Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

A friend told me about Poseidon UML today so I checked it out. The only other data modeling (er UML) tool I had ever used was the open source ArgoUML (yes I know its not perfect, but the price was always right).

Poseidon is much cleaner and more professional looking than ArgoUML (at least from my recollection of ArgoUML, in its defense its been quite a while since I used Argo and even though it was sort of ugly it always was capable of creating the basic diagrams and representing relationships as I needed).

Poseidon was originally based on ArgoUML but has since diverged. Poseidon is a commercial product and the "free" version is pretty annoying in that printing and cut and paste are disabled. Also the "communtion edition" doesnt have the fancy round trip code generation , java reverse engineering and other "advanced" features. Other than the annoyances its really good stuff and of course if you "upgrade" to the standard or pro you are set.

All in all Poseidon seems like really good stuff IF you are ready to buy something. If you arent I would stay with Argo because a free edition that doesnt print isnt really very useful at all.   Poseidon for UML