Tooling

For design sessions, you might find a whiteboard or flip chart paper better for collaboration, and iterating quickly. For long-lived documentation, there are a number of tools can help create software architecture diagrams based upon the C4 model. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when looking at tooling:

• Who are the diagram authors, and how technical are they?
• Who is the diagram audience, and how will they access the diagrams/documentation?
• Diagramming or modelling?
• A “drag and drop” UI or “diagrams as code”?
• Data stored in git next to your source code or stored in the tool/cloud service?
• Easy to diff source to use in pull requests?
• Open or closed data format?
• Interactive or static diagrams?
• Free or paid?
• Open or closed source?
• Cloud or self-hosted?
• Short-lived or long-lived documentation?
• Team only diagramming or enterprise-wide modelling?

Tools

The diagramming and modelling pages both have lists of tools that support the C4 model. Please get in touch to ask about adding your tool to these lists, with the following information:

• Name
• Short description
• URL
• Open source (include link to repo) or closed source?

If your tool doesn’t support the C4 model natively “out of the box”, please provide a link to a guide that describes how to use your tool in conjunction with the C4 model.