jgraph/drawio-desktop

What it is

drawio-desktop packages the core draw.io diagram editor in an Electron shell and ships it as a desktop application, so you can create flowcharts, network diagrams, UML and similar graphics without opening a browser. It is aimed at people who want the draw.io editing experience as an installable, locally running app. The editor itself comes from the upstream draw.io project, which is used as a git submodule here Official electron build of draw.io core draw.io editor.

The app is deliberately kept offline: its content security policy blocks remotely loaded JavaScript and restricts the app's own network connections to itself. The update check is the main exception, contacting github.com once a day and downloading from a GitHub-owned S3 bucket. Diagram data is not sent out and no usage analytics are transmitted, but a diagram can embed external image, background or font URLs that get fetched when the file is opened README.

Install and run

The simplest route is to download a built binary for your platform from the releases page releases section. Windows has three published flavours Windows installation:

• draw.io-<version>-windows-installer.exe: NSIS installer, per-machine in Program Files, needs administrator rights.
• draw.io-<version>.msi: per-user install in your profile, no administrator rights needed.
• draw.io-<version>-windows.zip: portable build; extract anywhere and run draw.io.exe, no file-type associations are registered.

Windows on ARM also has native ARM64 installer and portable builds; the MSI and Microsoft Store builds are x64 only and run under emulation on ARM64 devices Windows on Arm builds.

To build or run from source, clone with submodules (git clone --recursive https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop.git), then run npm install and npm start in the repository root. Use npm start --enable-logging when debugging. Building an unsigned app for personal use is covered in the personal-use build guide Developing.

Updates

Update behaviour depends on the installation type. The Windows .exe, macOS and AppImage builds download updates in the background and install them on restart; the Windows installer update asks for administrator rights. The MSI, Windows zip, ARM64 portable, deb and rpm builds only notify you and link to the release page. Microsoft Store, Snap and Flatpak are updated by the store and the app does not check for updates. Background checks can be disabled, and centrally managed installs can set DRAWIO_DISABLE_UPDATE=true or pass --disable-update to stop all checks, or DRAWIO_NO_SILENT_UPDATE=true / --no-silent-update to be asked before download Updates.

Constraints

The project is licensed under GPL-3.0 and can be used for any purpose without code changes, provided as-is. On Linux, the AppImage since 31.4.2 uses a static runtime and no longer depends on libfuse2; AppImageLauncher 2.2.0 cannot load it, so you need a 3.0 beta release or no AppImageLauncher at all Linux installation. Local and session storage live in the OS application-support folder, for example ~/Library/Application Support/draw.io on macOS and C:\Users\<USER-NAME>\AppData\Roaming\draw.io\ on Windows. Contributions are effectively closed; bug reports and feature requests are welcome, but pull requests are generally rejected Not open-contribution.

HotRepo's take

In the JavaScript daily ranking for 2026-11-04 the repository sat at position 5 with 20 stars gained that day, which fits a long-running, widely used desktop app rather than a spike. The 2020 Hacker News thread on the desktop app is small (39 points, 7 comments), but a comment from escherize highlights a concrete draw.io feature: exported PNGs carry the graph data, so the PNG can be reopened and edited like a project file discussion. The same thread notes the project is unsurprisingly an Electron build comment. For a tool that is mostly a packaged version of an existing web editor, the value is in the offline install and update story, not in novel features.