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Grafly.io – Free online diagramming tool

Grafly.io – Free online diagramming tool

by lnenad·Mar 16, 2026·9 points·1 comment

AI Analysis

●●SolidCozyBig Brain

LZ-compressed URLs encode entire diagrams — no backend needed for sharing.

Strengths
  • Local-first privacy with localStorage — nothing leaves your browser
  • JSON format reference lets LLMs generate valid diagrams without guessing
  • AGPL licensed with commercial option for closed-source derivatives
Weaknesses
  • React Flow does the heavy lifting — this is a polished wrapper
  • Excalidraw and draw.io already dominate browser diagramming space
Target Audience

Developers sketching architecture diagrams

Similar To

Excalidraw · draw.io · tldraw

Post Description

Hey, I'm Nenad. I built Grafly (https://grafly.io) because I kept reaching for different tools just to sketch out a quick architecture diagram and hating either the UI, color schemes, usage patterns or that I had to log in, or have my doodles stored on someone's server. It's a React/React Flow app that runs entirely in the browser meaning that everything saves to localStorage, nothing leaves your machine. You get basic shapes, AWS/GCP icons, edges with waypoints and shareable URLs that encode the whole diagram in the query string (no backend, just LZ compression). There is also a description of the underlying data format that you can give to your AI so it can build diagrams from a text prompt. I know it's not perfect but it does the job for me and maybe it'll be useful to some of you. Code is on GitHub, AGPL licensed. https://github.com/lnenad/grafly

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