draw.io
A diagram editor that runs in the browser, with open source code.
Instead of Lucidchart, Visio, Miro for diagrams
Screenshot from www.drawio.com, taken 2026-11-05, shown to help you recognise the tool. It belongs to its maker. Ask us to remove it.
Flowcharts are usually traced to the industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who presented a flow process chart in 1921 so that the work of a factory could be drawn before anyone changed it. draw.io is the browser version of that habit, and its repository calls it a JavaScript, client-side editor for general diagramming, with a desktop app linked from get.diagrams.net.
The source code is Apache-2.0, though the icon sets, stencil libraries and templates carry their own terms, including a restriction on use with Atlassian products without written permission. It is jointly owned and developed by draw.io Ltd, formerly JGraph, and draw.io AG, and it scores a 4 on footprint, lock-in, self-direction, longevity and delivery and a 3 on power.
The repository says this version does not support real-time collaborative editing, so it suits a diagram you draw yourself better than a board a team fills in together. You can self-host it from the repository with Docker or the .war files, though it calls that a test version and points to a paid production version for production deployments, and we did not read what separates them.
In daily use it is a diagram editor that lives in a browser tab, with the code open for you to host if you want to. Scores are our reading of public sources.
- A client-side diagram editor with Apache-2.0 code
- No real-time collaborative editing in this version
- Self-hosting is described as a test version, with a paid production version
What stands out
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For comparison, we also reviewed Miro (11/30) as a benchmark.
