Diagramming your workflows and processes is a great way to keep track of your progress and keep your whole team on the same page. Here are our picks of the five best tools for diagramming your workflows.
Whether you work alone or are on a team with many contributors, you should be keeping track of your processes. Planning out the framework for a project, helping your sales team stay on top of their deals, or even managing your org structure can be built out and maintained with the help of a workflow tool. There are many options for this, and each tool has its own unique elements. Let’s walk through five of our favorite, affordable tools for diagramming your workflows and processes, including Lucidchart, Miro, Diagrams.net, Gliffy, and Canva.
Lucidchart
Lucidchart described their tool as “a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.” With Lucidchart, you’re able to completely visualize processes for all of your teams. On their homepage, they highlight examples such as visualizing architecture for IT, managing your org chart, helping your sales team close deals, planning engineering projects, increasing efficiency for operations, and project management.
This is just scratching the surface on the capabilities of Lucidchart. Everything that you do on Lucidchart is customizable, but they also offer a template library that can start you off with a strong foundation as you begin outlining your project.
Lucidchart has multiple pricing options, including a free option for one single user, and $135+ for larger teams and capabilities.
Miro
Miro is another tool that has endless options for workflows. With Miro, you can get a lot done, but one that’s so useful it’s featured on their homepage, is their agile workflow diagram. Agile processes are widely used, so this is a great example to showcase Miro’s capabilities. For teams that function in an agile workflow, this is the perfect tool to make sure your whole team is staying on top of the sprint. They have complete agile workflows, including retrospectives, sprint planning, and huddle boards.
While agile processes are utilized by many teams across many organizations, Miro also has a template library with workflows that can benefit any project you’ve got on your plate. It’s easy to use because they sort this by use cases, teams, and frameworks. Miro also has many integrations and apps so that you can ensure all of your tools talk to one another. Additionally, they have a Developer platform so that you can get the most out of Miro.
The pricing of Miro varies. They start with their minimum tier at $0 per month, ranging up to $16/user/month, and then for even larger teams, you need to contact Miro’s team directly.
Diagrams.net
Diagrams.net, previously known as Draw.io, is a cool tool, especially if you’ve previously used other tools on this list. With Diagrams, you can import existing workflows into their platform and continue to iterate on what you’ve already created. The design of this app, as it stands today, looks almost like a Google application – which means it’s extremely easy to navigate and use. To create your workflow, you essentially just drag and drop into the sandbox, and you can customize the elements within.
Upfront, due to the design and ease of use, this looks like a basic app. But the workflows that you can build on this app extend beyond what meets the eye. Here’s a video to get you started with the app.
It’s important to note that although the name and host site is in the process of migration, the app looks and functions in the same way, with the same import and export capabilities.
The best part about Diagrams? It’s completely free!
Gliffy
Gliffy is a diagram tool that has strong integrations with Jira and Confluence – two tools that are extremely popular within the business world. If you want to create your workflows in the app, you can; however, the integrations are game-changers. If your team is already leveraging Jira and Confluence, having the option to integrate this app into the place where they’re already working will likely increase adoption of the tool.
You can create the most basic diagrams such as org charts, or business charts, and you can create more complex diagrams such as wireframes and AWS Architecture. No matter what you need to design, or where you want to host it, Gliffy has you covered.
The pricing of Gliffy varies. If you just want to use Gliffy for single person use, online, the price is $7.99/month. If you’re part of a small team, it’s $4.99/user/month. Since Gliffy is commonly used within Jira or Confluence, those prices are a bit different. The cool part about Gliffy is that the more people you have in your org using Gliffy, the cheaper it is. You can explore their full pricing suite here.
Canva
Canva is a well-known app amongst teams for its amazing graphic design capabilities. Everything from collateral to digital resources to you guessed it – workflows. The best part about Canva is that it’s quite literally a blank canvas, you’re able to create anything you need. They have many elements that you can use to bring your workflow to life.
One drawback is that they don’t have dedicated templates as robust as the other options on this list. Depending on what type of workflow you’re designing, you may not need additional capabilities, anyway. However, this tool does start as free, and you’re able to create basic level designs at that tier. Canva offers elements for purchase within the app, and they offer higher tiers for business and enterprise use.
No matter which app you choose from this list, you and your team will be able to design, follow, and iterate on your processes. These apps come at a range of prices, available at every price point. In addition, these apps benefit every team across your org from HR to engineering and everyone in between. These apps will integrate with the apps where you already work, transform your workflows, and maximize your workday.
Automation
Why are these workflow and flowchart apps so important? Well the short answer is this: If you can design your business in an organized way, you can likely start automating some of the business tasks. At the very least, it will help you handoff the process to a human who can perform the functions instead of you, the owner of your business (or manager of your team). Start thinking like a CEO and not a worker bee.
Once you have a system designed, you can schedule a free 1-1 consultation with our automation experts to if your process can be automated using computer software.
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