Visio Reviews

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. 

We use the tool for creating system plans and some hardware equipment structure.

I find the control flow and settings features valuable.

The control flow feature needs to be improved. I compared Visio to Bizagi and found that control flow is better with Bizagi. The improvements that can be made to the solution depends on the user. We don't want to restrict a user on what he can use and for what.

I have been using the solution for several years.

I have found Visio to be a stable solution.

Visio is a scalable solution. We have around 20-25 users for the tool.

The support for Visio from Microsoft is fine and subscription-based. We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft so the subscription is for three years. Therefore, we can solve all types of problems that Visio has.

The setup of Visio is straightforward.

The pricing of Visio is much better. It has a free version of the cheapest functionality which is enough for us.

I am using the latest version of Visio. I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I use Visio for designing diagrams and flowcharts. It is user-friendly and easy to use compared to other options. Although many people in my company use AutoCAD, I am not familiar with it. For all the designing, charts, and diagrams, I use Visio. If someone requests an AutoCAD format, I will design it in Visio and then forward it to our team who is responsible for converting it to a CAD file.

The main reason I choose Visio is that it is easy to use. The user interface is familiar and straightforward. Additionally, it offers a variety of templates, such as those for Cisco solutions, which make it easy to create diagrams for specific use cases. For example, we use a Cisco Meraki switch and we can find the exact template for it, then we can easily drop in the components and connect the cables to create the diagram.

Searching for specific templates within the program can be difficult. For example, if I need a template for an electrical diagram with certain symbols, it can be challenging to find it.

I have been using Visio for approximately three years.

I rate the stability of Visio a nine out of ten.

The scalability could be better for the cloud version.

I rate the scalability of Visio a six out of ten.

I did not use the support from Visio.

I have used some open-source solutions in the past but I prefer Visio.

The setup of Visio is simple.

The solution is expensive. The solution does come bundled in other packages.

I rate the price of Visio a three out of ten.

I rate Visio a seven out of ten.

The solution is easy to set up.

The stability is okay. The performance is pretty good.

It's a very flexible solution. 

It requires a lot of skill to get into it. 

It requires more simplicity. You have two options. Either you go very simple, then it's quite a hurdle to get into it or you go very complex. It's a hurdle too. However, when you decide to go complex, then you know exactly what you're doing. Therefore, the gap between, let's say, a common user and an experienced user is large. For Draw.io, I can point anybody to Draw.io and they can just get in there and do whatever they want to do, and it works for them. Visio requires someone to be more experienced.

There's also a solution called TAG for writing documents, which is awesome. It's mainly used in universities, education areas, and big pharma. It's an awesome tool. It takes a lot of time to get in there, but when you are in there, you can do basically almost every kind of document without any issues. Visio is much more similar to this. There's complexity and yet you can do anything within it.

I'm not used to the new versions of Visio. There is a standard version. Always when I get in there, I get frustrated as I can't do the things that I like. The usability could be improved.

Stencils are always an issue, however, this depends on the vendors.

The stability can get iffy if you are doing very complex things. 

I've used the solution quite extensively during the last ten years. It's been a long time. 

The stability really depends on what you're using and what you're doing. When you get complex, you can get some crashes. I have never figured out why that is. It may happen when you have different cards or registers with a lot of things linked together and grouped. For standard usage, it's awesome. When you do more complex things, well, you might have issues.

I can't say a thing about scalability. 

I can't speak to technical support as I don't deal with them. We have in-house support and our in-house support is abysmal. What happens after them, I really can't say. If you call them to ask questions, they just say, "We have to look it up." And that's the last thing you hear. That, however, is an internal issue. It's nothing to do with the quality of the support in general.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

I do now use Draw.io a lot.

The implementation process is quite simple and straightforward. 

Deployment times vary. It depends on how you manage it. If you do a good management process, with document templates and everything, it takes a lot longer. We basically just made packages and rolled them there, using the variables. I'm not a package filler, however, for us, it was easy.

I can't speak to how many people now manage the solution as it is completely outsourced. We don't manage it ourselves. 

We handled the implementation in-house. We did not need to hire any consultants or integrators.

I can't speak to the cost of the solution. We are using just the standard licensing terms for an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft, where we basically have a lot of things in there. I don't think it's included in any Office Microsoft 365 licenses. We basically just have a subscription for every license we're using, however, I can't speak to pricing or terms. 

I have to let Visio go as most often it's too complex and it takes too much time. I'm rather using Draw.io, which is by far enough for almost everything I do expect if I am really drawing up complex cabling things in a building, for example.

I'm just an end-user. The company I work for is a customer. We don't have a special business relationship with Visio.

I'd give new users the same advice I do for every tool. Be really clear on what you want to achieve. Be really clear that when you do it and do it in a strategical and tactical way. Don't do a single deployment and don't just install it and let users do their thing. Agree on templates, stencils, et cetera, that you're using within the company, and keep it simple and crisp, as simple and crisp as possible.

After using the solution for ten years, I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

I use it for diagramming networks, racks, data centers, data flow applications, etc.

I am using its latest version. We have an M-365 membership, so we can access it in the cloud, but we download the application because it works better.

It is a useful tool to map data flows, network objects, and computer science technology and show to clients. It does what I need it to do. It's a tool I've used the longest, so I know it the best, and that's probably the claim to fame.

Sometimes, there is a little bit of a learning curve with it, especially while doing complex network diagrams and getting the lines to snap the way you want them and not overlap or be confusing. It would be great if there was a built-in tutorial. It is not that you can't YouTube, but it would be nice if they gave you some free training. I've been using it forever, but every now and then, I got to do something complicated with it and I wonder how do I do that again. Maybe they do have such information, and I don't know. I have not done research on it because a bunch of people work for me, and some of them are better at it than I am, so I just ask them to do this for me.

There are some applications that you can run in an environment, and they will run through, do auto-discovery, and map the network environment. It would be great to see something like that in Visio, but Microsoft probably doesn't want the hassle of having to deal with it because all the ones out there don't work that well anyway. In order to work well, you have to give them a ton of access to your routers and switches, and nobody wants to do that because it is a security issue.

I have been using this solution for 15 years.

Its stability is excellent. It is a very stable application.

It is basically a client application, and it has one to one ratio in terms of the application being installed on the client. So, I'm not sure how it scales.

We have 15 users. All are technical architects and engineers. Its usage is moderate. It is just an as-needed tool, but everybody in our two teams needs it.

I never had to contact Visio's technical support.

If I did, it was a long time ago. Sometimes, we use PowerPoint for simple diagrams. Obviously, it's not nearly as powerful, but in a pinch, it works.

It is pretty basic, but I've been using it for 15 years. So, you get some stencils, and you build some templates.

We probably have an M-365 E3 license.

It had the same struggles the entire time it has been around. It is a good tool, but it got a little bit of a learning curve. Sometimes, you got to figure out how to make the line snap correctly so it is not really confusing, but it is a valuable tool. People want to use it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It is a really good application for what it does. I'm sure there are one or two other solutions out there that are pretty good, but I don't have a lot of exposure to them.

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 Visio for visual rendering of technical concepts. I use the stencils that depict different workflows, data flows, or architectural structures from an IT perspective that I could render in other documents like PowerPoint or Word documents.

Since we work in IT, we deal with very technical abstract concepts. So having the ability to visually depict a concept that we're trying to get across is helpful. When we write documentation, we have to write it for the broadest audience possible. If you can reduce the number of words, either in technical documentation manuals or others, and do it visually, that seems to register with the targeted audience.

The thing I like most about Visio is the stencils. As the product has matured over time, it comes with more stencils and objects that you can just pick out of the menu and go with. 

It thinks that it knows what you want to do, but it doesn't. It has a way of behaving that can be very frustrating from time to time. Either it moves things about because it thinks its placement should be at a certain place, or it's keeping track of things that you don't necessarily see, so it moves something elsewhere. So when the software requires more keystrokes than one would think to either capture or register a placement, or a drag and drop function that you think should be easily executed, it sometimes doesn't always work that way. Regardless of the skill, the user experience can sometimes be interesting. The predictive behaviors of it at times can be a little bit of a drag.

I've been using Microsoft Visio for twenty plus years.

More often than not, stability is not an issue, it's a fairly stable product. I've noticed that when I have multiple products open, like PowerPoint, Excel, Microsoft, and a couple of others, sometimes it begins to act flaky and then I have to start cutting down services or closing things. In general the Office suite, sometimes it can let you know that it's going to start acting funky, or the behavior begins to be flaky. You have to just know by experience that's your cue to cut down services, close windows, close applications, because the robustness of the applications are not allowing you to be as multitasking as you want to be.

Scalability is okay. It's like everything else, most people they use at most, 30% of the product's capabilities, so there's a lot of stuff in Visio that doesn't necessarily get used. You don't know that when you do the typical installation, that a good part of the product capabilities are never going to get used. The default configuration is to load everything, as opposed to custom, and it's just easier just to let it deploy everything. As a result of that, there's a lot of functionality that gets pulled in, and memory and CPU that may be consumed that the user would never benefit from. That's just the nature of the beast.

Setup is mostly straightforward, but there are occasions where the installation process can be prone to some issues that may not always be apparent until after you deploy it. Sometimes the installation experience requires expertise. Sometimes it's not always clear if you're going to have compatibility issues with the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version, there's been those type of subtleties in the past.

Since I've worked in different shops, sometimes I have installed it from my own product license that I purchased. So I've deployed it from a physical media and I've deployed it from an on-site provider because I purchased the key and there was no physical media. Then there are other times where the company that I worked for, their end user computing team, or their desktop support team, because they have to keep track of the licenses, they own the deployment and the push down to the user and make it part of their image. Because there's a cost to deploying that product in some variation of the product packaging, they tried to keep control of that. 

Just be mindful that the software, while it's helpful, it can behave in ways that can be a little frustrating. A lot of companies say go and find a Visio-like product that can do 70% of what Visio does, for free. There have been companies that I've worked for that said we will not pay the license fee for Visio, go and get a similar product that you can download from the web that can do 70% of what you need it to do. 

I would rate Visio an eight out of ten. It's a product that's been known. Many people use it. It's got an established install base. It's not flawless by any means, but since it does allow some intimacy with the Microsoft products, that's probably its greatest thing, and in a business environment, that's important. Because of its cost structure, a lot of organizations are trying to figure out if there are alternatives out there, which there are. Those other products can do much of the heavy lifting that Visio does at a cost point that, in some cases, is very attractive.

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.