Flowchart.com Offers Online Drawing Tools

There’s a new entrant in the online drawing tools market: Flowchart.com. Though they make their pitch as a flowcharting tool, they’re really a general-purpose shapes-and-connectors application, along the lines of Visio or OmniGraffle. Their UI is largely JavaScript-based, but seems reasonably responsive. In addition to creating drawings from templates, objects, and clipart, they offer a fair number of ancillary features: sharing, saving to PDF or PNG, recording movies, a developer API, and a marketplace (not yet fully functional) to let people sell their templates and scripts. You can also collaborate and chat in real-time.

Flowchart.com is in invitation-only beta at the moment, but I got an invitation less than 24 hours after I requested one. There are some rough edges, but it’s already displaying good functionality and promise. They’re in the same arena as established competitor Gliffy, but the extra features make them worth keeping an eye on.

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