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Anthropic Claude Design went viral as the closed cloud product. OpenCoworkAI Open CoDesign shipped the first open-source desktop alternative. Open Design is the third entry — web app + local daemon, file-based skills, BYOK to whichever coding-agent CLI you already have. Same loop, different shape.
TL;DR — pick the one that fits
Skip the table if you want — the 30-second decision is below.
Cloud incumbent
Pick Claude Design if you want a zero-setup, hosted cloud product, you're already paying for Pro / Max / Team, and you're fine being locked to Anthropic's models, skills, and update cadence. Best for solo creators who never want to think about infra.
Open desktop peer
Pick Open CoDesign if you want a real desktop Electron app on macOS / Windows, a bundled pi-ai runtime that works out of the box, and the smallest possible footprint outside the browser. The closest open-source peer to what Anthropic shipped.
This project
Pick Open Design if you already use Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Gemini / OpenCode, you want a web app you can self-host on Vercel, BYOK to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and droppable file-based skills + DESIGN.md systems you can fork on GitHub.
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Closed cloud product, open desktop peer, open web app. We borrow generously from open-codesign and credit it on /about — different form factor, different prompt-stack, same north star.
| Claude Design | Open CoDesign | Open Design | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License & cost | |||
| License | Closed | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Minimum billing | Pro / Max / Team | BYOK | BYOK — paste any OpenAI-compat URL |
| Form factor | |||
| Form factor | Web (claude.ai) | Desktop (Electron) | Web app + local daemon |
| Vercel-deployable | — | — | Yes |
| AI runtime & flow | |||
| Agent runtime | Bundled (Opus 4.7) | Bundled (pi-ai) | Your existing CLI |
| Provider flexibility | Anthropic only | 7+ via pi-ai | 16 CLI + BYOK proxy |
| Question form (turn 1) | — | — | Hard rule |
| 5 visual directions | — | — | Yes |
| 5-dim self-critique | — | — | Pre-emit gate |
| Skills, systems & migration | |||
| Skills | Proprietary | 12 TS modules | 110 droppable SKILL.md bundles |
| Design systems | Proprietary | DESIGN.md (v0.2) | 141 systems shipped |
| Claude Design ZIP import | n/a | — | Yes — keep editing where Anthropic left off |
Claude Design is a trademark of Anthropic. Open Design is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
Already paying for Claude Design?
Export your project ZIP from Claude Design, drop it on Open Design's welcome dialog, and keep editing where you left off — same artifacts, your filesystem, your CLI, your keys. Apache-2.0, no migration tax.
Compare FAQ
Yes. Drop the ZIP into the welcome dialog and POST /api/import/claude-design extracts it into .od/projects/<id>/. Artifacts, prompt history, and skill picks all carry over. See /import-from-claude-design for the full mapping.
Yes — that's the BYOK design. 16 coding-agent CLIs are auto-detected on your PATH (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, OpenCode, +11 more). No CLI? Paste any OpenAI-compatible baseUrl + apiKey directly.
Three reasons: (1) you can deploy to Vercel and share with your team without packaging electron binaries, (2) the daemon owns your filesystem under .od/ so projects are real folders you can git, (3) everything that runs in the browser also runs headless, which lets us treat the artifact loop as a CI step.
No. Open Design is an independent open-source project under the Apache-2.0 license. Claude Design and Claude are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC. We reference them nominatively for comparison and interoperability only.
Browse /skills and /design-systems — they're live previews of the bundled artifacts. Or jump to /showcase for end-to-end real prompts → real artifacts.
A note on credit
Anthropic showed what an artifact-first design tool looks like. OpenCoworkAI showed it could be open. Huashu Design showed the prompt-stack philosophy that prevents AI slop. Guizang's PPT skill set the bar for deck output. Multica wrote the daemon-and-runtime architecture we adopted. Open Design's contribution is the composition: web app + local daemon + file-based skills + BYOK + ZIP import + Vercel-deployable + Apache-2.0.
Long-form provenance: docs/references.md · See also our /about page.