Threat modelling, especially in IT, is becoming more common. Companies are increasingly aware of the risks of having their infrastructure and devices connected to the internet. As more devices, machines, sensors, monitors, and applications are added to a company’s infrastructure, there are potentially many more vulnerabilities.
Bioicons is a collection of free custom shape libraries containing open source icons for life science applications. The website lets you select one or more shape libraries, and open them in the draw.io editor on the web.
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standardised diagramming system used to visualise business processes. BPMN diagrams are a form of flowchart, similar to UML activity diagrams. While it is typically used by business analysts and managers, its simple and understandable set of shapes and flows makes it a good choice to document processes for stakeholders in any department.
draw.io is not a spreadsheet program - there are no figures from which to draw charts and graphs automatically. But there are plenty of useful shapes in draw.io, so you can easily create attractive charts and graphs for presentations and infographics.
When you contract an external company to create a website, a mobile app or a program interface, you need to provide clear requirements - user interface specifications and mock-ups, user flows and use cases, as well as data structures and note the various rules that must be followed. You could draw a set of technical diagrams for each context, or you could put it all into one diagram.
Many people prefer a minimal interface for diagramming, as there are fewer distractions. While online whiteboard applications often have a limited set of available tools, draw.io lets you use its advanced features in a less cluttered diagram editor theme.
Most businesses use mind maps or spider mapping - slightly restricted tree-structured concept maps - for planning and ideation, especially in marketing and other customer service professions. However, concept maps are also useful for problem solving as well as learning and knowledge sharing across all teams and professions.
Diagrams can convey a lot of information at a glance, but only if they follow the three C's - for drawing technical diagrams that means concise, clear and consistent. As the diagram author, you are responsible for clarity and conciseness. For consistency however, draw.io has many tools to help you draw diagrams that are easier to read.
Mindmaps are useful to quickly capture ideas, and are easy to draw in draw.io and our draw.io branded apps. But some people prefer to work from text lists when brainstorming. Drop a text list into the Mermaid import tool and draw.io will generate your mindmap for you - no need to fuss with connectors or layouts.
draw.io has a number of shape libraries and templates for creating rack diagrams. Both electronics cabinets can be visualised, as well as IT racks with servers and networking hardware, including those provided by specific vendors like APC, Cisco, Dell, F5, HP, IBM and Oracle.
Sequence diagrams show the order of messages that are passed between elements of a system to complete a particular task or use case. The events that cross system boundaries are used by objects and people (actors) to complete their processes.
T-charts are a type of graphic organiser or concept map that helps you to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of anything. They can also be used to contrast two things of the same type, such as physical products, services, processes or data structures, business models, applications, situations, etc.
The C4 modelling is used to describe and define architectures in an abstract and simple way. Designed by Simon Brown, C4 is a different way to approach modelling software development which focuses on four c's: context (people), containers, components, and code.
Floorplans aren't only useful for real-estate agents and people who are moving to a new apartment. You can also plan new office spaces, show emergency routes, create a seating chart, plan a conference or trade show layout - anything where you need to arrange people and furniture in a space.
When you slice a 3D shape up and layer it in a diagram, you clearly visualise that a concept or process is broken up into smaller parts. Here's a step-by-step tutorial to create your own infographic using shapes from the basic draw.io shape libraries.
UML class diagrams are used to illustrate the structure of a computer program. They detail the types of data or attributes stored within each 'class', the methods (operations or functions) that each class provides, and the relationships between the classes.
Crow's foot notation is used in entity relationship (ER) diagrams to show how data in different database tables relate to each other.
Humans understand information faster and more easily in diagrams. This is why there are many visualisation tools, from simple sketching apps, to single-purpose diagramming tools and whiteboarding apps, through to technical drawing applications like draw.io and hyper-specialised CAD and architectural tools for precision drawings.
Industries and services need to plan for when an incident happens, both to provide good customer service and ensure the safety of all those affected. When responding quickly to an incident, diagrams are easier to read and put into action than paragraphs of text.
Marketing teams commonly use 5C situational analyses, simpler SWOT analyses, PEST and PESTLE analyses to examine and improve their products and services. By presenting the information visually, you won't get bogged down in unnecessary details.
You can use diagrams in many ways in retail, including to visualise customer shopping data, to plan customer journeys, to analyse and optimise your retail space, and to improve workflows for both customers and co-workers.
Diagrams are an effective way of teaching and learning because we all understand complex information more easily when it is visualised. Graphic organisers, mindmaps, timelines, cause and effect charts, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, scientific illustrations - all of these can created in draw.io.
Software and web applications have become more complex, interacting with many different systems, and using a wide range of services and libraries. Good documentation, with technical diagrams of many different types, is used as both a planning and design tool, and to post-document a running system in order to make it easier to maintain and extend after deployment.
Technical diagrams are a form of documentation by themselves. But they are also used to supplement text in many other types of documents created by technical writers and documentation teams. While some teams may have graphics designers responsible for the diagramming, tech writers may be less familiar.
The concept of state diagrams or state machine graphs has been around since the mid 1900s, long before David Harel modified them into the form used today as part of the UML standard.
UML use case diagrams show all of the ways an end-user interacts with your systems, with all of its pre- and post-conditions, exceptions and alternate paths. These diagrams are used to establish your system requirements, whether that be a software system or an interaction with another person or team.
Flowcharts are one of the most used types of diagrams in all teams. But some process flows are circular or cyclical rather than a series of steps with a start and end. You can create circular flowcharts in the draw.io editor in a number of ways.
Communication diagrams (formerly collaboration diagrams) show the messages that are passed in a system as an action is taken or an event occurs, and in what order they are sent. As a simplified sequence diagram, these show the information sharing relationships more clearly between different elements of a system.
While the shape libraries in draw.io have a vast array of shapes for technical diagrams, there are relatively few illustrations for use in infographic diagrams. You can create your own illustration shapes easily using draw.io on a tablet. For example, all of the illustrations in this tidal pool infographic were drawn as freehand shapes in draw.io.
Represent the three-dimensional molecular shape of a chemical by drawing a structural or skeletal formula in draw.io with the two new connector shapes in the Arrows shape library - the solid wedge and the dashed wedge.
If you have an intermittent or restricted internet connection or want to draw diagrams without worrying about whether they will be scraped by cloud storage providers, you can use the draw.io Desktop. With the full set of draw.io shapes. templates and diagramming features, the draw.io Desktop app works offline on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Timelines, roadmap and milestone diagrams feature in a range of documentation - project development documents, infographics and presentations being some of the most common. There are many shapes and templates in draw.io and our draw.io branded apps that you can use to quickly draw an attractive diagram that you can embed in your presentation or documentation.
Tree diagrams are used to show hierarchies, to categorise something or show decisions. They are commonly used in computer science for binary search trees, red-black trees, and more, and to show directory structures on computers or a website navigation structure. Tree diagrams are quick and easy to create in draw.io.
UML activity diagrams show the sequence of actions and the flow of control in a system or a process. You can model the behaviour of physical and digital systems, as well as business process flows with activity diagrams.
Veaam is an online service that visualises and monitors your cloud and network architectures, and provides a number of additional availability services, including deployment, backup, replication and restoration. It supports Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud, as well as a variety of workloads, apps, and platforms commonly used by businesses.
Explaining new technologies to a less technical audience, like management-level stakeholders, can be difficult. Our whitepaper explains feature flags DevOps in clear diagrams how feature flags work and how they could benefit your product.
There are many systems where you need to describe the different roles that interact with it, and what their responsibilities are. As they can be quite complex, diagrams help you to explain how it works to both customers and colleagues.
Cloudockit is a platform which connects to and monitors your cloud and on-premises environment and automatically generates 2D or 3D diagrams. It works with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), VMWare Hyper-V, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and your local infrastructure to visualise your network and automatically generate documentation.
Teams use Confluence Cloud for many reasons - documentation, training, project management, development, business planning and more. All of these teams need to present information clearly and concisely - complex information is best presented visually in diagrams.
Steps in business processes and project documentation are easier to understand when visualised. As one of the most common families of diagrams, drawing flowcharts in Confluence lets you present complex information neatly and securely in your team and company knowledge base.
Sankey diagrams were originally designed to visualise loss in a steam engine system. These days, they are also used to illustrate data distributions and flows between states in many types of systems.
Documenting software costs developers time and becomes outdated quickly. A code-first diagramming approach - describing the diagram in code or text while programming - works well for entity models (SQL database code), and class descriptions using Mermaid syntax.
Over on the home lab, home networking and smart home subreddits, it has been fantastic to see diagrams of increasingly complex home computing and network setups being shared. Diagrams help home you understand the physical and logical connections between networked devices, and are useful for setting up security zones, upgrading hardware and debugging connection problems.
There are so many different notations used for technical diagramming that this is a hard question to answer. draw.io supports all your icon needs - there are shape libraries for a vast range of different technical diagrams, and you can extend the built-in libraries with your own shapes in a custom library if you need to.
It's easier to show new development team members your project's branch structure in your Git repository visually than to describe it in words. Some platforms may illustrate this using built-in tools. If you are using a platform without a convenient visual representation, it's easy to create your own gitflow diagram.
Data flow diagrams (DFDs) are common diagrams used in structured analyses and data modelling to document the data flows between entities, processes and data stores. For example, the following DFD documents the main data flows in a large language model that allows user queries such as ChatGPT.
Concept maps are a broad category of diagrams that are useful for brainstorming with teams, learning and training, showing hierarchical information, planning events or product campaigns, and exploring solutions to problems. They are widely used throughout all industries, especially in medicine and education.
UML package diagrams document the structure of grouped components in a system along with their dependencies, especially for multi-layered web and application architectures. Package diagrams fall in between the detailed class diagrams and the high-level more abstract profile diagrams and model diagrams.
Profile diagrams are one of the newer UML diagram types, providing a broad overview of a system showing how the system can be implemented in different domains. Stereotypes and constraints indicate which sub-systems and components, languages and processes are modified in different use cases.
The draw.io editor online at can use the Sketch editor theme which has an endless whiteboard-style canvas and simple toolbar. This theme is ideal to use as a collaborative online whiteboard with your remote team. The lack of page and grid lines, along with the simple toolbar, minimised panels and the default hand-drawn rough style for shape outlines, shading, connectors, and text labels feels like an informal physical whiteboard, much less intimidating than traditional diagramming apps.
Entity relationship diagrams show how data is structured in relational databases. Each entity consists of rows of attributes. ER diagrams are used in software development and by IT workers to design and document database structure.
If you are learning a language, you need tools to help you make sense of the grammar. Especially when you come across sentences that are carefully constructed to be as confusing as possible. That's where sentence trees come in handy.
Diagrams from text are oft faster for programmers to draw than to spend time manually styling and aligning the diagram elements. PlantUML support in draw.io is being phased out at the end of 2025, so here are some ways you can migrate your PlantUML diagrams to draw.io or rewrite them in Mermaid syntax.
Network diagrams, or infrastructure diagrams, let you understand a computer network quickly.
BTP solution diagrams document your SAP Business Technology Platform architecture to show its services, environments, systems and interdependencies. Using the standard SAP icon set in your BTP solution diagram ensures that teams from various departments can understand your diagram immediately - from IT service managers and CTOs to SAP consultants and solution architects.
The new Network 2025 shape library in draw.io has extra styling options built in. When you enable the background colour, the shapes will have a bold long shadow. You can colour each part of these shapes individually - shape outline, shape fill colour (and neutral colour for internal details), background colour and gradient.
Teams in different departments use many different methods to plan projects, but most of these plans are initially sketched on a whiteboard. Collaborate in real time and online with distributed team members, customers and stakeholders easily in the draw.io whiteboard-like editor theme throughout your project development process.
Salesforce diagrams let you visualise your system and solution architectures using a set of icons (shapes) recommended by Salesforce.
It's been a rather chaotic summer for all of us here at draw.io. Because it's a Thursday, to fit with the general craziness, here's a holiday-themed puzzle using one of the less-oft-used shape libraries. This library contains a large number of easy-to-recognise skilfully crafted classical hand-tooled signs, perfectly sitting at the bottom of your shape collection.
Risk management and knowing the probabilities of a success are important in any business, but much more so when human lives are on the line. You can indicate risks in diagrams with different shapes, styles and colours, or by showing percentages, even if you are not using a probability tree to visualise your system or task.
User story diagrams are quite strongly related to UML use case diagrams, and both are used in an agile software development context. Both types of diagrams are used to explore and document customer requirements, they identify different groups of users and their goals, but they are used in different ways.
Systems modelling language (SysML), is an extension of UML that has been modified for systems engineering. While both can document software, information and processes, SysML diagrams also document the hardware, humans, physical components, and facilities in the system.
All teams have their own unique needs and particular workflows. Integrating useful collaboration tools seamlessly into that workflow is the key to your team's success. We offer security-first diagramming for teams working with Atlassian products.
Technical diagramming covers a lot of ground across many different professions and fields, not just IT and software development.
In draw.io, the wide range of shape libraries let you draw many kinds of technical diagrams. The large process engineering shape library (Proc. Eng.) helps you visualise manufacturing processes and production lines. This library also includes various ISO shapes should you need to diagram to specific standards.
Technical diagrams are used throughout many different professions and industries, both for internal documentation and to help customers or provide training. Many of these fields have their own specific types of technical diagrams.
Timing diagrams are important for activities that need to be completed within a specific time frame. Such as the ringing of a doorbell after pressing a button, or a ticket gate opening after a ticket has been validated.
UML component diagrams are used to model the high-level software components and subsystems in service-oriented architectures and component-based development projects, and more importantly, define the interfaces between those components. As component diagrams provide a clear visual overview of a system, they are drawn early in a project as they are useful both to seek approval from stakeholders and to develop an implementation roadmap.
Interaction overview diagrams show a high-level overview of how components of the system interact with each other. General flowchart shapes show the interaction flow between activities, and sometimes entire sequence diagrams or activity diagrams are embedded for detailed documentation.
UML notation is one of the most popular technical diagramming standards defining a wide range of diagrams useful in many different industries and professions, not just software engineering. That many different technical diagrams can be daunting, so here is an overview of each of the different types of UML diagrams, who draws or reads them, and why they are useful.
Association classes in UML class diagrams 'hang' off the relationship between two other classes. Instead of leaving an unconnected end on your connector, add a waypoint shape between them and connect all three class shapes to the waypoint shape.
Draw your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure with draw.io for free. You don't need to register or sign-up, and you can store your diagrams in your favourite cloud storage platforms, like Google Drive, One Drive, and Dropbox.
Mermaid is a syntax similar to Markdown where you can use text to describe and automatically generate diagrams. With Mermaid's Markdown-inspired syntax, you can generate flow charts, UML diagrams, pie charts, Gantt charts, and more.
Org charts, also known as tree diagrams, organisational charts, and organigrams, are used throughout all disciplines and professions. We like to categorise everything as it helps us make sense of how the world works. Species of plants and animals, corporate and military hierarchies, team structures, family trees, language family relationships, even symptoms of illnesses - org charts help us quickly find who to contact, what illness to treat, and so on.
With PlantUML in draw.io using our web application (app.diagrams.net) you can quickly draw UML diagrams from a text description. When you input your PlantUML text, the diagram editor will automatically layout and arrange the diagram for you, based on your description and the style of output you select. It supports many different types of UML diagrams, as well as mindmaps, tree diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, Gantt charts, ER diagrams and more.
Flowcharts are one of the most common diagram types, showing all of the steps that must be followed to complete a process. Not many processes are limited to just one person or one team, which is why swimlane diagrams and cross-functional flowcharts are used - these show the flow of data or control across different groups.
Venn diagrams are widely used in business, education and research to visualise commonalities and differences. Although, you have probably most often seen theme used in memes.
There are a wide range of UML diagramming tools available, as standalone applications, as online-only cloud software, and embedded in various content platforms. Some take text input to generate diagrams, and others are specialised to draw just one type of UML diagram.
There are many terms for diagrams that show a series of steps and decisions - flowchart, process diagram, process map, workflow, and process model. While many sources claim large differences between these terms, in practice, they are used interchangeably.
Have you been asked to create a chart, a diagram, or a graph? There is a lot of confusion around these overlapping terms, especially as they are most often used interchangeably. However, there are some minor differences in how they are used.