VisualFlowAuto layout: dagre vs ELK in production
A side-by-side comparison of the two most popular layout engines, with benchmarks and trade-offs.
MC
Maya Chen
Staff Engineer · · 8 min read
#layout#dagre#elk
dagre
dagre is tiny and synchronous. For trees and pipelines under a few hundred nodes it is the right default.
ELK
ELK runs in a web worker and supports ports, compound nodes and dozens of options. It's heavier but handles complex architecture diagrams beautifully.