Visio Reviews

I have used Visio Professional to model business process to BPMN 2.0 standard in the Logistic and Insurance Industry. Visio has been an easy-to-use modeling tool for Logistic processes, Complaints processes, Compensation Recoveries processes, Insurance processes, and Finance processes. The modeling of the As-Is process allows process analysis to design an efficient To-be process.

Visio is used to model and communicate the business process. 

As with all process modeling software when used correctly, it has the following benefits:

• Swimlanes enable clear accountability and responsibility.
• The Data Objects are hyperlinked to the Standard Operating Procedures, Letters, and Forms.
• The Data Store is linked to the CRM/ERP system.
• The task types assigned to the task enables the identification of improvement opportunities.

The ability to create BPMN Diagrams with the Visio Professional, the ability to import Rules from the BPMN 2.0 Rule Set, and Check the diagram according to the BPMN 2.0 rules are the most valuable features.

The Align features are easy to use and keep the diagram neat and tidy as you model the business process with the stakeholders in process discovery workshops. You need to be pretty competent to be able to map the process on the spot.

The access to commonly used features with the right click of the mouse and F8 (Align) are the best features.

For older version of Visio Professional, not all BPMN 2.0 Elements are available. 

The Auto-Align has improved significantly from the previous release; however, you may still find the auto align features lacking if your process diagram has a fair degree of complexity. My suggestion is to keep your process model straight forward and use the intermediate Link Event or End Signal Event to break up, simplify or connect the the rest of the process map.

This is a stable solution. When working with a complex process model, ensure that your computer has sufficient RAM to support multiple software and multiple displays (three monitors) running concurrently.

Scalability is not applicable.

I have not required customer service or technical support in using Visio.

Visio is the first software that I used to start modeling business processes.

The initial setup of this solution was straight forward.

This solution was implemented in-house through the IT Support Team.

The ROI for this solution is hard to quantify.

The cost of the software is reasonably priced. 

I did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

If you are considering modeling business process to BPMN 2.0 standards, you must purchase the Visio Professional version as the Standard version does not include the BPMN functionality.

We use Visio for architecture designs and flowcharts.

It's easy to embed Visio in a Word document. We can keep the Visio flowchart active so that we don't have to copy and paste for any updates. Visio can be directly opened and updated from Word. Sometimes, we lose from where the original flowchart was. That's not the case with Visio since it is well-integrated.

Visio requires a lot of memory, and it is not good for a small design. It slows down the Word document because it takes time to load.

I have been using Visio for three years.

The solution's stability is fine because I haven't noticed any crashes. However, it's very slow and takes time to load and exit.

Visio is a scalable solution. More than 20 users are using the solution in our organization.

Visio is easy to deploy, and one person is good enough to install it.

We have seen around eight to ten percent time savings with Visio in terms of document quality, and good documents save a lot of money in technical communication.

When you document something and want to make a flowchart, you can import a Visio drawing in Word instead of drawing it in Word. Once we link it like that, any updates on the Visio side or the doc side remain active throughout the project. The prints are also good because the quality is good when you convert from Visio to video. Our documents are mainly internal technical documents, and we majorly use Word, Excel, and Visio.

The solution does not require maintenance. Microsoft provides updates, and periodic maintenance of the tool is handled remotely. I would recommend Visio to other users because it is a good solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for Microsoft Active Directory and for monitoring purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution revolve around the ease of deployment it offers. It is also easy to understand about the product and its deployment process. I enjoy the fact that since Visio is a Microsoft product, everything is linked and synchronized in our company's environment.

From an improvement perspective, the setup process needs to be made easy.

I have experience with Visio. My company is a customer of Microsoft.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

In my company, 48 people use the product.

I haven't interacted much with the solution's technical support. I contacted the solution's technical support to deal with an issue with the offline products.

The product's installation phase was okay. The product's installation phase can be a difficult process if you don't have the deployment script with you since it is very important to know what you are doing when you are dealing with the setup process. Visio's setup process is the same as Oracle's installation phase. If Visio is being installed in some company, it is important to have the script to help you know what you need to do since you can't install it on your own and make it work. In general, you need to know what to select to install the product properly.

The solution is deployed using Azure's cloud services.

The product is expensive, but it is cheaper if you buy it as a part of a bundle or an enterprise-level agreement.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. As an IT professional, we don't like to confuse people by giving them multiple options. It is better for people to explore different products, and later on, if, as IT professionals, we find the products are not compatible with the users' requirements, then we might suggest some tool with better features to such users.

It is neither too difficult nor too easy to learn to use Visio.

The product's integration capabilities with other platforms have helped improve our company's overall workflow.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution to make graphs and schemas for infrastructure, application, and documentation.

We need proper documentation. The tool helps us during the project initiation to visualize things.

I have used it for so long that it is the product that I can work my best with. It has a lot of features compared to other competitors. The product provides a lot of flexibility in writing graphs and customizing them. It has a lot of stencils that we can use to make it seamless. I haven't seen that in other products.

The solution is pretty expensive. It could be cheaper.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. I do not need to scale it much.

I do not contact support for Visio. I contact them for SQL Server. Sometimes, the knowledge of the people I talk to is not that good. Sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's not that good. It depends on the person who takes the case.

Neutral

I used draw.io in the past, but it was fairly limited compared to Visio. It didn't have a lot of functionality compared to Visio.

The setup is pretty easy. We just have to install the tool. We do not have to do a lot of configuration. It would be somewhat different in a business setup, though.

I have a Microsoft 365 license.

I prefer Visio. I have been working on it for a long time. It is a hassle to learn another tool. I will recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

This tool is mainly used by our engineers for network layout designs, to either document what's being deployed for a customer or to put together a proposal. We use it as a tool to graphically depict the network we're proposing to the customers showing what it will look like and which components will be included. We are customers of Visio and I'm the product director with sector security. 

The solution has many readily available shapes and icons. Visio is a kind of industry-standard to some extent. Many companies have icon sets that can be imported into Visio and then used for network graphics or to specifically show a manufacturer's product model number. It's very useful. Visio has always been a pretty good product with continual updates. There will often be new features you didn't know you needed but once they're included, you can't imagine being without them. They're on the right track as far as I'm concerned.

If you get large networks where you're trying to detect everything in the network and you get lots of minute details, the drawings can get too large to send via email. You have to put it in cloud storage for people to access it. That's a byproduct of having a large, very complex graphic.

I've never had any problem with stability and all of them. 

I've never heard of any concerns regarding scalability. 

Our own internal IT department deals with any support issues.

Sometimes if you have to import icon or figure sets, it can be a little bit challenging. For the most part, it's pretty straightforward. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

I use Visio for pretty much all of my landscape diagrams and for anything for management reporting, particularly on the technical side.

Visio has been something that I've been using for many, many years. It is ideal for putting out flowcharts and swim charts. It's really good. It has all the various options to use, particularly depending on what kind of audience you have. It provides you different kinds of options to insert the pictures and explain things. It really suited my requirements and I love it.

I have been able to get most of my things done using what's already been provided. It comes with a lot of functionality.

Another good thing I like about it is that it is already in the cloud. It's well integrated and I don't have any additional requirements at this point.

One thing that I always felt was missing was the ability to integrate with other Microsoft products, particularly with things like SharePoint or other Excel Office tools. It may be available, but it is not as good as it could be. There are some other tools that are very well integrated, but maybe they bought the product from a different company but it looks like the integration is not as seamless as other products that I work with.

I have been using Visio for many years.

I really have not encountered any issues. It is very simple to use. I never had formal training or anything of that kind. I just started using it and I learned it as I was using it.

In terms of scalability, Visio is single user, right? There's no challenge in terms of scalability.

It's open for everybody. It's a part of a package that we negotiated as a part of our licensing agreement with Microsoft. It's available to more or less all the users.

We have Microsoft support but I have never had a need to reach them. I think they're doing a pretty good job. There is a quarterly business review that we do for any issues that we have. That's not for Visio as such, but it is for all the enterprise products that we have from Microsoft.

I have never used anything else. I've always been using Visio.

We have multiple options available in the organization and Visio is one of them that I use. Of course, I use a lot of PowerPoint too, but Visio is among my favorite ones.

The initial setup is very simple.

I don't know pricing in particular for Visio, but since it is a deal that is negotiated, I'm assuming it's good. It's a part of the package that we have from Microsoft for all the tools that we procured from them.

My advice to anyone would be to try it out. Not many people are very familiar with it. A lot of people probably use PowerPoint. All the people who use PowerPoint should try it out, particularly if you are using a lot of detailed pictures. It's good for the techies, primarily for explaining things to the management. I think people who are into the techno-functional and mid-management level, who also have a technical background and are moving up to the management roles, it's a great tool for those people. It is pretty flexible. It provides a lot of options and it is very user friendly and it definitely provides a lot of value.

Particularly for enterprise architects and for people who are looking at drawings or putting together landscape diagrams and trying to document things at a high level, it is very good. Not necessarily at a very granular level, but at a high level, it's a great tool.

On a scale of one to ten, for me Visio is a 10. I don't think I've ever encountered a situation where I couldn't do something with it.

I use it for high-level detailed and high-level conceptual drawings for leadership. I also use it for small drawings when I'm doing documentation, policy creation, or building some kind of a spec.

It is installed on my personal machine. In terms of the version, my Office suite is 19, so I assume the Visio version is whatever is packaged with Office 19 suite.

It improved the way our organization functioned years ago, but right now, people are trying to find other ways to do what they're doing in Visio because the tool is stagnant and really not moving. It hasn't for years. They've added features but really not much. They're more pulling those into higher-level tools such as Azure Development Studio and things like that.

What I like about it is that the templates are easily findable and usable, and they are usually created for other software packages. It seems to be pretty much widely adopted in the industry. 

It is a visualization tool, so database visualization is pretty static in it. They haven't moved the ERDs very well. They haven't adopted any real visualization like what you have in Hackolade for JSON or other data patterns. It has none of that. If you go onto broader patterns, you can actually label and integrate with a data set, if you want, for Visio, but it's very clunky and very difficult for me to assign that to another user. I can't assign it to a junior or a documenter. They really haven't cleaned up and made their tools simpler to use when linking to data, which is primarily what you're trying to do.

The versioning has always been a bit messy. You can't have a state of how it is to how it was without having two drawings. You can layer, but layers don't work very well for the most part. They just haven't progressed the tool. The tool isn't keeping up with the architecture that people are forced to do. So, more and more people around here are abandoning it and moving to alternate tools. It is now being used for just basic drawings. It is no longer an enterprise-quality development or documentation tool. It can be, but you'd have to work pretty hard at it.

It doesn't have autosave features with respect to the way some of the other Office tools have it. It is pretty clunky if your machine crashes or gets shut down because of a low battery or something like that. To make sure that the changes persist, you need to look at the last version of it. It has still got on-premise features, and it still has that same paradigm of clicking "save", and you better keep clicking "save" to make sure it doesn't get corrupted. It is very old school for cloud tools. Any Office tool, Google tool, or Apple tool is going to save all your work because it's basically updating via messages, but that's not how Visio works. It is very old school. They just aren't spending any money on it.

I'd love them to get back to being able to do true data flow diagrams that are easy to use and that actually can be pulled from data lineage. In lineage diagrams, you can pull the data and actually reflect them in the right drawing. There is a little bit of that going on in some of the drawings but not much. I want to be able to do database design documents, if necessary. I've got people doing those. I'd like to do network drawings with multiple layers in a simpler way and to the point where the layers have displays of viewpoints as most systems do. 

I have been using this solution for 10 to 15 years.

It is very stable, but there are no autosave features in it.

There is no scalability to it. It is on your machine. You could put files into Teams and somewhat scale through Teams, but it is not scalable. You don't have the ability to have team cooperation and repositories. You can do repositories, but it doesn't have any of the features that allow you to regulate and have all the things you'd have or expect in any enterprise quality development tool or design tool. It doesn't have any of those features. You have to broaden the suite and buy about nine other Microsoft things to somehow attempt to get those features.

Its usage is declining. We used to have about 150 users. Now, we probably only have about 50 or 60 users. We're buying tools that knock out some of the edges of what Visio would do. Enterprise architecture is really no longer done in Visio. It is done a little bit, but for the most part, we use other tools for it. Although it can make the boxes, it can't really work a process in enterprise architecture. It is not a development or life cycle management tool.

I've never been able to queue up technical support on it. We don't allow our internal people to directly communicate with technical support. It goes through an internal layer.

It is easy to set up. It is also easy to add libraries to it.

I know you can pick it up in retail for under a thousand per person. You can also pick it up for cheaper than that. Microsoft has about 7,000 licensing models, and you get certain percentages off specific licensing. If you're a partner, you get specific numbers of licenses with the partnership price.

Visio was owned not by Microsoft. It was its own company way back, and it was actually moving very well. It had ERDs and was actually developing very well. Microsoft bought it. They picked it apart and started moving those tools into other things and downgraded the tool. I don't think it has met the level of expertise and the level of technical proficiency that it had 15 years ago. It was downgraded, pure and simple. A lot of those pieces are used in other things now.

I would advise others that just don't try to make it more than what it is. Find a tool that is enterprise-worthy if you're trying to move to that level, but don't try to make it into an enterprise tool.

I would rate it a six out of 10.

We use Visio extensively for creating architecture, network and workflow diagrams. Also used for UML Class diagrams and various types of flow charts 

We use it to create diagrams used for architectural review. It's a great tool to create diagrams to show how an infrastructure or software architecture has being designed and then review that with the other domain architects.

I like the way you can Hyperlink objects to a URL, local file or other tabs within the same diagram. I use this to create an Overview tab with a high level digram and then link objects in the Overview to other tabs with more detail on that object. You can also save the diagram as a html page and then host on a local server to create an interactive diagram. You can also automate the creation of diagrams with PowerShell

Would be nice if visio viewer didn't require active-x.

I have been using Visio for over 15 years.

It's a stable solution. It's Visio. It just works.

Scalability is fine. It runs on each individual client. I haven't used any of the team integration hooks. We have a lot of technologists that use it and we're trying to make a move to move those architecture diagrams to be more driven by code by leveraging C4 and then model driven design through MagicDraw and that's a new journey for us. I think there are still going to be a large number of teams that still end up using Visio as it's very versatile. 

It's all automated for our firm by our department. I run it on my Mac as well, and it's super simple to set up.

We do everything ourselves. We set up and deployed this solution.

It's better than using PowerPoint or something else to draw the diagrams. 

It's not the cheapest product, but it's extremely valuable.

I would tell potential users that it depends on how you use it. You can use Visio for everything from designing networks to organizational charts. You can also use it for so much more as it's a very versatile tool. There are a lot of Visio stencils that are available on the web. Use those.

Just do your homework. But there's just a lot of people who have contributed to creating various open-source Visio stencils. Most product vendors have already created those stencils. You don't need to go and recreate it on your own. You can go to NetApp or VMware, or Cisco and download the stencil for their products. Then it makes it very easy to use and integrate.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Visio a nine.