The SQL import was quite easy, and the fact it generated tables as saved shapes helped a lot to manually add them in the canvas (instead of having everything loaded from scratch and figure it out). If you are looking for an online pen and paper to draw your database schema, they are the tool you need.Īs a drawing tool I didn’t expect much but had a good surprise. They may have dedicated assets for ER diagrams and their main selling points here are their flexibility and design capabilities. Here are the categories and the best ones I found in each of them:Īs Entity-Relationship Diagrams are primarily diagrams, no surprise we find here diagramming tools. No need for exhaustivity here, just know where to look and find one that does the job.Īfter looking at a lot of them, I could identify 4 categories or relevant tools (leaving many on the side as they are quite outdated). Either strict ER diagrams with all the correct notations or kind of ER diagrams, just having tables and relations but without all the semantics of an ER diagram.Īs the offer is huge (here is a list of 79 Data Modeling Tools Compared, and it’s far from complete), focus on the task you want to achieve to choose a category, then try out a few ones. And when looking for a visual tool for your database, you will always find Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) on your way. Finding the right tool for the job can clearly be a game changer.

Free erd modeling tools