Diagrams · PlantUML macro

One diagram to maintain, not five copies of it

With the PlantUML macro your diagrams are written, not drawn - so they are reviewed, versioned and corrected like any other text, and the sequence diagram in your design doc is source, not a screenshot of somebody's old tool. You maintain one diagram, and every page that shows it stays right.

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You stop maintaining the same diagram five times

Keep shared fragments - your component names, actors, styling - as an attachment and pull them into any diagram with an !include, from the same page or another one. Rename a service in one place and every diagram that includes it is right, instead of four of them being subtly wrong.

Your diagrams read well in either theme

Set one theme for light Confluence and another for dark, and each reader gets a diagram meant for their background - no white rectangle glowing in a dark page, no washed-out lines in a light one. Long stories span multiple pages with navigation, so one diagram does not have to hold everything.

Whoever spots the mistake fixes it

Because the diagram is text, an engineer who notices a missing call adds a line - no drawing tool, no licence, no asking the author. Layout is handled for them, so the result still looks like the rest of your documentation, and your diagrams stop waiting on one person.

You write it here or keep it in the repository - and readers can take it

Type the source into the macro, or point it at the .puml your project already versions - a URL, an attachment, Google Drive, a GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repository, or a credentialed S3, SFTP or database connection an admin set up once. A fenced plantuml block renders inside Markdown documents, and readers download the source to render it themselves.

What the other PlantUML apps leave you pasting

The dedicated PlantUML apps for Confluence take the source one way: typed or pasted into the macro. A few general diagram bundles go further and read an attachment, or pull from a single Git host. That works right up to the point where the diagram already lives somewhere else - the .puml your project versions alongside the service it describes, or the shared style fragment every diagram includes - and then you are pasting again. This macro reads those from a URL, an attachment, Google Drive, GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, an S3 bucket, an SFTP server or a database an admin connected once, so your documentation renders the file your repository holds rather than a transcription of it.

PlantUML is one of 31 macros in Macro Pack

One app to install, one licence to renew, one place your team learns - and 30 more formats it already reads, from spreadsheets and diagrams to API specs and documents.

See every macro in the pack