SmartDraw Reviews

Where this software really shines for our business is its ease of use for submittal drawings when bidding and creating contracts for jobs. It allows us to empower our salesmen to create their own submittals without the expense or training needed for some of the more "professional" suites. This means for smaller projects we do not need to tie up our senior estimators, leaving their time free and better spent with CAD. What this means is that for job cost, we are able to use lower wage employees to perform simpler tasks and not eat into the margins of a job from utilizing higher paid engineers.

It can be a bit finicky in trying to get it to do exactly what you want it to do. Its ease of use sometimes means that you are fighting those very elements that make it easy to make it do what you want it to do. Snap to grids and the like, while toggle-able, provide an annoyance when they should "just work".

It's very easy to draw up a basic house floor plan.

Limited symbol options specific to interior design. If you use too many JPEG images within the file the system struggles to convert to PDF. (which isn't the case with my other design software). Often glitches when opening files and/or is very slow to open existing documents.

Hi Nicky, Thank you for the positive review and for the feedback. I'll pass the review along to our development team, so we can take a look at the PDF export and file opening issues you mentioned. If you reply back to me, or contact our support using the below info, we can further investigate and help. If there is any other way we can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. International: +1 858 225 3300 US: 800-768-3729 email: support@smartdraw.com -Chris

The interface would be great if it worked. At the price, it would be a great value, if it worked.

1. Many, many bugs. In particular, things often move when they shouldn't, and saving your work never works like you expect it to. In particular, if you save a project, via the "save" button, then "save as" another file, the work that was "saved" on the original is lost. They refuse to acknowledge this bug, but, over the phone, they did explain to me how to use templates, which gives a decent workaround...

Read more

Great software for flow charts and process maps. Used extensively for 3 years under a one time license.

Was only available for Windows at time of last use, since then it has moved to a subscription, web-based platform which is a significant cost considering other better-value or free softwares that can do the same.

Hi Simon, Thank you for the feedback. If it helps, we do still offer SmartDraw for Windows, which is a one time payment with no required ongoing fees in order to use it. That can be found here: https://www.smartdraw.com/buy/ or by visiting smartdraw.com and clicking Buy in the top right. Anything more, please let us know. Thank you, Chris support@smartdraw.com 800-768-3729 +1 858 225 3300

Very easy to draw flowcharts. Easily import and export visio. Available at cheap price and can easily replace visio i believe which is much costlier. One can use its rich library of colours. Templates help alot to quickly built mocks.

When I used i didn't find multiple user facility.

Powerful but easy to use platform with numerous applications across industries.

Complexity - which is a factor of how robust the software is, so it’s not really a criticism.

Thank you very much for the positive words. If we can help in any way, please do reach out to us. We do not charge for phone or email support. Thank you, Chris support@smartdraw.com 858-225-3300

Ease of manipulation of floor plans, handy clip arts. User friendly, can move groups of objects together. 3D modeling is something we rarely use, but it was easy to learn to do.

I don't care for the cloud based option and it seems like this is what it is migrating to. I prefer to save copies to my hard drive. I was unable to open previous files unless I upgraded software as well. That isn't right.

Create your diagrams and document the processes step by step of your workflow, ideal for planning strategies, powerful and easy to use, contains many templates to choose from to make your visual presentations.

The price can be a problem, since it is really expensive

Program was a little easier to use then some other programs. Wasnt overly difficult

Not as good features that other programs offer. expecially if your a advance person in design

Hello Christopher, Thank you for the positive feedback. We are constantly adding new features to SmartDraw and love to hear new suggestions. If there is a feature you would like to see, please let us know and we can add it to the software. -Chris US: 800-768-3729 or 858-225-3300 International: +1 858 225 3300 email: support@smartdraw.com

2D Floor feature . I used to implement software monitoring solution at customer site. Very often I have been asked to insert as background of the network map the floor plan of the building to easily determine the physical location of the network devices.

At time I used it there was not SmartDraw Cloud now available. This is perfect for small/individual business.

This product ships with a lot of prebuilt content, templates that can let you create quick and easy diagrams, visuals, etc for presentations.

We bought this thinking it might be a lower cost replacement for Visio and that we'd be able to use the Project Planning template for our PM needs. Neither turned out to be true. This tool will give you a good variety of templates, but if you want to move something manually... forget it. Don't like how the basic flowchart looks or need to make room for a 3rd branch? You'll go back to Visio after a month. Project plans look create, but when you need to update 1 date good luck. ugh. This had a lot of potential but it just isn't flexible enough for real use cases in our experience.

Good when it works, good symbol library, versatile

Have the desktop version for drawing floor plans only and have persevered with it for 2 years (version 2017). It regularly crashes on me as others have detailed. If it crashes once you may as well start again as it will crash continually after that. For the price I paid I was hoping for much better and feel ripped off.

SmartDraw has tons of images to support visual documentation. It's great way to share knowledge with others using this solution. I use SmartDraw to create: process maps, easy mindmaps, data flows and creative mix of ideas. Sometimes there is good opportunity to export document as image file and put to MS Excel and add contextual values to present bigger picture of business in easy to understand way (complex but easy to see relations).

I'd like to see more options in mindmapping area, to be able to manage task information in advanced way.

Smart Draw is relatively easy to use. It has all the various kinds of charts and graphs on its website you can imagine.

Smart Draw does not have any negative features. I used it to teach Quality Improvement concepts. It was great!

Hi Karen, Thank you for the positive review. Glad to hear SmartDraw is working well for you. If we can help in any way, please let us know. We offer free phone and email support should anything be needed. Thank you, Chris support@smartdraw.com 858-225-3300

The templates give you a structure when you are starting out and make things easier for you . The data migration process is intuitive and relatively quick .

More customization options when setting up the metrics you would like to follow would be welcome . Some functions are more complex and you need to be trained to use them .

Excellent value for the money. Contains a wealth of symbol libraries and is relatively easy to pick up.

Some of the options for line thickness, etc. can e a bit difficult to locate at first until you get used to it. The snap function barely works sometimes and works too well other times.

Easy to use. It has a great variety of modes of modeling adapting to any type of objective that we want to define or design. Concept maps can be made. You can create all kinds of graphics that you can then use in your presentations by exporting to PowerPoint. It has 70 types of visualizations / diagrams, and examples and templates for almost all.

It can be tested without limit for a while, and then its use requires an individual license, although the cost is relatively low.

This is the best software if you want and need to edit segment of a picture or image, because is pretty easy to use, the tools are very friendly and you can even work a pixel level with the maximum zoom and the results are awesome.

It is a very heavy software and demands many resources of your computer you need a very high speed ram memory and a good video card to get the most of this software.

Its an essential tool especially in IT Field to design network topology. Almost everything is there in templates to make the diagram more presentable and selfexplanatory.

Nothing at the moment as negative. Never changed to any other software for network design drawing.

SmartDraw is straightforward and easy to learn.

Advertised as free but is only a free trial. Functionality is limited to simple drawings

It is an unbeatable visual processor that uses complex algorithms to generate various types of graphics. This allows you to create flowcharts, other diagrams, calendars, flowcharts, family trees, architectural plans, maps and other types of graphics to make presentations. It has many templates needed to create items quickly. It also provides export options to other productivity applications including Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel.

Having a computer with enough processing capacity and memory so that it does not become slow to work in this application because it requires a lot of resources.

It offers a user-friendly interface which contains a categorization of diagrams that can be made from this tool. It is as easy as selecting the type of diagram and beginning to build it by embedding the elements or forms that make it up.

Try to install it and it was very slow download and installation, which I think may also be caused by the quality of Internet service and the potential of the computer you are using.

Easy to use, well documented help tutorial.

I would like a print preview screen. .

Very affordable compared to Visio and if needed you can even export into Visio which is cool. You can create complex flowchart across most Operating Systems either from the desktop application or through the web browser. Very user friendly to not much holding new users from getting started quickly.

Finicky when trying to be very precise where you want even with snap-to grids can be a problem. Also can be a resource hog on both the desktop and browser version.

SmartDraw gives us the ability to create custom workflow charts for various processes in our business. It is easy to use without being a graphics disign person. I like that it design library has an adequate amount of shapes and symbols for our processes.

I have problems making changes or additions to charts at times when I started with free trial. Had to buy individual license before i was able to finish learning to use.