In simple English
Drawnix is a digital whiteboard for drawing pictures, making mind maps, and building flowcharts. You can write text, draw freehand, and turn Markdown or Mermaid code into diagrams. It saves your work inside your browser so you do not lose it. You can run it on your own server or use the free public website. It is completely free to use under an open-source licence.
What it is
Drawnix is an open-source, web-based whiteboard application built on top of the Plait drawing framework and the React library. It offers an infinite canvas with zoom, pan, and modular plugins for rich text and shapes.
What it is good for
Solo builders who need a free, self-hosted canvas tool for brainstorming, planning software architectures, or sketching user flows without paying for commercial SaaS whiteboard tools.
- Combines freehand drawing, mind maps, and flowcharts in one place.
- Turns Mermaid and Markdown text directly into visual diagrams.
- Runs locally with Docker or Node.js without requiring a paid subscription.
- Saves work in browser storage by default, so clearing cache can erase drawings.
- Relies on a complex plugin architecture that makes deep code modifications challenging.
- Lacks built-in real-time multi-user collaboration out of the box in the self-hosted version.
Paid commercial whiteboard tools and manual diagramming software.
Docker (a way to run a program inside its own sealed box, so it cannot break anything else on your server).
- excalidraw/excalidraw134k stars
Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams with real-time collaboration.
- tldraw/tldraw51k stars
A very fast, infinitely zoomable canvas SDK and web application for building tools.
- GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh26k stars
A web page that compresses images in the browser and shows you the result before you save it.
- simple-icons/simple-icons26k stars
More than 3,400 brand logos as single-colour SVG files, released into the public domain.
- phosphor-icons/core394 stars
The raw SVG files and the catalogue for the Phosphor icon family, with no framework package attached.
git clone https://github.com/plait-board/drawnix.git cd drawnix npm install npm run start