Visio Reviews

With Visio, I create visual representations of business processes, which helps people understand the notation and communicate ideas effectively. I use BPMN templates to depict these use cases.

Visio is used to show processes in a way that people understand easily.

The task sequencing, the process level views, and the ability to communicate between lanes are valuable features in Visio. It is intuitive for users to drag and drop templates and figures, making it easy to use.

In terms of enterprise architecture, Visio is limited. It is also behind in supporting AI-related projects and might need better integration with other products.

I have used Visio for over 20 years.

Visio is stable, although my version is at least five or six years old. Stability can be impacted by the age of the software and whether updates are being applied.

Visio is the poor man's version of a modeling tool, and it does not scale well.

I have never used Microsoft's support for Visio specifically. However, I face challenges with Microsoft for personal systems due to constant new requirements. For Visio, I don't receive updates under my current subscription.

Positive

I used QualiWare in the past, finding Visio to be less complex in comparison. However, the switch was due to the perception that QualiWare was too hard to use and not user-friendly.

Initial setup can be tailored to different levels of complexity, starting with high-level mission statements and breaking them down into business units and value chains.

It usually involves teams, which could range up to twenty, thirty, or forty people depending on the size of the project. Small activity teams handle more short-term deliveries.

I purchased an older version of Visio and pay about twelve or thirteen dollars a month, but this subscription does not include Visio updates. For other solutions like project management or architecture tools, specialized tools would be more effective.

I would prefer an easy-to-use, comprehensive enterprise architecture and portfolio management tool that is integrated. 

There should be a strong linkage between portfolio management and architecture to ensure efficient management of inventories and life cycles. 

Additionally, a multi-disciplinary approach in architecture delivery can help address various requirements promptly.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for products, planning, and scheduling. We're using it with Microsoft BI for analytics.

We use the solution for structured preparation for various functions and with our HR team. We also use it for business process automation. 

The solution is very user-friendly. 

We're using a lot of flowcharts and business process steps. It's quite helpful. We can easily define roles and activities. 

The solution is stable and reliable. 

It's scalable.

Local technical support is helpful.

Instead of pushing the solution to PowerPoint, we'd like to be able to have the same visuals right in Visio instead of moving it to other Microsoft apps. When I create an organization chart in Visio, and I want to show it to management, I shouldn't have to copy and paste it into a PowerPoint presentation or put it into a PDF file. There needs to be better integration with PowerPoint. 

The setup can be a bit complex. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

It's a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale well. Currently, we have 400 users on Visio. We likely will double users in the coming year. 

We have a reseller partner. They offer local support. We raise a ticket and they provide help. If they need to, they can raise a question with Microsoft and we usually will get a solution to our query within a week. 

I did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup is slow. It's not straightforward. There is no standardization. We need to create instances on our own at the outset. 

It is a cloud-based solution, we just have to enable it and can immediately start using it. 

We likely see an ROI after three or four years. 

The pricing is pay-per-use. Initially, we paid monthly. Now we pay about $200, which is maybe $10 per user per month.

I did not evaluate other products before choosing this solution. 

We extensively use Microsoft products. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

I use this solution for documenting architectures and workflows.

It's a rich-client application, so it's deployed on-premises.

There are about 10 people who use this solution in my organization. We would use it more if the solution were less expensive.

In the future, I will have other licensing models for infrequent users so that they can pay per use for the solution.

The usability in general is good. The integration of uploading custom stencils is also very nice.

Integration with other software would be an area of improvement, so that it's not just used to document but also as a center plane for information sharing. I would like to have the ability to click on things and be redirected to the application all throughout the process flow.

In the next release, I would like them to provide an application store for stencils from different vendors where we can download new icons and drawing elements.

I have worked with this solution for ten years.

The stability is mature.

It's a one-to-one application. I don't think there's a need to scale. It's expensive to deploy too many seats, especially if people only need it a few times a year. 

Initial setup is simple.

Implementation was done in-house.

The price could be more flexible for infrequent users. If it's your main utility that you use daily, then it's a good price.

I would rate the pricing as two out of ten.

We also evaluated Lucidchart. The cost is the main difference.

One is an online solution, and the other is a native application. There are some functionality differences, but it's a big competitor because it scales much easier, and it has a lower cost for infrequent users. 

If your company usually standardizes on one tool and then you try to exchange information with infrequent users, then obviously the power users move to the tool that's also accessible and usable by the infrequent users.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. It's a good tool.

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.

We use the solution primarily for making high-level and low-level diagrams and making any other diagrams that might have some items available that we can quickly turn around architecture with.

I like that I can copy and paste icons and drag and drop items. It has a lot of great features.

It is very stable. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale.

It is easy to set up.

There should be more items available from a variety of other products that can be integrated. 

Architectural diagrams could be enhanced further.

The icon support is limited. We'd like third-party icons available to us.

I've used the solution for five years. I've used the solution for a while at this point. 

The stability is great. I'd rate it nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale. I'd rate the scalability seven out of ten. It could be a bit more scalable. 

We have 4,000 to 5,000 users on the solution.

We have used other solutions in the past. There is a product called Lucidchart that I've used. It's more flexible in terms of icons we can use. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It is not complex or difficult. 

While we have an on-premises deployment, the cloud is available on Office 365. 

The pricing is fairly reasonable. I'd rate it six out of ten.

We are Microsft partners.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

People should consider the solution. However, there is a lack of customization available. 

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.

Our primary use case for Visio revolves around business process re-engineering, as-is process, to-be-processed, and then time and motion study, value stream mapping, and in collaboration with everything together.

Visio has improved our organization through an essential collaboration with the other Microsoft applications like SharePoint and Excel. In the earlier days, what used to happen was that a majority of the organization captured all the as-is processes, the time and motion data in the form of Excel and then they used to create process diagrams using other freeware applications. However, collaboration allows easy and convenient sharing with other stakeholders, that is really helpful with Visio.

The features I find most valuable are the integration with the other Microsoft applications, specifically Excel.

The one particular thing which I would like to see improved is in comparison to other products in the market, and is still lacking in Visio, is publishing on a web application. For example, there is a freeware application business process modeling tool, Bizagi. This tool has a very good interface. It also provides visibility allowing users to publish on SharePoint directly. Then the entire product gets converted into an HTML format which provides a one-click on all the attributes of every task, a detailed description, direct visibility, which I find is still lacking in Visio.

An additional feature I would like to see included in the next release is the implementation of web publishing. For example, for any task or any flowchart diagram that I create, example "talk to the customer." Now using "talk to the customer," return adding attribute like "this is a step-by-step document file that you should follow" or "these are the setup questions that you should follow while talking to a customer."

These documents can be attached to that specific task, and when I submit this on the web, users will get all the description, along with the attachment.

As far as the stability of the solution I think it still needs to grow up when it comes to the interface usage.

My impressions of the scalability of this solution on a scale of one to five I would rate the scalability a 3.5, with five being the highest.

I know of 50 users working with this tool. Some of them are engineers. For the people who are not technically sound, for them, they find Visio quite complicated so they try to avoid using it. That is still where Visio needs to grow. In terms of user interaction, UX, and user interface. There is some obstructive complexity. 

I did use previous solutions, like as I mentioned one of them was Bizagi Modeler, which is growing in the market. Currently, I'm using IBM Blue.

The reason why there was a switch from Microsoft Visio was because of the user interface and easiness to UX. It's a complete BPMN solution, however, Visio can be used for multiple purposes. Now depending on the kind of audience, it was quite easy for them to use Bizagi Modeler. That's the reason why I introduced Bizagi Modeler in my organization. 

After switching organizations, I've found that Microsoft Visio was quite challenging and a little too complicated for the users. Irrespective of understanding the complete utilization and the power of the tool, people are switching to different solutions, so we were using IBM Blueworks.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's quite easy. I worked on a couple of projects which took two or three months to complete because they required extensive organizational level detail, like from top to bottom. Using Visio, it's quite easy and I like it.

The IT team takes care of the installation and deployment of Visio.

Before choosing I did a market evaluation. I performed a needs evaluation as the first step in our market evaluation. We considered what kind of solution we wanted and if it was okay to go with a freeware solution or is it right to go with the licensed software. Initially, we were Microsoft Platinum Partners, so that's why we had Microsoft Visio well established in our organization. However, again, when it comes to the kind of usage and along with the maturity of the process that we had, it was a simple move from my end because you're paying for a license and if you do not use the overall potential of it, including the user interface, I think it's not worth to pay for those applications.

The only additional advice I would give, Visio is one very powerful tool in the market. Not just the application, but also its effectiveness to collaborate with other applications. Everyone is using Microsoft applications; it's how you work across platforms, and this collaboration makes life easy.

The individual applications have a lot of functions an features that's the reason why each of these applications is quite complex. You need to understand the functions before getting the full value of this tool.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being the best I would rate this product an eight-over ten because it's a tool what works in collaboration with other applications very well. I'm deducting two marks because it's still complicated for the very generic user. The solution should be developed with a variety of end users in mind. It needs to be user-friendly and easier to use for all different kinds of users and user experience levels.