OpenPencil is the open-source design editor that reads and writes native Figma .fig files using the same Kiwi binary format — enabling bidirectional copy-paste between Figma and OpenPencil without data loss. The built-in AI assistant provides 90+ design tools through a chat interface, creating and modifying shapes, fills, strokes, auto-layout, components, variables, and boolean operations from natural language prompts, with BYOK support for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI, OpenRouter, Z.ai, MiniMax, and compatible endpoints. A Skia CanvasKit WASM renderer paired with Yoga WASM layout engine delivers Figma-parity rendering with flex and CSS Grid support including gap, padding, and alignment. The headless CLI inspects node trees via XPath queries, lints naming and accessibility, converts between document formats, analyzes color and typography patterns, extracts design tokens, and exports to PNG, SVG, JSX/Tailwind, and HTML. An MCP server exposes all design operations over stdio and HTTP, connecting Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and Gemini CLI for AI-assisted design automation. Real-time P2P collaboration via WebRTC with Yjs CRDT synchronization requires no server and no account. The Vue SDK provides headless components for embedding the editor into custom applications. Ships as a 7 MB Tauri v2 desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, or runs in any browser as a PWA. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

With over 84,000 GitHub stars since its April 2026 launch, Open Design has emerged as the definitive open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. Rather than shipping its own language model, Open Design acts as an agent-agnostic design orchestration layer that auto-detects 25+ coding CLI executables on your PATH — including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, and Kimi — or connects to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via its built-in BYOK proxy at /api/proxy/stream. The platform introduces a file-based protocol where SKILL.md files define composable design workflows and DESIGN.md files establish version-controlled brand systems, currently shipping 31 first-party skills and 72 brand-grade design systems. Output spans web and mobile prototypes, live dashboards, presentation decks, raster images, video, and HyperFrames motion graphics, with export pipelines for HTML, PDF, PPTX, MP4, and ZIP. The daemon architecture uses SQLite for project state and serves a sandboxed iframe preview renderer with vendored React and Babel for JSX artifacts. Deployment options include the native desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, local daemon mode via pnpm tools-dev, a single-container Docker Compose path serving both API and Next.js frontend on port 7456, and Vercel deployment for the web layer. On RepoCloud, deploy Open Design on a dedicated VPS with full root SSH access, persistent storage for your design systems and generated artifacts, and complete control over which AI providers and agent CLIs your instance connects to, all under the Apache-2.0 license.

Sketch a wireframe, get working code: Draw a UI turns hand-drawn layouts into web interfaces. It pairs the open-source tldraw canvas with an OpenAI vision model: you sketch a layout - boxes, labels, buttons, arrows, whatever communicates the idea - select the drawing, and click Make Real. The app snapshots your selection as a PNG, sends it to the vision API with instructions to return a single HTML file styled with Tailwind CSS, and renders the result in an iframe directly on the canvas next to your sketch. The loop is iterative: annotate the generated prototype or redraw parts of it, select both the sketch and the previous result, and generate again - the model receives the earlier HTML as context and produces an updated version. Built by Figma engineer Sawyer Hood as one of the first viral GPT-4 Vision demos and the basis for tldraw's "Make Real", it is a Next.js app that runs against your own OpenAI API key. Self-hosting matters here: the upstream demo ships without authentication, so a private deployment keeps your API key from being drained by strangers. MIT-licensed.

Describe a component in natural language and watch it render: OpenUI, from Weights & Biases, is an open alternative to Vercel's v0. Type a prompt like "a dark-themed dashboard with a sidebar and charts" and the LLM renders working HTML with Tailwind styling live in the browser. You then iterate conversationally, asking for changes until the design is right, and convert the result to React, Svelte, or Web Components for use in a real project. The backend is Python with LiteLLM routing, so it works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, and Mistral API keys, or fully offline against local Ollama models, including vision models like LLaVA that can generate UI from screenshot input - feed a screenshot and the model reproduces or riffs on an existing interface. Generated markup is inspectable at any point, with light and dark mode toggles, theme selection, and responsive previews across device sizes. The practical effect is compressing the mockup-review-revise loop from hours to minutes: a described layout renders in seconds and iterates through follow-up prompts, and because output converts to real framework code, prototypes feed directly into production codebases instead of staying trapped in a design tool. Self-hosting keeps unreleased product interfaces and prompts on your own server, and LiteLLM routing lets you pick the model per task - a cheap fast model for rough drafts, a stronger one for final passes, or free local models for unlimited experimentation.

Instead of juggling a chat window, a folder of reference images, and a notebook of half-remembered prompts, Infinite Canvas puts the whole image-making process on one zoomable board. Drop in text, image, video, and generation-settings nodes, then wire them together so every result stays connected to the prompt and references behind it. Add one or several OpenAI-compatible endpoints, choose default text, image, and video models, and set image count, aspect ratio, quality, and transparent backgrounds per node. Batch results arrive as linked nodes that remember their prompt, model, and dimensions, so any of them can be retried later with the same settings. A prompt library searches seven built-in sources plus your own JSON sources and inserts the winner straight onto the board. An asset shelf keeps reusable images, clips, and audio within reach. Projects can be duplicated, exported, and synced between devices over WebDAV. Want a helper? A local Canvas Agent lets Codex read the active board and edit it through MCP, with approvals and permissions shown in a side panel. Plugins add node types, inspectors, and toolbar actions. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Half the architecture sketches on the internet trace back to Excalidraw - the MIT-licensed virtual whiteboard whose hand-drawn aesthetic made technical diagramming feel approachable, at roughly 85,000 GitHub stars. The infinite canvas offers rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows with smart binding and labels, free-draw, text, images, and an eraser, with full undo/redo, zoom, dark mode, and keyboard-first ergonomics. Community shape libraries add thousands of pre-built elements - AWS architecture icons, flowchart stencils, UI wireframe kits - and everything exports to PNG, SVG, the clipboard, or the open .excalidraw JSON format that keeps drawings diffable and portable. Live collaboration works on a share-a-link model with live cursors and a laser pointer for presenting, and it is end-to-end encrypted by design: the room key travels in the URL hash, which never reaches the server, so the WebSocket relay only ever sees ciphertext. The architecture is remarkably light - the app is a static bundle served by Nginx, drawings persist locally in the browser, and the stateless excalidraw-room relay handles multiplayer - so a self-hosted deployment gives unlimited boards and collaborators with near-zero resource cost, replacing per-editor whiteboard subscriptions.

Excaliself turns the Excalidraw canvas into your team's own whiteboard server, where every sketch, diagram, and flowchart lives in your database instead of a vendor's cloud. The home screen works like a file cabinet for drawings: nest them in folders, star the keepers, drag files between spaces, and find anything again by title or by the text inside the drawing. Share a link and teammates edit together in real time with live cursors and follow mode; links can stay members-only or open to guests who have no account at all. A shared Team space sits next to everyone's private space, and one team library holds the shapes and icons the whole group reuses. AI clients can join with a personal access token: Claude Code or Claude Desktop can search your drawings, read what a diagram says, and create new ones from shapes or a Mermaid flowchart. Accounts are invite-only, single sign-on covers Google, Microsoft, and any OIDC provider, and admins manage members, roles, and password resets from Settings. Deleted drawings rest in a trash folder for thirty days before they are purged, and everything auto-saves as you draw. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

What if the whiteboard could read everything pinned to it and hand you back finished work, which is exactly the workspace Dim0 builds on your own server? One infinite board holds rich notes, hand-drawn and geometric shapes, images, documents, code sandboxes, and nested boards, all editable in place by a whole team at once with live cursors. The built-in agent sees the current board and your selected nodes, takes multi-step actions with its tools, and drops the answer back onto the canvas as a note, a mind map, or a working mini-app instead of burying it in a chat thread. Describe a tool in plain words and Dim0 generates a real interactive React app that lives on the board, reads the data sitting next to it, and can be opened, edited, and exported as code. Code nodes run in sandboxes, uploaded documents become searchable through retrieval, and presentation frames turn any board into a slideshow without exporting to a separate deck tool. You bring your own model keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, or Qwen and switch providers whenever you like. Boards holding thousands of nodes still pan and zoom smoothly, and light, dark, and paper-and-ink themes restyle the whole surface. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

HyCanvas folds graphics, presentations, videos, whiteboards, documents, and spreadsheets into one self-hosted browser editor, covering work that usually takes several separate design subscriptions. Start from one of 140 templates across social, print, events, business, and presentations, or import a PowerPoint file and keep editing it. The canvas carries shapes, frames, tables, nine chart types, QR codes, image filters, crop and masks, background removal, and Magic Resize for one-click reformatting. Video projects get a multi-track timeline with trims, transitions, keyframes, styled captions, green-screen keying, and screen or webcam recording. Whiteboards add sticky notes, connectors, a shared timer, and dot voting, and a finished board converts straight into a slide deck. Teammates co-edit in realtime with presence cursors, comments with mentions, version history, and approvals, while share links open view-only, comment, or edit access. Brand kits hold your colors, fonts, and logos, and a brand lock warns or blocks off-brand edits before they ship. Connect your own AI provider key to generate decks, documents, images, and charts from a prompt, then export PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, PPTX, MP4, or GIF with no watermark. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

ExcaliDash adds persistent storage, access control, version history, and real-time collaboration to Excalidraw, transforming ephemeral whiteboarding sessions into a managed drawing library your team can rely on. The Node.js/Express backend with React/TypeScript frontend deploys via Docker Compose on port 6767, using Prisma ORM on SQLite for all drawings, users, and metadata. WebSocket-powered collaboration lets multiple users edit the same canvas simultaneously with live cursor presence. Drawing snapshots preserve every revision with visual preview and one-click restore to any previous state. Three authentication modes handle different deployment needs: local email/password for personal use, hybrid mode mixing native credentials with OIDC for gradual enterprise adoption, and enforced OIDC-only for organizations requiring SSO through providers like Authentik or Keycloak. Scoped sharing controls determine whether drawings stay private, shared internally with team members, or accessible via external links without authentication. Collections organize drawings through drag-and-drop grouping, full-text search locates any diagram instantly, and exports use the non-proprietary .excalidraw format ensuring complete data portability. 1,350+ stars since November 2025. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Most design tools stop at prototyping; Quant-UX also measures how real users actually perform with the prototype. The visual editor creates prototypes that behave like real apps - functional input widgets, animations, form validation, data binding across screens, and business logic modeled with REST requests and decision elements. Design systems are first-class, with components, design tokens, and master screens; if you design elsewhere, drop in image files or import from Figma. Testing is a shared link or QR code - no installs on the tester's side. Define user tasks up front, and Quant-UX records every session: click heatmaps show where users found (or missed) actionable elements, user journey graphs expose lost users, drop-off charts reveal where tasks stall, and success rates and task KPIs are extracted automatically into a dashboard. An A/B test operator wires two design variants into one prototype and compares task duration, success rate, and interaction counts. In-prototype surveys collect qualitative feedback alongside the numbers, and an AI assistant generates prototype fragments like styled forms on request. The RepoCloud deployment runs the full stack - frontend, backend, and WebSocket server containers over MongoDB - so all test recordings and research data stay on your infrastructure.

Type a sentence like 'draw a seaside lighthouse under moonlight, with a small sailboat and stars' and Draw Agent Studio sketches it on a live canvas you can then keep editing by chat. Follow-up messages move objects, change colors, delete elements, and undo or redo steps, so refining a diagram becomes a conversation instead of a wrestling match with shape handles. The same canvas accepts direct manual work: select and drag shapes, draw freehand with the pen, or drop text onto the page to finish details the model missed. Researchers and writers use it to build flowcharts from a paragraph of method notes, grouping stages, adding quality checks and feedback loops, and restructuring sections on request. Canvases save automatically as you work, and finished pieces export as PNG, JPG, WebP, or SVG images, or as editable Excalidraw files for further hand editing elsewhere. You bring your own model connection, choosing OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Ark, DeepSeek, Kimi, Groq, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Vertex AI, or a local Ollama or OpenAI-compatible endpoint. A built-in connection test sends a real image and verifies recognition and tool calling before you save, and your API keys stay encrypted on the server rather than in the browser. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Turning chaotic group brainstorming sessions into structured visual diagrams, TeamMapper provides a real-time collaborative mind mapping workspace that teams and classrooms can join instantly without creating user accounts. Workshop facilitators, teachers, and product squads start from a central root topic and branch outward into hierarchical radial trees, using keyboard shortcuts and full undo-redo history to capture ideas at the speed of conversation. Every node can be styled with custom branch and background colors, adjustable font weights and sizes, external reference links, uploaded raster images, and visual pictograms from the ARASAAC library to reinforce memory and visual association. Sharing a live session takes a single click: hosts distribute either a view-only link, a full modification invite URL, or a scannable QR code so remote colleagues and students in the same room can edit branches simultaneously. When enabled by the administrator, an integrated AI assistant can automatically generate initial mind map branches and subtopics from a text prompt to jump-start planning sessions. Completed maps export cleanly to JSON, Mermaid diagram syntax, scalable SVG vectors, high-resolution PNG images, or printable PDF documents, and existing JSON maps can be re-imported at any time for follow-up workshops. Built-in privacy controls automatically purge inactive mind maps and orphaned image attachments after a configurable retention window, simplifying GDPR compliance for schools and enterprises. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

The drawing surface inside WebRTC conference tools like Meetzi and the LAMS online-learning platform is Whiteboard (by cracker0dks) - a lightweight Node.js collaborative sketchboard built to be embedded and customized, which also slots into Nextcloud via the External Sites app. Everyone opening the same whiteboardid URL parameter draws on the same board, with remote user cursors visible live, per-user undo/redo, and an indicator showing the smallest participating screen so nobody draws outside a colleague's view. Content handling goes beyond pen strokes: drag-and-drop or paste images and PDFs from any PC or browser, then resize, rotate, and draw over them on canvas or background; add text and sticky notes; hold Shift for angle-snapped lines and perfect squares. Every function has a keybinding - deliberately friendly to pen displays like Wacom and XP-Pen whose hardware buttons map to shortcuts. Boards save to image or JSON (with reload), export directly to Nextcloud via WebDAV, and persist across restarts with the file-database option. A REST API with bundled interactive docs allows full programmatic control, an optional access token locks down uploads, and YAML configuration tunes behavior and performance. MIT-licensed and reverse-proxy friendly.

Webstudio delivers a professional-grade visual website builder that outputs semantic HTML and clean CSS without inline style pollution or JavaScript-heavy render paths. The live canvas editor provides direct manipulation of all CSS properties — flexbox, grid, spacing, typography, transforms, and filters — with real-time preview across responsive breakpoints. The component system supports reusable instances with variants and overrides, while design tokens maintain consistent colors, fonts, and spacing across the entire site. Data bindings connect to external content sources through native integrations with Strapi and Supabase, plus a generic CMS interface for any REST API backend. The Scroll Timeline API powers animations at 120 FPS off the main thread, with presets for rotate, scale, translate, opacity, color, and filter effects. Projects build as dynamic Remix applications with server-side rendering or export as static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The Webstudio CLI generates Docker-ready builds that run a Node.js server on port 3000, with Nginx reverse proxy configuration for SSL termination via Let's Encrypt. The builder requires minimum 1 GB RAM and 1 CPU core for Docker builds. MCP integration enables AI agents to create and modify websites programmatically. On RepoCloud, deploy Webstudio projects on a dedicated VPS with root SSH access, persistent storage, and complete control over your hosting, custom domains, and deployment pipeline, all under the AGPL-3.0 license.