Tuesday, November 27, 2007

UML tools a review : Best UML tool for personal or comercial use. (Free)


Recently i was looking for a UML tool. for personal use, I evaluated some tool's like argo UML ,Poseidon for UML, UML Studio 8 , UMLet (also avilable as eclipse plugin) and so on. i was totally frustrated to see that non of this work properly. one or more issues came up with all of them.

argo uml:

  1. Problems with sequence diagrams
  2. once you start a sequence diagram then you can not add in between two events ( which you usually require for expansion)
  3. copy and paste is not supported ( you can only copy a diagram as a image)
  4. you have to register to tigress to tell them what bugs are there
  5. registration is required for any feature request
Poseidon:

the community edition is suppose to be free but when i installed it. it asked for registration. so, i just un-installed it.

UML Studio 8:

the free version looks attractive but in the sequence diagram
  1. self message is not allowed.
  2. studio crashes quite often. even if you leave the message in between. that's it.. one more crash !!
UMLet :

Eclipse plug-in , requires to much effort to learn. and the effort is not worth it.

( Productivity is quite low using this tool)... one has to invest to much time to learn it. Instead to use the tool and get his work done or implementing ideas.

there are many other tools as well which i evaluated an wasted my bandwidth any time. which was not worth it.


Hope this saves your time and effort.

Mihir

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The best free tool which i found was Star UML ( 24MB) available at

http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/download.php


it is excellent and very easy to use , on top of it this tool is open source.


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5 comments:

Yanic said...

Hi Mihir,

If you're looking for something that makes working with sequence diagrams REALLY easy, why not have a look at Trace Modeler?

You can find a 30 sec demo and the download here.

In a nutshell, Trace Modeler takes care of all the layout issues for you, freeing you to focus on the actual content.

I'm always happy to get feedback, so if you're missing anything let me know!

Mihir said...

Thanks for the feedback..

I would surly like to check it out.

Yanic said...

I really don't see why your gripe with staruml is directed at me :o)

Rasmus said...

I'm looking for a free UML tool too. You're not the first one to recommend StarUML, but that tool is no longer being developed. SunUML is supposed to be a replacement. Have you tried it? And if so how does it compare with the other UML tools you've tried?

UML Tools said...

excellent article

my advise take a look here: http://case-tools.org