Top 7 AI diagram apps - a visual review of each

general

Jacob Beckerman

[email protected]

Updated: 2025-02-12

Language models have gotten really good at creating diagrams, but the basic tools like Claude and ChatGPT have no built-in diagram editor. There’s a bunch of options such as Macro, Miro, Figjam, and more (full list at the end of this article). Here are the criteria that mattered to use as we were looking at the tools in this article:

1. Does the diagram tool let you input documents to the AI like biology papers or contracts or things like that? E.g. can you ask “explain all of the concepts in this [pdf] to me visually as a diagram?”
2. Is the diagram editable or just a basic image that you can export? ChatGPT itself can output mermaid diagrams (a type of basic diagram image) so if all you need is a picture that might suffice (just ask it to make you a mermaid diagram and it should be okay ).
3. Can the AI edit existing diagrams or just create the first draft? You’re going to want to iterate on the first draft with the AI, but editing existing diagrams is a harder problem than just generating the first draft.
4. How good is the diagram tool sans AI? Some of these diagram tools we tested were more painful to use than others which were delightful to use. So that matters to, because after AI does the work, you’re probably going to want to edit the diagram yourself and with your team, so the tool should be ergonomic to use with good UI/UX.

Winner: Macro was the overall best in our testing.

Evaluated over input options, edit-ability, AI and UI, Macro is the overall winner for general diagram tools and also perhaps the best domain-specific tool despite not being one.

The best part about Macro was that it is not just a diagramming tool, but a full AI workspace that contains all kinds of file formats. So for example, one of the unique features this enables is dropping files from your drive onto the board. like PDFs or web pages or other types of documents. Since one of the primary Things you might be using a diagram or whiteboarding for is to describe concepts or services or something else that may live externally, it's great to be able to bring all of this onto the diagram itself.

Here’s a screenshot of how you can embed pdfs, docs, code files, or even other diagrams on the board:

And you can attach (multiple!) documents as well in the creation of the file.

Overall, macro.com is the winner with their free plan and paid plans having all of the same features for generating and editing diagrams. It’s nice to have this in the flow of AI Chat (Macro is a complete chat tool, instead of having to depart to another app):

Figma (Figjam): the AI needs some work

Figjam added a simple AI tools recently as pictured below. It’s just a text input no documents ❌. The diagram tool is really nice and editable and collaborative, so that’s a big plus.

Figjam generally is a great mind-mapping tool but isn’t the best for technical diagrams, so you may prefer this for brainstorming but not for questions like “generate me a hierarchical diagram of the legal entities in this contract,” which it couldn’t do anyways without attachments.

Figma’s iterating on diagrams is not so good. After the above image I asked “make it more detailed” referring to my diagram on ATP / key concepts in biology. Here’s what the output looks like… Not very good; instead of making the diagram more detailed it gave me another diagram with some useless content that wasn’t related to my query.

So I think that’s a definitive no on “can it edit existing diagrams” ❌.

Edit: After more testing, I think what’s going on here is that it’s completely unable to edit existing diagrams and instead always creates new content. I guess that’s fair since the modal says “Generate” but it does really reduce the scope of the feature.

Miro: good AI first draft

Miro has a really great implementation of AI generation as screenshotted below. You can choose between generating a bunch of sticky notes, an image, a document (TIL Miro has documents!) and under diagrams there are a few different types Miro can generate: flowcharts, mindmaps, ER diagrams, UML sequence and UML classes. Not really sure what those last few are but I chose to create a flowchart to match what we did before in the Figjam AI tool for a fair compare.

Again I asked the bio question relating to ATP and here’s its output. Much better than Figma in my opinion. More readable and just better (though my knowledge of the subject is limited).

Now let’s try editing this document… failure. It started talking about a different topic entirely unrelated to biology, and it wasn’t able to edit the existing node graph.

Maybe I did that wrong? Let’s try something else: highlighting a node and hitting the button that looked AI-coded. Yep, that’s it. But it doesn’t seem to be able to edit the existing diagram either.

Full List: General-Purpose Diagramming Tools

Here’s a full list of all the general purpose tools we considered here. By that we mean tools that are targeted at generic whiteboard, diagram, 2D canvas-type use cases as opposed to specific industries. We didn’t feature all the tools because they don’t all meet our bar, and we had limited time and space here, but for reference:

Full List: Domain-Specific Solutions

And here are tools that might be better for your specific use case, although to be frank some of these tools are more marketing-tailored than they are product-tailored. In other words, they may have icon packs or other niceties that are specific to the industry, and some industry-specific jargon, but otherwise are generic tools. That might be what you’re looking for though!

We were not able to test some of these tools because they aren’t self-serve.

Winner / conclusion

Overall, Macro.com was the best across our 4-dimention matrix for evaluating these tools. It can generate the first draft of a diagram (called Canvas in Macro), it can then edit it and it’s free. It works in the larger context of the Macro app where you can work with PDFs, docs, images, etc., and then these files can be embedded on the canvas which is great for reducing context switching and making sure word product reflects your mind-map, if that’s what you’re using it for.