Show HN: Vellum, the best diagram editor you'll ever use
vellum.blueprintr.ioI love Excalidraw, I use it all the time for work to quickly draw up a proposal for a customer. But its annoying I have to re-draw the same thing, but better in Draw.io / Visio when it comes to writing the formal documentation later.
Vellum is designed to give you the speed of a whiteboard, but the architecture-diagram-finish in quality.
It uses YAML to store everything, and even has a 'graph' section for those of you who like the diagram-as-code elements of mermaid... but vellum allows full authoring of layout without the restrictions of Mermaid.
I love it to bits. I hope you will too.
Been working on it a while, but decided to make it source available here: https://github.com/blueprintr-io/vellum-editor
Proud to say its not purely vibe coded slop, but I used Claude to help with some of the more challenging geometry based elements and some housekeeping stuff.
This is pretty good for network diagrams as well, you should rightly be proud of it. Many companies still use Visio which rarely generates a good looking diagram (of course it's based on the user, but Visio makes it difficult to do so), or Lucid charts which is decent, but has some limitations. Yes, network engineers still need to manually draw network diagrams. I would suggest getting some Cisco and cloud stencils and marketing to that crowd as well.
Even Linux kernel is getting ai assistance these days, nothing wrong with using Claude, as long as you put in restraints and structure.
It comes prepacked with Cisco stencils, cloud stencils and a bunch of others!
Press 'S' to open the shape & icon library
I'm having trouble figuring out the line from "speed" to "quality" over Draw.io. Why would someone pay (https://blueprintr.io/#pricing) for this over Draw.io?
They wouldn't! Diagramming is, and should be, free! Vellum is completely free, no restrictions whatsoever.
The chargeable stuff is additional blueprintr functionality; such as AI features, enterprise authentication, live collaboration rooms, and links to 3rd party platforms.
Tried it out. Really like the clean design and how smooth it feels to use.
Nice tool!
Two small UI suggestions: 1. Add dark-mode styling to the scrollbar so it matches the rest of the interface. 2. Consider adding a Tutorial button that opens a short walkthrough. A few slides with text, or a small GIF with an explanation, would make the site easier to understand for first-time users. Keep in mind that many users will linger on the website only for a couple of seconds and don't have much patience. It's important to show fast how the website works.
Good tips, thanks !
Lovely tool, but the UI and text are way too small. Makes it unusable. :-(
Hey! Thanks for the feedback. Out of interest did you test this on mobile, laptop or desktop? In any case I'll look into some additional accessibility settings
I came to post the same - on desktop (Chrome, macOS), the initial "Welcome to Vellum" screen has tiny text
We are seeing quite a lot of traffic! Thank you :)
If you would like to try out some of the AI features of Vellum, or Blueprintr in general, email me your username to josh@blueprintr.io and I will give you 2 months of Premium!
looks interesting, but nowadays I hardly think anyone manually draws diagrams. Most of the time I generate plantUML or Mermaid diagrams via Claude
You'd be surprised! but yes I agree AI driven diagrams are becoming the norm, which is why we support it too.
AI diagrams are handy for quickly understanding something, but, in my opinion, not good for real documentation, or for anything complex that has a lot of nodes (it gets messy quick).
Looks interesting
Nonsense marketing page if that interests you: https://blueprintr.io/about/vellum