Yes, I know, draw.io theoretically isn’t entirely open source, but the source code is available and it can be self-hosted. Honestly, that’s good enough for me, I think I can make an exception for this one. But generally I care a lot about strictly using FOSS too. It can also be integrated with Nextcloud: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/drawio
There’s also a draw.io (diagrams.net) plugin for intellij and probably eclipse.
Vscode too
https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw
Excalidraw is great, but can be a pain to set up locally if you require the collaboration features.
Have you done it? I’m interested in this. Any tips and tricks? Maybe you kept some notes?
Thanks!
I didn’t myself, but talked to a colleague recently who set it up for our company. Apparently it was quite tricky to get the various containers set up just right, as they need to communicate with each other but also be user facing and have proper certs and so on. I don’t have any details, but usually this guy is very good at deploying stuff, so if he admits to struggling I know it must be seriously hard.
Do you think he would he share his deployment code? I was thinking of deploying excalidraw on my homeserver :p.
I don’t think it’s possible, as his deployment code is very specific to our company setup (own acme, own sso, …). Sorry. 😕
No problem, I expected as much but wanted to try haha
Thanks! Now I’m intrigued. I’ll try to set it up this weekend.
There’s also an Obsidian plugin that gives you a local setup without the extra config for sharing
I’ve used Dia for years, great simple tool for diagramming & if I need something more I’ll switch to graphviz dot files
Inkscape works well for this.
Does inkscape have diagram connecting? One of the best draw.io features is the wide array of premade shapes, styles, and auto connecting for flow visualization
Maybe mermaid fits your use case?
There’s kroki as well, which includes Mermaid, Excalidraw, GraphViz, PlantUML, etc.
You are aware that draw.io is itself open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio ?
“This project is not an open source project as a result.”
https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/blame/dev/LICENSE <-- that’s … a rather specific and recent change. Is there a story here ?
They added:
- None of the Work may be used in any form as part, or whole, of an integration, plugin or app that integrates with Atlassian’s Confluence or Jira products.
Amazing. I get there’s some atlassian bullshittery behind that.
Looks like their paid confluence extension was called a scam in a review and they really did not like that 😂 https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/discussions/4623
Weird because gliffy (or whatever it’s called) exists on confluence
Draw.io has a Docker container
Graphviz
I used to use one years ago called yEd graph editor. Supremely amazing. It is free to use, but I don’t think it’s open source.
Yed is pretty good. It’s what I use.
Unless I misunderstand your question, draw.io can be downloaded as a standalone Linux application and run locally.
Likewise, the Xfig package should he available in most Linux repos. It’s old, but good enough for a quick sketch.
edit: aha. My mistake. My eyes slid over ‘open source’ in the title*, and even still I hadn’t realized it was an Apache license.
* Whaaat, it was pre-coffee? Let the purest among us cast the first stone.
They’re looking for something open-source. Draw.io’s readme says:
License
The source code authored by us in this repo is licensed under a modified Apache v2 license. This project is not an open source project as a result.
I haven’t been through the license to see what its restrictions are, but there must be a reason they give this warning.
Of the changes made last week to the license, this one stands out:
- None of the Work may be used in any form as part, or whole, of an integration, plugin or app that integrates with Atlassian’s Confluence or Jira products.
That is a weird carve-out, so I’d guess the license revision (and technically the reason it’s no longer open source) somehow has to do with Atlassian or their plugin marketplace?
From another comment on this thread: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/discussions/4623
I guess that’s how they make a lot of money, selling their own Confluence plugin.
draw .io is closed source.
Source available*
D2lang is good
