Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Balsamiq

Excalidraw is an open-source virtual whiteboard for creating hand-drawn style diagrams, wireframes, and sketches in the browser. It focuses on fast ideation with a simple UI, infinite canvas, and easy sharing and collaboration.

Key Features

• Infinite canvas whiteboard with a hand-drawn visual style
• Rich drawing tools (shapes, arrows, free-draw, text, eraser) with undo/redo
• Arrow binding and labeled connectors for clearer diagrams
• Real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption support
• Local-first behavior (autosave in the browser) and offline-capable PWA
• Export and sharing options (PNG, SVG, clipboard, and open JSON-based file format)
• Image support, theming (including dark mode), and localization (i18n)

Use Cases

• Team brainstorming sessions and collaborative whiteboarding
• Creating lightweight architecture diagrams, flowcharts, and user journey maps
• Wireframing UI concepts and embedding a whiteboard into other web apps

Excalidraw works well as a standalone web app or as a reusable component via its editor package. It is a strong choice for teams and individuals who want quick, low-friction diagramming without heavy tooling.

Penpot is an open-source web-based design and prototyping tool built to streamline collaboration between designers and developers. It supports creating UI designs, interactive prototypes, and scalable design systems, while providing developer-oriented inspection and code-oriented workflows.

Key Features

• UI design editor with reusable components and variants
• Interactive prototyping for flows and user journeys
• Design systems tooling, including native design tokens
• Inspect mode with SVG, CSS, and HTML information for implementation
• Real-time collaboration for teams, with solo workflows supported
• Plugin system to extend functionality and integrate with other tools
• Webhooks and API access via tokens for automation and integrations

Use Cases

• Product teams designing UI screens and maintaining shared component libraries
• Design-to-development handoff using inspectable SVG/CSS details
• Organizations hosting an internal design platform with controlled access and integrations

Limitations and Considerations

• Primarily focused on UI/UX design and prototyping; it is not a general-purpose vector illustration suite

Penpot is a strong choice for teams that want an open standards–friendly design tool and a more code-aware design workflow. Its collaboration features, inspect mode, and design-system primitives make it well suited for continuous product design and implementation.

diagrams.net (branded draw.io) is a web-first diagramming and whiteboarding application that runs in the browser and as an offline desktop app. It provides a full-featured diagram editor for flowcharts, UML, org charts, wireframes and network diagrams, and integrates with common cloud storage and collaboration platforms. (drawio.com)

Key Features

• Full client-side diagram editor with drag-and-drop shapes, connectors, layers and styling presets
• Large library of templates and icons for common diagram types (flowcharts, UML, ER, network, wireframes)
• Export/import to PNG, JPEG, SVG, PDF and native draw.io XML formats; versioned files and local storage options
• Integrations with cloud storage and platforms (Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, Dropbox, GitHub/GitLab, Atlassian products) and a hosted web app entry point
• Official desktop builds (Electron) for Windows, macOS and Linux to support offline use and tighter security controls

(drawio.com)

Use Cases

• Create architecture diagrams, flowcharts and UML for design and engineering documentation
• Produce editable diagrams for product specs, onboarding docs and team knowledge bases stored in cloud repos
• Design wireframes and process maps for product, ops and network teams that require export to common formats

(drawio.com)

Limitations and Considerations

• The GitHub repository contains minified client code and the project notes that not all build sources are published; the project is not maintained as a fully open-source, buildable source tree and the team does not accept pull requests. This may limit ease of building custom forks from the repo. (github.com)

diagrams.net (draw.io) is a mature, widely used diagramming tool that prioritizes a full client-side editing experience, multiple platform deployments (web and Electron desktop) and broad cloud integrations. It is suitable for technical and non-technical teams that need a versatile diagram editor without mandatory sign-in.