Selected tools
I'm aiming to have a go with most of these.
- Interactive
- Inkscape, a traditional application, has been used by some team members, both Rancher and SUSE. It's maintained and in development.
- An in-browser alternative is Excalidraw which appears to be both simple and easy to start with extensibility via libraries of components. Seems to be open source, with repositories on GitHub. It's possible to get paid plans that include interactive whiteboard style collaboration on drawings.
- Another good option given time is diagrams.net. Browser based with what appears to be more features that Excalidraw, more like a traditional Inkscape type tool.
- On Friday of Hack Week, I received a Lucid Chart license from SUSE IT. SUSE has a license agreement, it's used by parts of SUSE, primarily the IT function, I think. This is a powerful, proprietary tool with team working and shared whiteboard functions. It's a bit late to do much in the way of evaluation during this hack week. I think I've discovered that it's the nature of this hack week project that I'll not be able to make a definitive final recommendation. It's going to be an ongoing process.
- Diagramming-as-code
- Mermaid.js. The default (for Rancher docs teams) due to it's already existing integration with Docusaurus.
- diagrams.mingrammer
- PlantUML
- Structurizr