yEd - freeware for professional diagrams drawing

Talking about professional diagrams drawing, including Organization Chart, Venn Diagram, Flow Chart, Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram, Use Case Diagram, UML Class Diagram, Network Diagram, BPMN Business Process Diagram, Semantic Diagram, Decision Tree, Family Tree, Swimlane Diagram, ... and so on, what would be in your mind?

I am sure you will think of MS Visio, which is now part of MS Office suite. Visio is superb, but it is not free. For the free one, you might think of the open source Dia, now under GNOME project. Dia is good enough for most of the people looking for free MS Visio alternative, only that you need a lot of effort to use Dia to produce nice looking diagrams, and to maintain a relatively large diagram.

I've found yEd, a freeware developed by yWorks of Germany, which enables us to draw and maintain professional diagrams easily, and able to produce nice looking diagrams. One of its selling point is that it has a powerful feature that enables us to automatically rearrange all the elements in the diagram into well organized nice looking position, just with a single click.

The video below is a 90 seconds introduction to yEd.

yEd is running on Java, therefore it is cross-platform, able to run in Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc. It can import diagram/data from multiple format, including GraphML, GML, MS Excel spreadsheet, GEDCOM, TGF, XML through XSLT, etc. It can also export to multiple format, including JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PDF, SWF (Flash), SVG, EMF, EPS, HTML imagemap, etc.

Here are some sample diagrams drawn with yEd:

 

Click here for more information and download of yEd.