Articy:Draft Alternatives

I recently downloaded Articy Draft to try out as I'm getting bored of using the online planning tools - which are ok but are not very flexible in terms of organizing or as visually appealing.

A few things I've learned about Articy Draft: it is very expensive at around €300 for an individual user license. multiple user & server licenses can run you up to around €800+ with additional fees based on what you need. Also it seems to require a vast amount of processing power to run as it was really slow on my laptop.

Below I am listing some - cheap/free - alternatives which are similar to Articy Draft - one way or another.

• Twine: this is a very basic pin board style sticky note flow chart application. I didn't really like trying to use this as it uses the same mark-up system as wikipedia/mediawiki for text editing & linking to other sticky notes. it is on the other hand free. (if you get an error about a missing dll file on app launch then just add this file into the folder you installed the application - you may have to install directly in c rather than program files)
  
  
• Chat Mapper: is somewhat similar to Articy Draft as it lets you create flow chart blocks & assign small thumbnail images & text. it is mostly for planning dialogs & characters but can be used for other misc data. Characters have a few things you can fill in like name, age, sex, race, class etc. this program is free for non-commercial use; but who would know if you used it commercially anyway.
  
  
• yWorks yEd Graph Editor: this program is a really dynamic flow chart creator & comes with loads of diagram types, options & examples; plus it is completely free to use. I am really liking this application as an alternative to Articy Draft - besides the massive amount of options, choices & flow chart style preferences it also comes with an export option to various image formats such as: jpg, png & vector - which is really useful as you can share your graphs/charts around with your team members or for use in a presentation. did I mention it's completely free to download & use however you want & doesn't require much processing power either.
  
  
• VUE (Visual Understanding Environment): another free app similar to yEd (I think - I haven't tried it yet) ...
  

there were a few more I downloaded & tried but they were not exactly very user friendly - much like twine, that I listed above.

Thanks a lot for these, I knew about Twine and Chat Mapper but yEd looks awesome. Articy is just to pricey.

welcome

yeah yEd is really nice.
takes a little while to get used to but there is plenty of documentation as far as I know?
haven't needed to check any of it yet mind.

I use Chat Mapper. It is very convenient to use. Here is the coupon if you want to buy it:
http://couponcode0.com/chat-mapper-1x-commercial-developer-l...

I tried chatmapper. I thought it was free?

I have actually tried a lot more planning & cloud mapping apps than I listed here & in the end I ended up buying Articy Draft. If anyone does buy it then I recommend buying it in a sale as I ended up spending €99 instead of €200 when I bought both articy 1 & 2 dlc in the bundle option during the summer sale. Bargain.

Does any of these software support a realtime multiuser using?

Just articy draft as far as I know, but the server option is pretty bloody expensive.

Ok.. so i guess Google docs are just fine.

Yep google docs or any of the other online planning services such as Asana or Wunderlist etc are plenty fine for sorting out planning & tasks & setting deadlines etc & you can also attach any workflow / mindmaps you export from other free programs such as yEd or Mindmaple.

also you can use microsoft onenote or evernote as it is a bit more featurerich than wunderlist or just googledocs

To be honest, for me is even that 100€ a lot ( and that's price without the server as i understood ) I don't mind paying that, but i don't have it.
So i just prefer Google Docs instead because it really works just fine for me.

What Lee said, because he's probably the nicest guy ever it sounded like that it was rather meant for us to me.