YNynniv·Oct 29, 2025
eclipse also does better than dot, but it's useful to notice that graphviz never dies
https://github.com/eclipse-elk/elk
In Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?eclipse-elk
elk
Java2021–2025
eclipse-elk / elk
elk
Eclipse Layout Kernel - Automatic layout for Java applications.
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Eclipse Layout Kernel - Automatic layout for Java applications.
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| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
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| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesGraphviz is the classic option but unfortunately it isn't very good. I mean it was great when it was written in the 80s or whatever but then it seems like it was declared "done" and is still stuck in the 80s.
Quite annoying because it totally dominates the mindshare of graph layout tools, making it difficult to find alternatives.
Here's some other options anyway:
* Eclipse Layout Kernel: https://github.com/eclipse/elk
* OGDF: https://ogdf.uos.de/
In fairness both their websites are pretty terrible (would some examples kill you OGDF?) and they don't provide an easy way to try them out, so I guess it's not that surprising that Graphviz dominates.
Anyway in practice if you have a complex graph then doing it manually is by far the best option.
If it's too big to do manually then it's unlikely to be a useful graph in the first place.
In How to draw software architecture diagrams (2022)The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.
Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.
In Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram toolNot as easy to use, because it does not have a simple cli, but nested layouts are better than dot's with the Eclipse Layout Kernel. There is a JavaScript version, as well and you can try it in recent plantuml versions.
[0] https://www.eclipse.org/elk
[1] https://github.com/eclipse/elk
[2] https://plantuml.com/elk
In How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes