ProtoPie is a tool used to turn UI/UX design ideas into interactive prototypes for mobile, desktop, web, all the way to IoT, from the company of the same name in Seoul. Designers can explore, validate, and test design solutions and ideas by creating realistic, production-like prototypes without code and the help of engineers.
Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short โ but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
I will definitely recommend ProtoPie as it is free in the market and provides a number of features to design a prototype. For starters, I will surely tell you to go and try it . If you are a web developer or App developer then ProtoPie is a good option to give a try for creating prototypes.
OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points.
OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories.
What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be.
I'd love to be able to keep more than one of the different tool tabs open at a time.
The stencils are amazing. Would be great if a whole lot more of the free ones came standard as opposed to having to download them from Graffletopia or other sites.
While these other tools are great for what they are, OmniGraffleโs solid focus on and support for diagramming makes it our tool of choice for communicating workflows and concept relationships, creating documentation, and creating other diagrams. Its libraries allow us to create designs quickly, and its ease of use enables us to use the tool widely across the company without much time or effort spent on onboarding.
Figma is pretty much similar to ProtoPie. But it is paid tool whereas ProtoPie is free which competes with Figma on features and easiness. Figma is more of UI designing prespective tool whereas ProtoPie can be used even by starters due to its simple UI and navigation.
Omnigraffle isn't an expensive software tool, so there isn't really any negative from the perspective of raw cost. Thinking in terms of time spent using it on a project - what you create in omnigraffle will inevitably lead to a dead end. It's useful only as documentation. There are other tools like Sketch that integrate into prototyping software and can create useable visual assets for applications in addition to being able to create wireframes.