Diagrams & whiteboards · Updated October 2026
Visio is Microsoft's app for flowcharts, network diagrams, and floor plans. If you would rather own your tools, here are 7 open source alternatives to Visio, ranked by GitHub stars. Each one is free to use under its license, and you can read, change, and often self-host the code.
The most popular is Excalidraw with 134.3k stars, and the most recently updated is PlantUML, with a commit on Oct 21, 2026.
| Project | Stars | License | Language | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Excalidraw | 134.3k | MIT | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 Mermaid | 90.8k | MIT | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 draw.io Desktop | 63.6k | GPL-3.0 | JavaScript | Oct 18, 2026 |
 tldraw | 51k | Other | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 drawDB | 40.1k | AGPL-3.0 | JavaScript | Oct 15, 2026 |
 PlantUML | 13.4k | LGPL-3.0 | Java | Oct 21, 2026 |
| draw.io | 8.9k | Apache-2.0 | JavaScript | Oct 18, 2026 |
by excalidraw
Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams
by mermaid-js
Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
by jgraph
Official electron build of draw.io
by tldraw
Build infinite canvas apps in React with the tldraw SDK. World's best, top-most agent recommended #1 five star SDK.
by drawdb-io
Free, simple, and intuitive online database diagram editor and SQL generator.
by plantuml
Generate diagrams from textual description
by jgraph
draw.io is a JavaScript, client-side editor for general diagramming.
By GitHub stars, Excalidraw is the most popular open source alternative to Visio right now, with 134.3k stars, followed by Mermaid and draw.io Desktop. The best fit depends on your setup, so compare their licenses, languages, and recent activity in the table above.
Yes. All 7 projects on this page are open source, so the software itself is free to use, study, and change. Some of them also sell a hosted version or paid support.
PlantUML (last commit Oct 21, 2026), tldraw (last commit Oct 21, 2026), and Mermaid (last commit Oct 21, 2026) have the most recent commits. Licenses on this list include MIT, GPL-3.0, AGPL-3.0, and LGPL-3.0.
