What is the best technology for drawing trees and graphs?

Question

What is the easiest, clearest way to draw graphs and trees for CS theory assignments?

I am not happy with any of these solutions:

text-based: ugly
tikz latex package: cumbersome for larger trees
Adobe Illustrator: time-consuming

Has anyone written software specifically for this task?

Thanks!

NetworkX with Graphviz is kind of nice. – kreativitea Dec 01 '12 at 19:19 — kreativitea, Dec 01 '12 at 19:19

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 01 '12 at 19:31

1.) http://www.graphviz.org/ is the easiest for drawing directed and undirected graphs. You just provide a list of nodes, edges and labels in the proper syntax, and GraphViz will spit out an image.There are various front-end programs that provide a nicer interface to generate the GraphViz code.

2.) http://www.sagemath.org/ (it's open source and can draw weighted directed graphs)

3.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/treeform/

4.) http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/newgraph/

5.) http://www.conceptdraw.com/products/drawing-tool/

6.) http://rw4.cs.uni-sb.de/~sander/html/gstools.html (collection of graph drawing tools details)