Yeah I used Excalidraw for a while, but once the novelty of the sketchy look wears off it's really a very basic drawing program. Not suitable for proper technical diagrams (which to be fair it isn't intended to be).
In a way it felt to me like Excalidraw works around your diagrams not looking very good by just making them obviously not intended to look good. But Draw.io solves that problem by just making them actually look good.
The only issue I have with Draw.io is that it can't export text in SVG properly - every text object is really an embedded HTML element, which means you can only view the resulting SVGs in browsers. They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF). https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems
It doesn't seem like they care about solving that problem properly unfortunately. Their "solution" is:
> "Convert Labels to SVG" transmits the diagram to our servers, generates a PDF, then pipes that through Inkscape, and returns the SVG output.
Jesus.
Aside from that it's an amazing program. A worthy successor to Dia.
Yes but that requires an extra step and we're also using the SVGs with Asciidoc which can generate HTML too. I don't think it even supports PDF images. We'd basically have to do what Draw.io did - export to PDF (very slowly), then covert it to SVG with Inkscape. Gross.
draw.io is pretty good IMHO. The fact that it has a reasonably rich set of built-in shapes, and you can add any arbitrary jpg or png file to your diagram, makes it immensely useful IMHO. I also love that it integrates with Google Drive or you can download/upload an XML file yourself.
