70! That is awesome

I like Mermaid fine, but nothing is perfect. I will look at your list. The tool I always wanted would let me paste in the SQL of my database schema and output a diagram of the tables and relationships. That's SQL and not Markdown or JSON or any other format.

Note that DrawDB (www.drawdb.app) does this, although it does not yet handle views. But I have been happy with what it offers so far. Still, I would welcome suggestions of other tools.

This list is so cool!

This is a great resource. Thank you for the effort. Do you know of something similar for charting/data-viz libraries?

I wish WebSequenceDiagrams was further up your list. I guess I have some work to do.

When I made it, nothing like mermaid, plantUML，lucid charts existed. The syntax of most tools was based on Java or graphviz and overly verbose. I was writing an email to a colleague at BlackBerry and wrote out the sequence diagrams as text. I spent the next week making a script to convert it to an image and put it online. Many other tools have since adopted the syntax and I'm happy it has become so widespread.

I was wondering, are there any tools that could help to draw decent looking genealogical tree ? My main issue are the updates, where adding one of the ancestors or newborns causes full rework of entire tree. I'd like to feed data to some script and have it render a family tree, with all the regular updates.

But they are browser based.

The main benefit for me to just know and primarily use mermaid is that it integrates with markdown in Azure DevOps and GitHub seamlessly. No need for a text to image build step or similar.

They might be "better", but Mermaid works offline (there's a cli) which makes it a much better choice, along with PlantUML. An online tool might be good for making one off things you know you won't ever need to change, but my main use case for these tools is documentation which, naturally, needs to change over time.

Thank you, that's handy!

Nice list, thanks for compiling it. It looks like you have "textik" in there twice in positions 11 and 13.

That's an amazing list! If you're writing in asciidoc like I generally do, here's the subset that you can write directly in your document: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/diagram-extension/latest/

Nicer looking but fewer diagram types

Also, AFAIK, their "render locally" story is "boot up headless chrome, good luck" which isn't great

Except it has trouble rendering text on the CLI version when producing SVGs.

I use it and see it many times per month as it’s the preferred way of sticking graphics and diagrams in markdown in git repos and generated static sites.

It’s so handy for putting a sequence diagram in your docs and then tracking the changes over time using git.

I’m curious what other software developers use if not this. I’ve tried specific graph and drawing tools like lucid and Visio, but the simplicity of mermaid is nice. And I don’t know anything else that shows git blame for who changed what in my diagram, when.

I love it when this happens, people almost always reply with something cool they did with it, or discovered. The link isn't new, often the comments are.

Its real-world use is drawing diagrams on a web page! I much prefer diagram-as-code to diagram-as-screenshot. e.g. https://sbs.johnnydecimal.com/14.23+OPS1#diagram

We use it a lot for internal documentation, eg in Markdown on GitHub (renders natively), Notion, and Jira.

Yes, I think this is why mermaid is hard to beat right now. LLMs seem to understand the syntax well.

I’ve used AI to build mermaid diagrams during ongoing system design discussions from transcripts as they progress.

I’ve rendered them, shared them and then the group can look at them and iterate very quickly.

A bunch of the rendering tools aren’t great, but some are and decent basic styling makes a big difference.

deepseek r1 understands mermaid very well and can correct all the mistakes of Gemini and Claude

Obsidian also supports inline mermaid charts in markdown code blocks. One of those features I don't see mentioned much.

Github supports inline mermaid charts, too!

I've been starting to include them in my bigger PRs and reviewers really like them.

Hugo does this as well.

About Notion, they do indeed support Mermaid, but their included version is quite obsolete and they don’t seems so eager to update it. A shame.

Care to share your prompt(s)?

I draw a fair bit on a Kindle Scribe. I’d love to try this, but I bet your prompt would be helpful.

Alternatively, ask the LLM to create a mermaid DAG of your current code.

I recently did a variation of this where instead of drawing, I just drafted a quick few bullet points and text describing at a high level what the system should do. And then I asked chat GPT to identify use cases and generate sequence diagrams for each use case in puml format (plantuml). Shockingly effective and it took about five minutes. This was a technical proposal that I shared with a few partner companies to provide a detailed plan to a customer. It came after several online meetings spaced over a few weeks of us negotiating the details. Pretty important document and it was well received. Plantuml looks decent enough that you can get away with sticking the resulting diagrams in a document.

I'm a busy person. I don't have hours of time that I can take out of my schedule to generate what I regard as write only documentation (nobody will ever read or truly value it) that ticks the box of "we have stuff to point at when somebody asks (which nobody ever will)", which has a lowish value. Sometimes it's nice to have. The above is a fine example. People will glance at it, give me a little thumbs up, and then give me permission to proceed as planned and bill accordingly. Job done. It's not a reference design that anyone will ever look at for more than a few seconds.

After a few decades in the industry, I'm extremely skeptical of the value of diagrams vs. the time required to produce them. I just don't see it. A lot of good software gets produced without them. You don't need blueprints for your blueprints, which is what source code is (a blueprint for automatically compiling into working software). People value such traits as structure, readability, conciseness in source code for a reason: it allows them to treat source code as design assets. I don't write UML, I stub out data classes and interfaces instead. And then I refactor them over and over again. Diagrams just slow me down.

But a few minutes is about on the threshold of me wasting braincycles on producing them and enrich documentation that I'm writing anyway in text form. Quickly jot down some notes. Don't waste any time whatsoever obsessing about the awkward syntax of these micro languages, and just get the essentials nailed. I bet I can get it down to like a minute or so with better LLMs and larger context windows. "Examine this project, produce an overview diagram of all the database tables". That's a prompt I'd write. In the same way, letting LLMs document code is a great use of time.

I was under the impression mermaid is a wrapper around graphviz dot.

I did a system design interview awhile back using Excalidraw. I really enjoyed it (though I also frequently use it for normal work stuff, so was familiar with it).

I love excalidraw. But does it have an editable, diffable textual representation? Can it be generated with little ceremony, and laid out automatically?

  {
    "type": "excalidraw",
    "version": 2,
    "source": "https://excalidraw.com",
    "elements": [
        {
          "type": "rectangle",
          "version": 175,
          "versionNonce": 279344008,
          "isDeleted": false,
          "id": "2ZYh24ed28FJ0yE-S3YNY",

Interesting slides, it's always nice to see different ways to set up these kinds of systems and with a practical git repo to boot!

That's pretty slick, thanks for sharing. https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki (MIT) and they thankfully use Zulip for their chat!

Are clusters not enough?

They can be nested.

https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/cluster.html

https://github.com/ReneNyffenegger/about-Graphviz/blob/maste...

They were working on a wasm version some time ago I believe [0]. Not sure how usable this is insofar, but it may be of interest.

[0]: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/pull/436/files

That’s a pretty major downside, since broad in-browser support (GitHub, Notion etc) is arguably Mermaid‘s USP.

The other downside is that D2 is a thinly-veiled Open Core project and you'll be forever stuck with yet another company trying to get money from you:

https://d2lang.com/tour/tala/

> Proprietary layout engine developed by Terrastruct

> TALA is a separate install from D2, to keep a clean cut between 100% free and open-source D2, and proprietary, closed-source TALA.

The two non-proprietary layout engines are 1) Dagre, a port of ideas from Graphviz to Javascript, where the only benefit over Graphviz seems to be "it's in Javascript!" 2) ELK, a fairly naive layout engine that makes non-symmetrical graphs with oddly crooked lines.

Your app looks interesting. Am curious about how is AI being used. Assuming that to discover character relationships, how is that done? Thanks.