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I am looking for a UML design tool (just for design, no need for code generation).

Key features

For Linux

Easy to use

Lightweight

While not strictly for UML I use JavE . Since all the drawings are plain text I can paste them into my wiki, markdown files in VCS etc. and easily modify and see changes between revisions. It's easy to use but you get no shapes out of the box. You can export and save your own, though. Example diagram . – Johnny Baloney Jun 6 '16 at 6:56 If you want a tool to please your boss, but don't want to spend much time on diagramming. Or you want to visualise your code. Then checkout Doxygen. It reads code and generates diagrams. We first used it to get our boss off of our back, he wanted everything documented (but documents get out of date). Later I used it sometimes, to visualise the code that we had. It is good to get an overview. It does not do all UML diagrams. But what it does do is automated. The few other diagrams that we made, we did by hand, on a white board, and made a photograph. – ctrl-alt-delor May 8 '18 at 11:08

ArgoUML (Java based, I had some glitches with diagrams)

Umbrello

Violet UML Editor (Java required)

UMLet (Java required)

StarUML

Experimental/alternatives:

ASCII flow - you can not always include images in documentation but simple text looks everywhere same, good to use in code for quick overview.

Cloudcraft - Draw AWS diagrams with Cloudcraft. Good for quick architecture diagrams.

For quick drawings and who does not scare to "code" some diagrams I also suggest to take look at this product http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/samples .

I am using ArgoUML for now. But it is a big pain in the backside. Very limited support for UML models and connectors. Something is better than nothing. – Kamal Feb 14 '12 at 5:11 The problem is that most of these tools are dead. Alone Dia (which I really like) hasn't seen an update for over 6 years. – rbaleksandar Feb 21 '17 at 8:37 @rbaleksandar I have to agree with you, but the processes/diagrams haven't "much" changed. With the adoption of agile frameworks, I see less and less heavy documented projects with UML diagrams etc. This doesn't mean the documentation is less important it still should be part of the process. – Risto Novik Feb 21 '17 at 9:02 Personally I would go with Inkscape if no code import is required. Since SVGs are XML-based you can speed up the process of adding repetitive data (plus the fact that there are multiple libraries that support working with SVGs hence you can use your programming skills to do things pretty fast). And last but not least you can make things look rather pretty. :) PS: Never said that documentation is to be neglected but getting used to a tool that is out-of-date and not knowing whether the next release of your distro would break it completely is a waste of time omho. – rbaleksandar Feb 21 '17 at 9:16 Its very hard to use! Even dragging a box is a pain. Am i missing something? Can you maybe share an ease-of-use guide – Daniyal Yasin Sep 11 '20 at 5:08

I just discovered Violet UML. Easy to use, lightweight, diagrams look ok for me: I picked it for my use!

See here : http://alexdp.free.fr/violetumleditor/page.php

I use gaphor which is GTK2 based and draws nice diagrams using cairo. It's Python based and can analyze and display Python code in UML.

Best install from PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gaphor

Github: https://github.com/gaphor/gaphor

Website: https://gaphor.org/

I use the Obeo UML Designer that you can find in the Eclipse Marketplace .

It goes very well together with the Acceleo toolkit for MDSD.

I think the major selling point for any modeling tool is that it has to be able to produce an output that can be fed into your toolchain.

I have never seen models that just exist for pure documentary purposes survive more than two or three cycles in a project. That sort of stuff usually never works, because the changes in the project are executed first and then the model is adapted. This kind of work is rightfully regarded as either braindead or luxury (depending on who you ask).

The correct way is that changes in the project must be driven by changes in the model.

this appears to be a direct download link with stand alone version for Linux umldesigner.org/download – JesseBoyd Aug 14 '17 at 18:38