Cloudcraft Reviews

As our AWS environment grew across multiple applications, accounts, and environments, maintaining architecture documentation became increasingly difficult. We started using Cloudcraft because the infrastructure was evolving continuously through Terraform deployments, and manually maintaining diagrams was time-consuming and often outdated. Cloudcraft became our preferred platform for creating accurate AWS diagrams that could be shared with engineering teams, management, customers, and auditors. It also provides cost estimation capabilities, which help during solution design and capacity planning.

Whenever a new application is being deployed, we first create the architecture in Cloudcraft before provisioning the infrastructure. This includes all AWS components like Route 53, WAF, and CloudFront, allowing technical and non-technical stakeholders to understand the complete solution before deployment begins.

Cloudcraft has positively impacted our organization as infrastructure documentation is more consistent and easier to maintain. Solution review meetings are much more productive because everyone is discussing the same visual architecture now. Infrastructure planning becomes faster because architecture can be quickly assembled and modified, leading to better customer communication and improved cost awareness.

The best features Cloudcraft offers include visual AWS architecture, the ability to create professional AWS diagrams quickly, significant time savings during solution design, cost estimation, and having estimated infrastructure costs directly within the architecture diagram. Cloudcraft also makes collaboration easier as architecture diagrams can be shared across infrastructure teams. AWS best practice visualization is there, encouraging better architecture design by making it easy to visualize high availability, multi-AZ deployment, public versus private subnets, and security layers. Creating architecture documentation that previously required several hours can now be completed much more quickly.

Architecture design and documentation have had the biggest impact on my team. These are part of our day-to-day work that were time-consuming previously, and now they are easy to accomplish.

There are areas for improvement in Cloudcraft, such as more cloud service coverage and quicker support for new AWS services releases. Real-time collaborative editing could be improved for larger infrastructure teams working simultaneously. Integration with IaaC, such as deeper integration with Terraform and IaaC workflows, could further simplify documenting updates.

I have been using Cloudcraft for more than two years, primarily for AWS structure visualization, documentation, architecture planning, and cost estimation.

Cloudcraft is stable.

We have seen a return on investment as the time spent documenting has shifted from five hours to completing tasks within one or two hours.

We have seen specific outcomes, such as time saved in respect of manual work, documentation, and architecture designing.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive as Cloudcraft provides strong value to organizations requiring regulatory design documents and AWS architecture. I view the pricing as reasonable given the value it delivers, and the setup was straightforward.

Before choosing Cloudcraft, we evaluated other options such as draw.io.

I would advise others looking into using Cloudcraft that it is a very good product for organizations building or maintaining AWS environments who want a professional, efficient, and collaborative way to design and document cloud architectures. I rate this product highly based on my experience.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Cloudcraft is drawing AWS diagrams and schemas. When I use Cloudcraft for AWS diagrams and schemas, for example, when the client asks for some architecture plan, I can make it in Cloudcraft and then send it with all the details about pricing, network infrastructure, and layers shown on the schema. This is incredibly useful for AWS. Cloudcraft is an amazing tool for this use case. Additionally, you can import your Terraform templates, and it will generate a schema for you.

The best feature Cloudcraft offers is its diagram structure, which is amazing. The aspect of the diagram structure that stands out for me is that it is easy to use, which is the most important part. It is easy to use and looks great. Cloudcraft has positively impacted my organization as it has saved us a considerable amount of time.

When I roughly calculate the time I save with Cloudcraft, I can give an example of a project where Cloudcraft made a significant difference. When I had to make a schema for one of the projects, it is internal and confidential information. When I had to make a project structure, it took me minutes to create it, especially if you use the Terraform code.

I think Cloudcraft can be improved by possibly being a little less expensive.

I have been using Cloudcraft for around three years.

Cloudcraft is stable.

Cloudcraft's scalability is perfect, and I have nothing to complain about.

Cloudcraft customer support is great.

I previously used a different solution called draw.io. It was far too limited and was not as well integrated into AWS infrastructure, so I found it not as good as Cloudcraft.

My experience with Cloudcraft's pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is easy to use and easy to set up. It is straightforward.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I mainly use Cloudcraft to manage assets on AWS and to have an easy view of all the items and resources deployed on the AWS infrastructure. I use it to monitor issues, find gaps, identify bottlenecks, and troubleshoot problems.

For troubleshooting and modeling links, one of my clients is AWS heavy, so it uses many assets, many different features, and many different AWS services.

Cloudcraft helped us identify issues in one particular situation with a government client that had a large infrastructure connecting at least 20 different applications. Some of them are on AWS, some are on Azure, and some are on-premises. Managing these applications and trying to find the issue while they were in production was troublesome. To figure out the issues, a high-level bird's-eye view of the applications and the complete infrastructure was helpful, and Cloudcraft provided it. We were able to find issues specifically related to the integration of various applications and the dropping of messages when the systems were not able to communicate properly, because sometimes the applications were fine. The underlying images and the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure failed to scale. Those kinds of problems were easier to find and mitigate with Cloudcraft.

Something unique about our workflow is that we generally use Cloudcraft to create diagrams based on requirements and on the different categories available for specific clients. We organize those items into separate categories and create diagrams based on the categories and the filters for those specific use cases. I can see all the different resources that work within those categories and how they interact with each other. We have the option of looking at the entire view of the complete AWS infrastructure, for example, or we can select and look at the smaller pieces that make more sense from an application perspective, a domain perspective, or a specific business perspective.

Cloudcraft has positively impacted our organization. Before, we found it very difficult to troubleshoot and navigate a specific problem, because finding the root cause was sometimes difficult through the complex maze of different AWS resources. Having diagrams and the Live Sync capability is more similar to looking at railway infrastructure and finding out if a specific signal is causing an issue or where a specific train has been. It is much more interactive than the normal AWS dashboarding capability.

With Cloudcraft, troubleshooting time decreased from a couple of days to a few hours. Proactive monitoring also increased, which was almost not possible before. A lot of issues were avoided even before they could appear.

The best features Cloudcraft offers include very good support for AWS and a bird's-eye view of the complete AWS infrastructure. It is quite easy to find issues, and it gives me a complete blueprint of the entire infrastructure. If the complete topology is very complex, going through the different sections of the resources in the AWS dashboard becomes quite tedious. Looking at the application diagrams or the diagrams from Cloudcraft makes much more sense for a newcomer or someone who is maintaining the complete infrastructure.

Of those features, I think the bird's-eye view is the most important, and it is the one I rely on most day-to-day in Cloudcraft. Remembering all the different artifacts and the changes to those artifacts on a daily basis is not possible for anyone or any specific department. However, having a diagram with Live Sync capability helps us monitor the infrastructure more effectively and in a much more optimized way.

The Live Sync capability in Cloudcraft also works well. Sometimes it just needs a bit of a refresh, but otherwise it works well. Cloudcraft also has the capability to manage infrastructure on Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud. Although the integration is not as deep as it is for AWS, it still has that capability, which is a welcome feature.

Overall, Cloudcraft is a good product. I think it removes the complexity of managing, updating, and maintaining the complete AWS infrastructure. It is specifically helpful for organizations where the AWS infrastructure is quite complex and is split into different categories, applications, or domains. Having a product like this is much more helpful, and it complements the AWS native capability of providing and managing the infrastructure through a dashboard.

Cloudcraft could be improved in a few areas. The first is the capability of managing other cloud providers such as Azure and GCP. The support is there, but I feel that it is not as developed or as sophisticated as it is for AWS. The Live Sync feature also has some lag in some cases, so we need to refresh it in some scenarios. That could be improved. If the complexity of the infrastructure is huge, the image becomes a spaghetti diagram, so there might be a different way of presenting diagrams that are far too complex to look at. There could also be an option to upload custom icons or custom images, which could enhance the diagrams created by Cloudcraft.

There is always room for improvement in the user interface, pricing, and other areas of Cloudcraft, but I think the more important points are about Live Sync and the accurate total cost of ownership. If the actual cost of ownership of all these cloud items can be specified accurately, Cloudcraft will be even more effective, because currently the calculation seems to be off in some cases. If it becomes very accurate, Cloudcraft will be an irreplaceable item.

I gave Cloudcraft an eight because the support for other cloud providers or the industry and the accurate cost calculation need to be there. The diagramming capabilities also need to be slightly more advanced. Then I think it will be a good, solid product close to a ten.

I have been using Cloudcraft for two years.

I have not had a chance to explore Cloudcraft's AI capabilities much, but from what I have seen, they seem promising and are heading in the right direction.

The accuracy of Cloudcraft's AI output is quite high, except possibly for the cost calculation. Otherwise, it seems to be very high.

I did not purchase Cloudcraft through the AWS Marketplace.

My advice to others looking into Cloudcraft is that it is a very good product, if you understand it.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)