Revision.app

After 10+ years as a software developer and architect I've yet to see a simple and easy-to-use tools for documenting software architectures.

What about existing software modeling languages?

Traditional modeling languages for software documentation such as UML, ArchiMate etc are complex and have a steep learning curve. The result is that these are not very used. And if they are adopted it's usually only by a few enthusiasts within an organisation.

As a counter reaction to the complexity of UML and other similar models C4 (https://c4model.com/) has emerged. C4 is a simplified model focusing on visual diagrams and abstractions.

My experience is however that people are often looking for even simpler ways of describing architectures.
Often just by using simple boxes to represent systems and services and arrows to visualise data flows between them.

What kind of tools do people use today?

There are a number of Enterprise Modeling tools on the market - Archi, LeanIX and Ardoq are just a few. Some of them a build around one or several of the above mentioned modeling languages. Others have their on take on how to model and visualise the documented software.
As these "Enterprise tools" however target larger organisations they are often expensive and kind of complicated.

The good thing about using the tools is that they enforce the creating of models before diagramming. This means that all artifacts, such as systems, data flows etc are stored in underlying model. These model can then be used in a diagrams but could also be queried against.
One could for example query for "give me all systems that are connected to the customer database". Or "give me all systems that are marked with containing GDPR sensitive data"

As the tools however are so expensive and complicated they it's just the largest organisations that can afford the time and money to adopt them.

Again, in my experience most companies fall back to boxes and arrows using simple tools like Powerpoint, Draw.io, Miro.com etc.

What can Revision.app do better?

Revision tries to find the golden middleground between a simple drawing tool and a more complicated "model first" tool.
The tool is centered around visual drag and drop diagrams. Diagrams that are just based on boxes and arrows for visualizing systems, services and dataflows.
Each box and arrow however also creates an entry in the underlying model. Making sure that we just don't create "stupid images" but also can query against our data.