Open source design and whiteboard tools

Four kinds of tool

This category groups tools that look similar on screen but do different jobs.

• Interface design and prototyping is the Figma job: drawing app and website screens, building reusable components and shared libraries, and linking screens into clickable prototypes. Penpot is the most complete open source option. Quant-UX focuses on prototypes you can test with users, with heatmaps and recordings, and Pencil is a desktop wireframing tool with ready-made UI stencils.
• Template-based graphic design is the Canva job: social posts, posters, slides and invitations made from templates and brand assets. Doory is the only actively developed, OSI-licensed project on GitHub we found that targets it as a full product, and it is very young.
• Whiteboards and diagrams are the Miro job: a shared canvas for sketches, workshops and explanations. Excalidraw draws in a hand-sketched style and can be embedded in other software, WBO is a minimal live whiteboard that is easy to host, draw.io is a precise diagram editor with large shape libraries, and OpenBoard is built for teaching in a classroom.
• Graphics editors cover illustration and image work. Graphite and SVGEdit edit vector graphics, Drawpile and MyPaint are painting programs, and Pinta and miniPaint are general image editors on the desktop and in the browser.

None of the open source tools covers all four jobs the way the commercial suites now try to. Pick by the job, then check the details below.

Collaboration on a self-hosted install

Real-time co-editing is often the first thing people expect, and it is where self-hosted setups differ most. Penpot, WBO, Doory, Quant-UX and Drawpile include collaboration in what you install. Excalidraw’s official docs say a self-hosted instance does not support sharing or collaboration out of the box, because the production build sends those features to Excalidraw’s own services. draw.io lets you choose where files are stored, but its self-hosted build has no live co-editing. OpenBoard, Pencil, Pinta and MyPaint are single-user desktop programs.

File formats and migration

Open formats make it easier to leave a tool later. SVG is a W3C standard: version 1.1 (Second Edition) has been a Recommendation since August 2011, and SVG 2 reached a new Candidate Recommendation snapshot in October 2026. SVGEdit edits SVG directly, WBO saves each board as an SVG file, and Penpot builds on SVG and CSS concepts. For layered raster images, OpenRaster is a simple ZIP-based specification published on freedesktop.org and read by MyPaint, Pinta, Krita and GIMP. draw.io uses its own XML-based .drawio files.

Moving existing work matters as much as the format. Penpot maintains a Figma plugin that exports files for import, though prototype interactions are not carried over, and Quant-UX can also import from Figma. draw.io imports Visio, Gliffy and Lucidchart diagrams. Doory has no documented way to import Canva designs, and Miro boards export only as images, PDF or CSV text, so whiteboard content usually has to be rebuilt.

Self-hosting effort

The effort ranges widely. Excalidraw, SVGEdit and miniPaint are static web apps that any web server can deliver. WBO runs in a single container and keeps boards as files. Penpot, Quant-UX and Doory are multi-service applications with a database, and Doory needs extra content (fonts, icons, templates) downloaded after install. Desktop tools need no server at all, apart from Drawpile’s optional session server.

Licenses and maturity

Every listed app has an OSI-approved license for its main repository, but the details differ. Penpot sells a proprietary administration layer (admin console, organizations, single sign-on) on top of its MPL-2.0 code. Doory uses the Attribution Assurance License, which requires a visible credit in any hosted or redistributed copy. draw.io restricts the use of its icons and stencils in Atlassian products and does not accept outside pull requests. Maturity varies too: Doory is at version 0.1.0, Graphite is alpha software, and MyPaint has had no stable release since 2020.

Projects not listed

Inkscape, GIMP and Krita are well-known open source graphics programs, but their development happens on GitLab instances (gitlab.com, GNOME’s and KDE’s), and their GitHub repositories are mirrors, so they are not included for now. tldraw, an infinite-canvas whiteboard SDK, is source-available rather than open source: its license allows development use but forbids production use without a separate license from the company, so it is not listed either.