I have an almost exhaustive list [1] of browser based text to diagram tools. Some specialised tools (like https://sequencediagram.org/) so much better at what they do than any generic ones like mermaid.
I wish WebSequenceDiagrams was further up your list. I guess I have some work to do.
When I made it, nothing like mermaid, plantUML，lucid charts existed. The syntax of most tools was based on Java or graphviz and overly verbose. I was writing an email to a colleague at BlackBerry and wrote out the sequence diagrams as text. I spent the next week making a script to convert it to an image and put it online. Many other tools have since adopted the syntax and I'm happy it has become so widespread.
Great tech - thanks for your pioneering work. I made https://vsm-book.com/app as a tool to support a meeting and leave a lasting artifact. WebSequenceDiagrams (and https://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/ which also credits yours) was very much in my mind, though my grammer is much less elegant.
WebSequenceDiagrams has been my go to for years, and I'd be basically brainstorming straight in it in lieu of pen and paper. I laughed the day one of my colleague was explaining his issue on the whiteboard and he was writing it "A->B: some action" style instead of the actual box and arrow sequence, it just became part of our culture I think.
I had to move on when I couldn't get it approved at the place I worked, and nowadays PlantUML tools have become "good enough" (still wish Notion had PlantUML support instead of mermaid...), but I'm incredible thankful your service is still up and running.
They might be "better", but Mermaid works offline (there's a cli) which makes it a much better choice, along with PlantUML. An online tool might be good for making one off things you know you won't ever need to change, but my main use case for these tools is documentation which, naturally, needs to change over time.
I think almost all of the tools I listed are offline. They do load in browser, but from there they don't use server to render diagrams. Some aggregator tools like Kroki is of course not offline though.
I like Mermaid fine, but nothing is perfect. I will look at your list. The tool I always wanted would let me paste in the SQL of my database schema and output a diagram of the tables and relationships. That's SQL and not Markdown or JSON or any other format.
Note that DrawDB (www.drawdb.app) does this, although it does not yet handle views. But I have been happy with what it offers so far. Still, I would welcome suggestions of other tools.
This is based on graphviz, and with the available layout algorithms, any schema with more than 5 tables and a few foreign key relation becomes a jumbled, unreadable mess.
Since you asked for recommendations: Cacoo (https://nulab.com/cacoo/) has this function. You input your database schema SQL and it generates an editable diagram with all the relationships.
Disclaimer: I work for them. I’m the person who developed that feature.
I was wondering, are there any tools that could help to draw decent looking genealogical tree ? My main issue are the updates, where adding one of the ancestors or newborns causes full rework of entire tree. I'd like to feed data to some script and have it render a family tree, with all the regular updates.
https://www.familyecho.com/ is the lightest one. It's almost offline. Some light reverse engineering can make it work totally offline. I saw a version of it on Github too. Some features had problems, I think it was printing which was failing.
The main benefit for me to just know and primarily use mermaid is that it integrates with markdown in Azure DevOps and GitHub seamlessly. No need for a text to image build step or similar.
You're catching more heck than me but, for real it's a great competitive cross cut. Maybe my remarks seemed flippant but, curated list like this is what I wish Google or AI could deliver. It's quality content.
[1] https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/