For a long time now I have been looking for a good & free UML tool that I can use for my personal and non-commercial projects. Recently I finished another survey, which I undertook because I wanted to draw a couple of class diagrams for my open source project Little Go. Unlike my experiences in the past, this time I actually did find a couple of viable tools (see the conclusion), which came as a surprise because, to tell the truth, when I started the survey I didn't have much hope.

Anyway, here I am writing down my findings, possibly for others to read, but also for myself so that I have a starting point in case I ever need to do a future round of evaluation.

About me

My name is Patrick Näf Moser (né Patrick Näf, but that is another story). I live in central Switzerland, near Lucerne, with my wife and no kids, cat nor dog. I earn my living in varying jobs in the computer software business. My personal interests, in no particular order, are computers, reading books, playing games and travelling.

This page lists all software projects of which I am the principal author. All projects are hosted on GitHub.

Table Of Contents

Introduction
Choosing test candidates
Requirements
Test results
Conclusion
Update to the original article

Introduction

In September 2004, I started using phpWebSite on my site herzbube.ch. This document tells you a bit about the evaluation I did in order to find out which software I should use.