Vellum, the best diagram editor you'll ever use
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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.
HN · launched Sep 21, 2026 · 25 upvotes (top 23%) · 0 views
Niche: diagramming and flowchart tools · 116 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 116 launches in diagramming and flowchart tools →
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 : 257 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #88 of 258 (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 0.50
- Mermaid Design · ph · 2026-10-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Reladraw · hn · 2026-09-26 · 407 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- TryMermaid · ph · 2026-10-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- vellum.nvim · github · 2026-09-22 · 79 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- FluidCAD · hn · 2026-04-10 · 160 upvotes · similarity 0.45
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.