Open Source Design & Visualization Tools

Open source design & visualization tools

projects 7 combined stars ★ 347K refresh nightly

Design & Visualization is one of the most active slices of the open source world — the 7 projects below are ranked by GitHub stars, which makes this page roughly a community-voted shortlist rather than a vendor-curated catalogue. Every card shows the license and the last-commit date, so you can filter out the two failure modes of free software in one glance: restrictive licensing that blocks your use case, and abandonment that leaves you maintaining a fork. When two projects look comparable, prefer the one with more recent activity and the more permissive license (MIT/Apache-2.0 over AGPL) unless copyleft specifically serves your goals. Hover into any project for its full README — the documentation quality is usually the honest tell of engineering quality.

All Design & Visualization tools

Excalidraw ★ 132K

Collaborative whiteboard with a hand-drawn aesthetic

rank001 licenseMIT written inTypeScript typeDesign & Visualization

Affine ★ 73K

Docs, whiteboards, and databases in one privacy-first workspace

rank002 licenseNOASSERTION written inTypeScript typeDesign & Visualization

Penpot ★ 60K

Open-source UI design and prototyping for product teams

rank003 licenseMPL-2.0 written inClojure typeDesign & Visualization

Tldraw ★ 50K

Free instant whiteboard with real-time collaboration

rank004 licenseNOASSERTION written inTypeScript typeDesign & Visualization

Graphite ★ 27K

Procedural vector editor that runs in your browser, no signup needed

rank005 licenseApache-2.0 written inRust typeDesign & Visualization

Ray.so ★ 2.4K

Create beautiful images of your code

rank006 licenseMIT written inTypeScript typeDesign & Visualization

Chalk.ist ★ 1.8K

Transform your source code into stunning visuals

rank007 licenseMIT written inVue typeDesign & Visualization

Frequently asked questions

How many open source Design & Visualization tools are there?

This registry tracks 7 open source Design & Visualization projects, with 346,938 combined GitHub stars. The list is ranked by stars and refreshed nightly.

What is the most popular open source Design & Visualization project?

Excalidraw leads this category with 132,233 GitHub stars, followed by Affine.

Are these Design & Visualization tools free?

Yes — every project listed here is open source. Some also offer paid hosted versions alongside the free self-hosted option; the licence for each project is shown on its card.