Search code examples
architecturedrawingvisualizationsystem

Platform to visualize system infrastructure

What's the best web-based platform to visualize system architecture ?

For example, I want to draw/visualize how client hits http server, then http server hits database server and so on.

What kind of options do we have today ?

Thanks !

Solution

  • I use this website (known as draw.io) for a couple of years to build architecture diagrams/flows. There are multiple reasons I like this platform:

    • It's free (at least for most of the diagrams you may need to create)
    • It has a desktop version, but the online version works really well (haven't noticed any significant lag)
    • The number and type of the components/objects you can use is enough for most use-cases (that I had, at least)
    • The objects can be arranged in a very granular way, by using the arrow keys (if the sticky connections feature doesn't help)
    • You can export the diagram in different formats, you can even embed it in HTML if you need to.

    Although this platform allows you to build sequence diagrams, a better option for this would be PlantUML. It's really straight forward to learn the language. Here is an example on how to build a sequence diagram.