You don’t need to create an account or login to get started: just head to the Diagramly site. The bulk of the screen is taken up by a blank grid, where you’ll create your diagram. Along the left-hand side of the screen are palettes of shapes (rectangles, circles, connecting lines,  arrows, etc.), BPM flowchart symbols, and clip art — to use these you just drag and drop them onto your grid, and then preposition and scale as required. At the top of the screen you’ll find tools for adjusting things like zoom level, text size, gradients and fills, and line color. There are also undo/redo, copy/paste and file open/save buttons at the top-left.

Once you’re happy with your diagram, you can save it locally (either in Diagramly’s native XML format, or as a PNG, JPG or SVG file). Unfortunately, there’s no option to save your diagram to the cloud, and you can’t collaborate in real-time with other Diagramly users, which would have been nice features to see. Cleverly, you can open Visio files using the app; if nothing else, Diagramly could prove handy for those times that people send you a Visio file and you don’t have it installed.

If you’ve used a desktop diagramming app like Visio, Diagramly will probably feel familiar. It does have some quirks that take a little getting used to: Some of the icons in the left-hand sidebar don’t really match the shapes produced, for example. However, while it’s not quite as polished as commercial desktop diagramming apps, it’s free, and with a little patience it’s capable of producing pretty decent results.

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Fast and Easy

The learning curve on working with the LucidChart is minimal: you can draw lines and add shapes with the click of a mouse, as well as drag and drop images from your desktop into your diagrams. You can collaborate in real time, with no limitations on the number of users who can be working on a given diagram at one time. Adding new members is a matter of a quick invitation. Bringing a team up to speed on using LucidChart is a trivial matter.

It’s worth noting that the CEO of LucidChart, Karl Sun, came from another company that makes easy to use products — Google. There is a level of user-friendliness in LucidChart that would be nice to see in more web applications.

Considering Mobility

Because LucidChart is built entirely on open standards, making use of HTML5, it offers an advantage for anyone working from a mobile device that can’t handle Flash  s adbe), like the iPad. There’s no need to buy and install a separate application for mobile devices. Considering that mobile diagramming tools can get pricey (one iPad application costs $49), that flexibility makes LucidChart stand out. If you’re working with a team that needs to be able to access flowchart and diagrams from a variety of devices, LucidChart may be your best bet.

Pricing for Teams

While LucidChart has a free version, it allows just one user to interact with the diagrams created in the application. With a Professional account, however, 25 people can collaborate on as many diagrams as your organization needs. The price tag for a Professional account is $50 per month. If you need to bring in more than 25 users, you’ll need to contact LucidChart for its enterprise solutions. That pricing is lower than many comparable products, many of which may require more work to keep perfectly synchronized. A single license for Microsoft Visio, for instance, starts at $249 and can hit $999 if you’re looking at the premium version.

Let us know what you think of LucidChart below.

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SlickPlan doesn’t really differentiate between creating a web site plan or a flowchart, which can be a little confusing at first. But once you realize that it uses the same tool for both, you can quickly start adding items to a chart. The tool is fairly simple: You click the “Add a New Page” to add a bubble (whether it represents a page on a web site or an item on your chart) and select the page or item under which it will be located.” You also have a side bar listing each element and allowing you to move, edit or delete individual pieces. There aren’t a lot of fancy bells and whistles — but you won’t miss them. Instead, SlickPlan does one thing particularly well, allowing you to create a chart in no time flat. Even better, any project you put together with SlickPlan is clean and attractive enough to send out to clients comfortably.

Once you’ve got a chart or site map put together, SlickPlan offers you a few different options on what you can do with it. Most importantly, you can save it and work on it later. You can also save multiple versions of a project. By opening up individual projects, you can access an HTML embed code that allows you to add your chart to other sites, export your project as a PDF and send a link to anyone you need to look at your chart. You can save an unlimited number of projects to your SlickPlan account at this point.

There are a few places where SlickPlan could use a little bit of polish. The application itself is easy enough to use, but the way certain buttons are labeled can make it seem like you can only create site plans, rather than use it for flowcharts and other options — uses that are specifically mentioned on the application’s web site. The application was developed by Atomic Interactive, a web development studio. SlickPlan was not created for a client, however; instead, it’s more of an internal tool meant to eliminate the frustration of trying to build site maps in Illustrator or InDesign. The resulting application makes knocking out a fast chart easy.

You may find that SlickPlan is not quite so useful if you want to add notes about individual elements or need to make more elaborate charts. In such scenarios, you may want to consider a more robust tool. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool at the right price. SlickPlan’s developers intend to keep it free, as well, relying on ads and donations to cover the site’s costs.

What tools do you use to create flowcharts?

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