Software Diagrams - Plant UML vs Mermaid | Dan Does Code

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Software Diagrams - Plant UML vs Mermaid

https://www.dandoescode.com/blog/plantuml-vs-mermaid/

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Originally posted by RDMueller on 2022-11-06 01:06

Great comparison!
Three comments:
Have you already found kroki.io? It is a server which supports plantuml, mermaid and many more diagram types.
Regarding having to store the generated images - I am only aware of rendering engines (github, gitlab, asciidoc etc.) which generate the images on the fly. No need to store them with version control.
Btw: are you aware that plantuml stores the sources of an image within the meta data of the png and svg. This is sometimes good to know.

[giscus-migrator[bot]]

Originally posted on 2022-11-06 08:18

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't heard of kroki.io. Cheers for the suggestion.
Looks like it's an aggregator that routes the diagram code to the right rendering engine under the hood?

RE: stored images, correct this is only needed for PlantUML in Azure DevOps/GitHub as Mermaid is automatically rendered (which is a big winner for me).

I was aware of the SVG trick, but didn't know it worked for PNG also. Cheers!

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Originally posted by ArrozConCostra on 2022-12-20 05:30

didn't knwo about kroki neither, thanks!

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Originally posted by Christopher Fuhrman on 2022-11-20 02:56

Awesome comparison. It's important to know that https://app.diagrams.net/ lets you insert PlantUML and Mermaid. The fact that you can also save the whole diagram as "blah.drawio.svg" (embedding the diagrams.net source and PlantUML/Mermaid source) is very meta and cool. The only thing that doesn't quite work is the non-supported SVG sometimes, but this workaround is reasonable: https://www.diagrams.net/do...

[giscus-migrator[bot]]

Originally posted by Christopher Fuhrman on 2022-12-20 06:12

> With PlantUML, you need to also check in the images to source control and these could easily become out of date. Winner: Mermaid

Not entirely accurate. See https://stackoverflow.com/a... for some markup magic that works if your repo isn't private (uses the PlantUML web service to render the images inline).

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Originally posted on 2022-12-20 17:17

Awesome! I wasn't aware of this. Thanks a lot for sharing!

[omac777]

I've actually tried both plantUML and mermaid.

Both in my opinion lack the most important kind of diagram which is the UML collaboration/communication diagram displaying the temporal/relationship at the same time within one diagram. It is the perfect diagram for explaining contexts, how they connect and when they communicate. It is the one that helps to crystallize what is elicited and then with the diagram you can get clarification and correct/tweak it to represent an existing real-world situation more accurately and then move on to the next step which is what you really want the scenario to be improved on. It helps to communicate the change requests and helps everybody all stakeholders to participate be on the same page/wavelength for what is the system and for what everybody wants to system to morph into.

[omac777]

Rational Rose and Visual Paradigm offer the capability of making collaboration/communication diagrams.

I think plantUML/Mermaid and structurizr.com all fall short in capability without this type of diagram.
The structurizr.com Dynamic Diagram is inadequate.

[vibrog]

You wrote that GitGraph is not supported by PlantUML, but there are now experimental support for generating git branching diagrams. There are examples of using component diagrams and sequence diagrams for it. PlantUML also supports Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) diagrams, which can be used to draw branching and merging operations.