When comparing Microsoft Visio vs PlantUml, the Slant community recommends Microsoft Visio for most people. In the question“What are the best flowchart / diagram softwares?” Microsoft Visio is ranked 3rd while PlantUml is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Microsoft Visio is:
Visio has the most thorough set of standard support and tool-set.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Complete set of tools
Visio has the most thorough set of standard support and tool-set.
Pro De facto standard
Microsoft Visio is the de facto industry standard diagram creation software.
Pro Looks good
Pro Easy usage
Pro Many, many integrations
For example from Emacs, Sublime Text and so on. You can learn about integrations here.
Pro Easy create diagrams from text
There is even a Visual Basic Macro to draw UML diagrams in Word.
Pro Free/libre/open source (GPL)
Source code can be browsed here.
Pro Has online editors
Such as.
Pro sphinx-contrib extension for embedding into docs
sphinx-contrib extension on PyPi
Allows you to keep your UML definitions under VCS and include them inside generated documentation with ease.
Cons
Con Very clumsy for state diagrams, limited features
Con Proprietary
Con Pretty expensive
Con Imperfect integration with Office
Since Visio was acquired, not originally developed by Microsoft, integration is not as seamless as the core Office Suite is known for. Diagrams can get corrupted while importing from Visio to Word or Powerpoint.
Con The "plantUML-language" is a bit strange and hard to grasp for new people
Con Slow development due to it being mostly a one-man project
There’s been no recent contribution to the source forge project but from the administrator arnaud_roques. Future contribution might be difficult due to lacking code documentation.
Con Not maintained
