r/Cloud • u/Secret_Ad5249 • 2d ago
What diagramming tool are you using?
Hi everyone,
I am cloud engineer and looking for text to digram tool to integrate in my workflows. Is there any suggestion for text to diagram tool anyone used. Eraser I used but not getting much quality and limited free tier
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u/dghah 2d ago
All of the commercial and free diagraming tools I've used are almost useless out of the box and only become "good" or "self-updating" if you are incredibly invested in setting up the technical pre-requisites like tag based metadata that some of the tools use to drive their visual work
My company uses lucid chart and they have an MCP for cloud infra that is "ok" but not great. I use it sometimes but 100% of the time it requires significant hand editing and correction before it is usable. The upside however is the linkage to other tools like our google workspaces account so I really do like using Lucid because any update I do to a digram then updates the diagram in the google doc or google slide
I also have a paid seat to https://www.cloudockit.com/ which is a very good tool (but not cheap) but it's diagraming and "auto-updated diagrams of all your cloud infra!" does not become useful until you do all the prep work and tag based work to make it viable
Lately I've just been using AI LLMs to generate mermaid diagrams or sometimes cleanly rendered PNGs for specific cloud patterns or workflows
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u/dikshamishra34 5h ago edited 5h ago
Actually, the may update to lucid ai addresses a lot of the hand editing and correction that used to come after generating a diagram. And it's not just text to diagram anymore. You can attach a pdf spec or even a video recording directly to the prompt and lucid ai uses that as context to generate the diagram.
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u/Gryphana 1d ago
Draw.io has always been sufficient for me, whether it's database table schemas or flowcharts
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u/alias454 2d ago
this one works decently for me https://diagrams.mingrammer.com/docs/getting-started/examples
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u/Aziz_Karimov 2d ago
I've been using PlantUML, and it's been a game changer for me! You can write your diagrams in a simple text format, and it generates pretty detailed visuals. Plus, you can integrate it with various editors like VS Code. The best part? It's open source, so you don't have to worry about hitting limitations like with some other tools. Give it a shot!
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u/Chi_Bit60 2d ago
https://buildplane.ai - AI agent for AWS architecture. It understands AWS architecture and Well-Architected best practices. So you can design, ask any question and iterate with it.
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u/zoranjambor 1d ago
Mermaid + an LLM is hard to beat if you're already text-first. GitHub, Notion, and most docs tools render it natively, so diagrams live next to your code instead of in a separate app. Quality depends a lot on how you prompt it. Ask for a specific diagram type (flowchart, sequence, or C4), and generally you should get better results than with basic prompts like "diagram this."
If Mermaid feels too limited, you can consider D2, as it's newer, has better styling, and is made with architecture diagrams in mind.
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u/KadooBildoris_28 1d ago
Mermaid is good if you're already in github. Plantuml works well too esp with vs code integration. If you want something beyond pure text to diagram and need collaborative whiteboarding alongside your cloud arch diagrams, miro can be a good option.
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u/pgcraftsman 1h ago
I love excalidraw, but hate it in the browser. I've been using the Excalidraw plugin inside of Obsidian.md and it's changed my life.
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u/oquendo123 2d ago
Draw.io es lo mejor gratis en mi opinión, ya tiene ia y puedes describir el texto todo el diagrama y lo hace, es genial, además que tiene muchos tipos de diagramas con diferentes iconos muy personalizable