Grafio 4 - Diagram Maker Reviews

I love Grafio4. Let’s get that straight right up front. I find one consistently bothersome bug though. The way I use Grafio4 , I typically push shapes around constantly, tweaking here and there, sometimes for over an hour. Almost always use Apple Pencil. But I also use Apple Keyboard a lot at the same time. I like the precision of moving objects with the arrow keys. But invariably, the arrow keys will stop working sometime during the session. Even with the Apple Pencil, I can’t get the same precision of placement and it becomes frustrating trying to place things just so with either finger or pencil. The workaround I found was to disconnect and reconnect the keyboard to make the arrow keys work again. Oh, and one big wish for future functionality: It would be most awesome if a circle would remain a perfect circle when being resized. I don’t want to lose the ability to make an egg shape out of it, but I do want the option to do both. Actually this would be great for all the shapes, but most especially for circles. Wonderful App!

Easier to use than Omnigraffle, has plenty of features, and costs a fraction of the price. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Omnigraffle does, but I found that most of those were for very specific professional needs and most people don’t need them. Grafio does have more features than Lucidchart and is again much cheaper (no subscription compared to $5.99-$8.99/mo for Lucidchart). I use Grafio for creating org charts, diagraming processes both for work and at home, and used it to create a network map when setting up my home network. The library of assets is great and includes assets to meet just about any need. The examples that are included have been great for helping me come up with ideas for my own diagrams. Being able to use the Apple Pencil to create shapes has been a big bonus and I love that I can import my own assets (icons mainly) into Grafio. If you need a feature packed diagraming app that’s easy to use get Grafio!

In using a t I just couldn’t get anything done several time it closed itself or a action would keep going stand Nottingham stop. Resizing an object and it just kept getting longer long after I stopped right off the page. I delete it make a new one and it resizes itself in the same way and I Unis off the page. Adding an arrow a simple action is cumbersome. You draw Aline it figures that out and it makes it nice and straight for you but then you have to go get the arrow head ....then resize....then try to get it to snap to where you want it. It wouldn’t snap to even the the setting was set to do so. So I end up moving it with the x y pull down after going the wrong way almost every time I look up and realize it took me ten min to put that arrow there ...

Nope I’m ask for my money back this is not for me

I downloaded Grafio looking for an amazing app which could Help me do amazing things, and for Grafio 3 I had an incredible experience, everything ran smoothly, I did many amazing projects but this new update has been messing around all my previous and actual work. I spent almost 2 hours in a simple algorithm because Grafio4 kept moving the arrows all over the place and I wasn’t able to fix that until I worked around Grafio4 bugs. And in the end when I saved the project it just disappeared into a white canvas, there was no trace of my previous work I just spent hours working on. And there was NO way to take it back. I am so disappointed with this update because I really loved Grafio4 and now I’m forced to design the whole graph again and it keeps crashing.

Version 4.2.3. The UI is just too broken to use. Snapping object edges to the grid doesn't work, nor does manually setting the vertical sizes of basic objects. Some objects (e.g. UML diagram objects) can't have background colors set; they have to be transparent. Arrows on lines only work in one direction, and it defaults to the opposite way you drew the line. Arrows also don't snap to grid or objects properly. The touch/pen handoff doesn't exactly work... sometimes my finger draws ink lines, sometimes it box selects. The "ignore touch input" decides whether or not it wants to work. With touch blocked, sometimes I can't select objects at all (with pen or touch).

I love the concept, but $9.99 for an unusable app isn't really something I could swallow. :/

I Iove this program. I work with teams of designers and engineers and they are CAD and or Visio, two programs that are too bloated or restricted in the iPad universe. A lot of my projects start off as Blue Sky, and free hand drawings. However, when it comes time to move it up the pecking order for approvals, you need something that crystalizes your thoughts to the viewers. This program does the trick. I have been talking to Stoyan on my thoughts of what the project needed- more technical/engineering templates and he delivered. P&ID and PFDs are now done a lot faster. You can then export them to be converted to .dwg’s. Bravo!

I would give all five stars, but 3 small points hold that last one back for me:
* No SVG export (seems they are working on it though)
* When using the resize handles on shapes, they don’t snap to the grid. This makes diagrams of nested objects a little harder to plan out.
* Unit options are only in points. No inches or centimeters. Makes some guesswork when you want to make a diagram that will be in printed documentation.

Very exciting to use Grafio4, worked quite well with the Apple Pencil. There are certain interactions which were problematic after using Grafio4 in anger.

Selecting arrows for precise alignment when they sat over the top of another shape. Even when you locked the background

No way to color shapes with a certain opacity?

The ability to draw arrows back and forth from shape to shape in one motion, didn’t seem to be present and had to be done 1 by 1, often leading to misalignment when resizing shapes.

When resizing shapes, often linked arrows would often be reposition behind other shapes that were placed in the area where the arrow ran.

This is an amazing application however, and really hope that app development continues! Keep up the awesome work!

Missing App Features
-> Precise sizing
-> Auto layout of diagram
-> Visio or other format Exports so you can share your work with people who don’t have Grafio4 or no iPad.
-> Shape controls: resizing a rounded rectangle will screw the shape as you have not control over anything. So basically the "vector drawings" are useless as you don't get the benefits of it: being able to control the shapes.
-> Grid or pixel snapping when you resize objects. Getting multiple objects of the same size is a nightmare right now if you need to modify their size.

Missing Export Options
-> Transparent background
-> Trimming transparent pixels to only export the content and not the whole canvas

Despite the promises of the developers in the comment, still waiting for basic shape support. Right now you resize a shape, your diagram is done. It will be deformed and you have no control on rounded corners or anything.

I’ve been loving how clean and smooth Grafio4 is. But the shape recognition corrects a shape too little. When I draw squares that are imperfect, it turns them into parallelograms, and when I draw circles slightly wonky or with a small tail, I get weird blob shapes. It would be nice if the developer made some sort of sliding scale that determined how much or how little Grafio4 corrected. Most often I want perfect shapes, not amorphous ones.

This is the best app that I have in my large collection of apps.I know that this is an app that is used for graphs and flow charts but I have found a different uses for it and feel completely satisfied. I wish I could draw without snap recognition and have it the color fill in. Could you ask explain the grids spacing and the angle step? Thank you

It’s a very good app as is, and there are some good features in the pipeline. Little clunky when compared to things like Concepts, but I’m told some of its gestures are on the way. Sharing is a bit of an oddity as we can’t use the system share sheet for some reason; eager to get that fixed.

Otherwise it’s a great app with a lot of aides to help you just graph your thoughts and get on with it.

Finished upgrading from Grafio to 4.
First "lost” all of my 3.0 Grafio files. Then finally found the caution there was a problem and fix was coming shortly. Which it did, now have back all of my 3.0 files.

Started trying to read the Detailed Help section and cannot see most of the help text on my ipad pro ! Some of the scroll down screens are truncated as white banners. Then is get to a point where the Help will not scroll any further down, even though there is more Help.

So as of 6Oct2019 I can only rate this app as a 3 star.
BTW Grafio3 loved all of the features and functions so when I saw 4.0 upgrade was thinking happy. Not so right now.

If Detailed Help section has bugs, what else in 4.0 has bugs as well?????

It takes a while to get used to, but once I got over the hump it does what I need it to.

The only thing I don’t like is so trivial it’s hardly worth mentioning, but here it is: when I set Grafio’s permissions to “add photos only” I can’t save drawings to my camera roll. I have to give it full read/write access to make that work.

This is a great concept, but needs to be simpler. I am working from an ipad, and I don’t find Grafio4 to be user friendly. Sometimes apps are just over thought. Flow charts should not be difficult. They should be user friendly. Developers need to pretend a 4 yr old wants to use their program. It should be fun, big, colorful, easy. In its current state, it is flowcharts made complicated.

Needs a few polishing touches, two finger tap for undo, three finger tap for redo would be a great usually addition. Drawing a line between objects doesn't always draw an arrow, it someone's just draws a line, output in else to iCloud would also be quite useful. I still like Grafio4 as is.

If Grafio4 would update to fix text which atm seems completely dysfunctional. Along with just overall performance, it randomly jitters and if you move multiple objects at once some of the lines completely disappear and others move to different locations then you would expect. Overall I don’t understand how this is 4 stars right now.

I have tried several flowcharting apps in Grafio4 Store. This is by far the most intuitive and easy to learn. I was creating fairly complex charts after just a few minutes of “playing around”. Using Grafio4 with my iPad Pro and pencil makes flowcharting a snap. Kudos to the developers!

I bought this after reading all the great reviews but this thing is super clunky and frustrating. The fonts are hard to set (and you have to do it every time, same with colors etc., which makes creating branded diagrams super tedious and annoying.

But the worst part: it will only let you "draw" shapes and lines! You can't jot down notes or make sketches at all!

Repeat: Grafio4 will not let you scribble on your diagrams! You have to TYPE in every note, and if you want to add tiny drawings to your diagram, you have to create each one in a separate app and import it individually as an image.

as such, Grafio4 is useless, to me, unless there is some exciting update coming like right now? Otherwise I'm requesting a refund.

I’ve been using Grafio4 as my go to graphics maker for years and love it. There’s always room for improvement, so when an update occurs I get excited. It’s easy to use and easier to export to any document.

Keep up the good work.

Easier to use than Omnigraffle, has plenty of features, and costs a fraction of the price. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Omnigraffle does, but I found that most of those were for very specific professional needs and most people don’t need them. Grafio does have more features than Lucidchart and is again much cheaper (no subscription compared to $5.99-$8.99/mo for Lucidchart). I use Grafio for creating org charts, diagraming processes both for work and at home, and used it to create a network map when setting up my home network. The library of assets is great and includes assets to meet just about any need. The examples that are included have been great for helping me come up with ideas for my own diagrams. Being able to use the Apple Pencil to create shapes has been a big bonus and I love that I can import my own assets (icons mainly) into Grafio. If you need a feature packed diagraming app that’s easy to use get Grafio!