Open Design

Best for: designers and developers who want their existing coding agent to produce real design files rather than describing designs in chat.

Open Design is a local-first desktop application positioned as an open-source alternative to Claude Design. It turns a coding agent into a design engine that produces prototypes, landing pages, dashboards, slides, images and video — exported as real files in HTML, PDF, PPTX and MP4. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, OpenCode, Qwen and more than twenty other CLIs on a bring-your-own-key basis.

What makes it useful: the output is files, not suggestions. A screenshot-backed PPTX or PDF you can hand to a client is a different proposition from a chat transcript describing what a deck might contain. Recent releases focus on keeping long design sessions alive across interruptions and model switches.

Where it falls short: bring-your-own-key means you pay for every model call, and design work with images and video consumes tokens quickly. It is a desktop app, so there is no browser access or straightforward collaboration. At version 0.13.0 the project is young and still moving fast.

Details: TypeScript, Apache 2.0 licensed. Desktop, local-first.