I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model.
Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.
Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence.
On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to hear what happens.
I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.
FYI for any new or casual Mermaid users, it comes with a built-in alternate layout called `elk` that I find does a much cleaner job on complex flowcharts.
Mermaid does indeed provide alternative layout engines. Please do try ELK before Line9. My experience is 1) hand-tuning the layout of Mermaid, having to try alternative engines or parameters, is not what I want. I just want a graph that I can use straight away. 2) ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart that I might be satisfied with for personal use but I still wasn't happy putting it in a presentation in front of others.
Neither, really — it's closer to hand-rolled local search.
My first three phases are based on Sugiyama to produce a seed layout (which is broadly what Dagre does). Then I've added my new phases driven by a penalty score that grades candidate layouts using fourteen factors that I devised from my experience laying out graphs manually. The refinement phase is where the bulk of my work is. It applies targeted move types iteratively within a budget, trying to lower the penalty score.
Finally, the result goes through my own embedding and rendering with the theme system on top.
What is the current standard for generating valid BPMN diagrams. Does Mermaid support the level of control needed for formal diagrams of this nature with possible L1/L2/L3 drill down, multiple swimlanes, etc.
Oh dear, sorry that didn't work out well for you. If you’re pasting flowcharts that don’t work then I really want to try to address them. Can you say what happened? Nothing rendered at all, or something you couldn’t use? If you’re able to send them to me directly they’re worth a lot as real diagrams to improve Line9 from.
I'd separate Mermaid the language from the tooling around it. The language has real strengths, like Markdown for diagrams, and not least in being ubiquitous so that both humans and AIs can use it easily. What I found poor was the tooling side and that's what prompted me to create a new layout engine. The ecosystem can be improved.
Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.
On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to hear what happens.
See docs here: https://mermaid.ai/open-source/config/layouts.html
You can try it with Line9's first chart: https://mermaid.ai/live/edit#pako:eNpVVEtv2zAM_iuCTilgB1mbxq...
While it's nice and compact, it actually is rougher to grep.
https://mermaid.ai/live/edit#pako:eNplUlFPwjAQ_ivNPW9EkMHWB4...
There's even a yearly competition - started in 1994 - whose results are announced at the yearly Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.
It's not a subject I'm versed in, but can you talk more about your solution? Do you use a larger constraint solver or is it hand-coded?
--
Competition: https://mozart.diei.unipg.it/gdcontest/
The 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization, to be held in Ontario, Canada: https://graphdrawing.github.io/gd2026/
n.b. It's an independent conference, not under the auspices of e.g. IEEE or ACM.
My first three phases are based on Sugiyama to produce a seed layout (which is broadly what Dagre does). Then I've added my new phases driven by a penalty score that grades candidate layouts using fourteen factors that I devised from my experience laying out graphs manually. The refinement phase is where the bulk of my work is. It applies targeted move types iteratively within a budget, trying to lower the penalty score.
Finally, the result goes through my own embedding and rendering with the theme system on top.
[0]: https://typst.app/universe/package/merman/
What is the current standard for generating valid BPMN diagrams. Does Mermaid support the level of control needed for formal diagrams of this nature with possible L1/L2/L3 drill down, multiple swimlanes, etc.
It's an amazing tool, but I wish it were open source.
https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-live-editor https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
OP's product is not open source btw
Just vibe code a user interface to it.