The open-source alternative to Claude Design. Your existing coding agent — Claude · Codex · Cursor · Gemini · OpenCode · Qwen — becomes the design engine, driven by 31 composable skills and 72 brand-grade design systems.
The open-source alternative to Claude Design. Local-first, web-deployable, BYOK at every layer — 16 coding-agent CLIs auto-detected on your PATH (Claude Code, Codex, Devin for Terminal, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen, Qoder CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Hermes, Kimi, Pi, Kiro, Kilo, Mistral Vibe, DeepSeek TUI) become the design engine, driven by 31 composable Skills and 72 brand-grade Design Systems. No CLI? An OpenAI-compatible BYOK proxy is the same loop minus the spawn.
Why this exists
Anthropic's Claude Design (released 2026-04-17, Opus 4.7) showed what happens when an LLM stops writing prose and starts shipping design artifacts. It went viral — and stayed closed-source, paid-only, cloud-only, locked to Anthropic's model and Anthropic's skills. There is no checkout, no self-host, no Vercel deploy, no swap-in-your-own-agent.
Open Design (OD) is the open-source alternative. Same loop, same artifact-first mental model, none of the lock-in. We don't ship an agent — the strongest coding agents already live on your laptop. We wire them into a skill-driven design workflow that runs locally with pnpm tools-dev, can deploy the web layer to Vercel, and stays BYOK at every layer.
Type make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round. The interactive question form pops up before the model improvises a single pixel. The agent picks one of five curated visual directions. A live TodoWrite plan streams into the UI. The daemon builds a real on-disk project folder with a seed template, layout library, and self-check checklist. The agent reads them — pre-flight enforced — runs a five-dimensional critique against its own output, and emits a single <artifact> that renders in a sandboxed iframe seconds later.
That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture — exactly the bar Claude Design set, but open and yours.
OD stands on four open-source shoulders:
- alchaincyf/huashu-design — the design-philosophy compass. Junior-Designer workflow, the 5-step brand-asset protocol, the anti-AI-slop checklist, the 5-dimensional self-critique, and the "5 schools × 20 design philosophies" idea behind our direction picker — all distilled into apps/daemon/src/prompts/discovery.ts.
- op7418/guizang-ppt-skill — the deck mode. Bundled verbatim under skills/guizang-ppt/ with original LICENSE preserved; magazine-style layouts, WebGL hero, P0/P1/P2 checklists.
- OpenCoworkAI/open-codesign — the UX north star and our closest peer. The first open-source Claude-Design alternative. We borrow its streaming-artifact loop, its sandboxed-iframe preview pattern (vendored React 18 + Babel), its live agent panel (todos + tool calls + interruptible generation), and its five-format export list (HTML / PDF / PPTX / ZIP / Markdown). We deliberately diverge on form factor — they are a desktop Electron app bundling pi-ai; we are a web app + local daemon that delegates to your existing CLI.
- multica-ai/multica — the daemon-and-runtime architecture. PATH-scan agent detection, the local daemon as the only privileged process, the agent-as-teammate worldview.
🌟 Codename: Inspiration Time Machine
🪄 125 PRs · 36 contributors · 5 days — 0.14.0 makes Open Design an inspiration time machine. Too many good ideas still vanished into the flow: a promising sketch, a useful source, a better earlier version, or the exact moment a draft started to go wrong. 0.14.0 keeps more of the work alive — sketch first, trace the inputs, step back through HTML history, and recover the thread instead of losing the spark. 🚀
🔥 Highlights
✏️ Plan mode gives rough ideas somewhere to land before the real build starts. Jumping straight from a thought to a long prompt could make early exploration feel slippery: the concept changed fast, but the working plan stayed invisible. Plan mode and Excalidraw sketch flows make it easier to think in outlines, shapes, and next steps before you commit to a full run. (#4862) Thanks @pftom.
📚 Composer context stops feeling hidden behind the answer. When a result looked right or wrong, it used to take too much guessing to remember what the model actually saw. Context sources now show the material feeding the composer and track that trail more clearly, so follow-up edits feel grounded instead of fuzzy. (#4869, #5057) Thanks @pftom.
🕘 HTML work now has visible version history. Generated or edited HTML used to feel fragile: once you changed it, the previous shape could disappear with it. HTML file version history makes iteration safer, so you can compare, recover, and keep moving without treating every edit like a one-way door. (#4872, #5072) Thanks @pftom.
🧩 Design systems are turning into real working material, not just references. Instead of hunting across screenshots, style snippets, and separate kits, you can now pull richer system context straight into the flow. The Design System Source Context plugin, the Glass Design System UI Kit plugin, and richer live previews with lightbox browsing make reusable design material easier to inspect and apply. (#4931, #4395, #4777) Thanks @hanyunsushi, @HiCatcat, @pftom.
💸 Model choices stop hiding the trade-offs. Picking a model used to feel like a memory test: which option is newer, which one costs more, and which provider is about to fail for a small configuration reason? Cloud model cost tiers, refreshed pricing support, and cleaner provider error handling make choosing — and trusting — a model a lot less blind. (#5247, #5212, #4873, #5054) Thanks @XingliGe, @pruefsumme, @YOMXXX.
🔌 Bring-your-own stack fits more real-world setups. Teams using their own providers or internal endpoints should not need a pile of glue before the first run. BYOK providers now route more cleanly through OpenCode, internal provider endpoints are easier to allow safely, and local auth is less likely to be misread as broken. (#4876, #4250, #4632) Thanks @PerishCode, @maxmilian, @thatditsyboy.
🔄 Live work is harder to lose during reloads and reconnects. A dropped stream, a reload, or a quick search could still knock a good session out of rhythm. Reconnection is more resilient now, failed-looking messages can reattach when the run actually succeeded, preview reload behaves properly, and the composer stays steadier during fast interaction. (#4971, #4651, #4652, #4298) Thanks @TheRealMkadmi, @cbeaulieu-gt, @Diyoncrz18.
🩺 When something breaks, Open Design leaves a better trail behind. “Error” without context is not a fix; it is a dead end. Specific export error codes, run workspace provenance, and packaged crash-scene evidence make failures much easier to explain, reproduce, and recover from. (#5220, #4264, #5224) Thanks @lefarcen, @dredozubov.
📥 Download: Tag open-design-v0.14.0. All assets are published on GitHub Releases and releases.open-design.ai.
Platform Architecture Asset
macOS Apple Silicon (arm64) open-design-0.14.0-mac-arm64.dmg
macOS Intel (x64) open-design-0.14.0-mac-x64.dmg
Windows x64 (installer) open-design-0.14.0-win-x64-setup.exe
✨ Added
🎨 Studio, planning & design systems
Plan mode with Excalidraw sketch flows for shaping an idea before you push it into a full build. (#4862) Thanks @pftom.
HTML file version history so generated documents are easier to revisit and recover. (#4872, #5072) Thanks @pftom.
Design System Source Context plugin for bringing system material closer to the active design flow. (#4931) Thanks @hanyunsushi.
Glass Design System UI Kit plugin for another ready-to-use visual system inside the plugin ecosystem. (#4395) Thanks @HiCatcat.
Richer draft design-system previews with lightbox browsing so large image sets are easier to inspect. (#4777) Thanks @pftom.
🔑 BYOK, models & cloud
Model cost tiers in Open Design Cloud to make price differences visible before you commit. (#5247) Thanks @XingliGe.
Cleaner BYOK routing through OpenCode for provider-backed workflows. (#4876) Thanks @PerishCode.
Safer support for internal provider endpoints in enterprise or self-hosted setups. (#4250) Thanks @maxmilian.
🌐 Community, templates & public site
Trending / Newest sorting in the Community templates gallery so browsing shared work feels less random. (#5211) Thanks @XingliGe.
Localized community pages and a larger tutorial library across the keep-11 locales. (#4915, #4924, #4935, #4941, #4961, #4967, #4976, #4985, #4991, #5047, #5056) Thanks @xne998808-ai.
A careers page and stronger team-access entry points for people evaluating Open Design with a wider group. (#5141, #5059, #5080) Thanks @xne998808-ai, @ScarletttMoon.
🔁 Changed
Composer context is now easier to inspect while you work, turning source awareness into part of the normal flow instead of a post-hoc guess. (#4869, #5057) Thanks @pftom.
Homepage, pricing, and community entry points are clearer and faster to browse, with stronger navigation, updated plan positioning, and faster landing performance. (#4933, #4987, #5005, #5006, #5012, #5066) Thanks @alchemistklk, @lefarcen, @xne998808-ai.
Model support and pricing communication are more current, including refreshed cloud choices and a clearer premium roster. (#4943, #5212, #5217) Thanks @Sid-Qin, @XingliGe, @xne998808-ai.
🐛 Fixed
🎨 Studio, Home & templates
The plugins flyout no longer closes while you type in search. (#4857) Thanks @Bojun-Vvibe.
New Project folder picking is less likely to fail silently. (#4812) Thanks @abhi-zit77.
Wide Home layouts show more recent projects cleanly, and deck previews lose distracting visual artifacts. (#4628, #5105) Thanks @jzhishu, @lefarcen.
Template cards and carousels behave better under real scrolling and layout pressure. (#5090, #4785) Thanks @xxiaoxiong, @jzhishu.
🔑 BYOK, agents & runtime
Local auth is less likely to be mistaken for broken credentials. (#4632) Thanks @thatditsyboy.
Minimax, NVIDIA BYOK, Kimi, and npm-based runtime resolution are less brittle. (#4873, #5054, #5070, #5078) Thanks @pruefsumme, @YOMXXX, @EthanGuo-coder, @holistis.
OpenCode and agent runtimes fail more honestly instead of stumbling forward. (#4835, #4747, #4957, #5109) Thanks @abhi-zit77, @want2knoww, @AjTheSpidey, @todotge.
🩺 Reliability & diagnostics
Reloads, reconnections, and resumed runs recover more cleanly after interruptions. (#4298, #4651, #4652, #4971) Thanks @Diyoncrz18, @cbeaulieu-gt, @TheRealMkadmi.
Exports now surface specific failure codes, and packaged crashes capture stronger evidence. (#5220, #5224) Thanks @lefarcen.
