Text to diagram comparisons

Go to comparisons site

Compare syntax, layouts, outputs between languages for generating diagrams with text.

Full disclosure: This site and D2 were originally created at Terrastruct. Today, the site is maintained by the independent D2 project, fiscally sponsored by Hack Club. D2 appears first; otherwise, it gets no special treatment. Contributions and corrections are welcome—even ones that make D2 look bad. We'll include them without bias and then furiously improve D2.

Currently supported comparisons

High-quality comparisons take a lot of work, which will only get more as the number of examples grows. Other than D2, the currently supported set are what seem to be the most popular tools for text-to-diagram.

• D2
• Mermaid
• GraphViz
• PlantUML

For completeness, you may want to also evaluate less popular tools/languages. The best catalog we've found is https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/.

FAQ

• See https://text-to-diagram.com#faq

Contributing

Run locally

# Only needed first run
git submodule update --init --recursive
yarn

yarn dev

Adding examples

Please follow the examples in src/examples.

1. Create a folder in src/examples with a short name of the example
2. Add in that folder:

• description.txt to describe what the example aims to demonstrate.
• render/ for SVG renders
• syntax/ for texts
• If there are languages with errors for this example, error/

1. Create the text for as many languages as you can. It's okay if not totally complete. We or others can fill.
2. Run ./ci/render.sh (with the respective tools installed)

• Pre-requisite tools:
  • mermaid-cli (mmdc)
  • plantuml
  • graphviz (dot)
  • d2

Adding features

If you think there's a significant feature that people want to compare against, feel free to add a line in src/components/Features.tsx.

Adding languages

If you wish to add a new language, please fill out as many of the examples and features as possible. It's a lot of work, but if there's enough interest in the language, perhaps others will help out.