Open Source Diagram & Mind Map Software

By GitHub stars, draw.io Desktop is the most popular (63,687 stars), followed by Next AI Draw Io and Vnote. People often use these instead of Microsoft Visio, Lucidchart and XMind. Each page lists the platforms, license and last commit.

9 of the 11 open-source diagram and mind-mapping apps listed here run on Windows, 11 on macOS and 9 on Linux; on a Mac, the most starred is draw.io Desktop. 1 can be installed with a package manager such as Flathub, Homebrew, winget or Chocolatey.

Yes. All 11 use an open-source license (OSI-approved or FSF-free), so you can use, copy and change them for free.

Apps come from desktop awesome lists (Awesome Linux Software, awesome-mac, awesome-windows, awesome-electron and the media and file sections of awesome-cli-apps), more than 70 GitHub topics such as desktop-app, electron-app, tauri-app, gtk, qt, macos-app, pdf-editor, cad and remote-desktop, and a hand-picked list of flagship apps. An app is listed only if it has a license (one GitHub detects, or one appsgit checked by hand), a README and a commit in the last six months, is not archived or a fork, and has 1000+ GitHub stars (topics), 500+ (awesome lists) or 100+ (hand-picked). It must also be an end-user application with a desktop signal: installers in its releases, install instructions for Windows, macOS or Linux, or a Flathub, Homebrew, winget, Chocolatey, Snap or AUR package. Libraries, frameworks, themes, plugins and servers are left out, and source-available apps are labelled as such.