OpenSource Flow Charting

Solution 1:

you can use for Flow Chart Design:

LibreOffice Draw (Formerly OpenOffice Draw) (You can give it colors to the elements)
Kivio (From the KDE KOffice Suite)
Inkscape

If you are talking about Gantt Flow then

Planner
Dia
Opensched
Umbrello

Solution 2:

I would add inkscape Install inkscape to the possibility list. Output is svg by default, so it is very portable will render well. (Flowchart hint -- use the connector tool.) If you are comfortable with the interface, inkscape is wonderful and very flexible. SVG/XML documents created in the software are also hand-tweakable, if that's your cup of tea.

Another tool that I discovered from this askubuntu is pencil.
Here's one of the threads discussing it: FOSS GUI Prototyping
There are also some community-provided flowcharting stencils on their stencils page. I'm not sure if this is what you need, but it might be worth checking out.

Solution 3:

I use Google Docs for creating flow charts. It's not open source, but it is free (as in beer) and does create attractive graphics. Here's an example of a simply chart

enter image description here

It's not very complex in that it doesn't 'know' about different types of charts - it's intended as a sandbox that you can use to create whatever chart you need. You have a wide range of shapes that you can place on the canvas, with a wide range of colours with which to fill them, easily selectable from a dropdown menu in the toolbar. It also allows you to 'snap' your shapes to an invisible line that has them aligned with each other - just place a few shapes on the canvas then start moving another one around and see what I mean.

You can download the finished images as PDF, SVG, PNG and JPG files.

You will need a Google account to use it, but you have the added bonus of not having to worry about saving them periodically, and you don't risk loosing them which, if they're for work, will be a great help.

Personally, I've never liked Dia. I've always had to fight with it to get it to do what I want, and it always made me do things in incredibly convoluted ways. The 'drawing' feature in Google Docs just feels 'right'.

Solution 4:

Perhaps xmind is an option. It's much more than just a Mindmapper.

Examples:

http://www.xmind.net/share/test00/flow-chart/

http://www.xmind.net/share/andi_iium/ip-geolocation-techniques/

Solution 5:

There is another software to make flow charts called yED.

Check it out.