Vellum, the best diagram editor you'll ever use
Details
- External ID
- 49789066
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Vellum, the best diagram editor you'll ever use
- Website domain
- blueprintr.io
- Launched
- Sept. 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 25
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7695374800637959
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 25, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 25, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
I 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-editorProud 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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- markdown editors and writing tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- diagram editor for visual design
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Creating a standard canvas drawing app is vibe-codeable, but building a production-grade diagramming engine that seamlessly balances whiteboard freedom with structured CAD/Visio auto-layout and snapping is notoriously complex.
What it would actually take: Requires an HTML5 Canvas/WebGL vector graphics engine, complex geometric algorithms for orthogonal connector routing (A* pathfinding with obstacle avoidance), snap-to-grid constraints, and bidirectional serialization/export formats (SVG, PDF, Visio XML).
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: PlantUML, Mermaid, Claude
Concerns raised: Nonsense marketing page, Few people manually draw diagrams now
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 122 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #44 of 123 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 327 days after the earliest competitor.
- vellum-editor · github · 2026-09-21 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Visimer · hn · 2026-08-17 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Line9 · hn · 2026-08-06 · 87 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Reladraw · hn · 2026-09-26 · 407 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- vellum.nvim · github · 2026-09-22 · 79 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- FluidCAD · hn · 2026-04-10 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- TikZ Editor · hn · 2026-06-23 · 451 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.