Doory: a browser design editor you can host yourself

After Canva’s price increases, “find an open-source one” has long had answers on GitHub — but most alternatives are either thin or hard to deploy. Doory (TypeScript, about 1.3k stars and 83 forks as of 2026-10-15) moves the whole design editor into the browser: posters, social graphics, stories, slides, invitations, resumes, thumbnails and business cards, starting from templates, with no login and one Docker command to self-host.

Core features

• Full editing in the browser: the left rail opens as panels, and selecting an element swaps the toolbar for its property panel; layers can be renamed, locked, hidden, grouped and reordered, with copy, duplicate and arrange in the right-click menu.
• Clearly scoped assets: about 25,000 icons, emoji and illustrations, stickers and QR codes; text supports curved text, font pairings and uploading your own fonts; images support upload, crop, masks, filters and in-browser background removal, plus stock search with an Unsplash or Pexels key.
• Motion and sound: 27 enter and exit animations, 12 emphasis animations, 16 page transitions, 24 CC0 music loops and 88 sound effects, with voiceover recording — and a present mode with speaker notes, timing, auto-advance and a second presenter window.
• Collaboration in three share-link tiers: view, comment or edit (with an optional password), plus pinned comments, version history and real-time co-editing.
• Broad export coverage: PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF (with bleed and crop marks), MP4, WebM and GIF.
• Brand kits: store a team’s colors, fonts and logo as a kit and apply it inside templates.

Typical use cases

• A small team that needs a privately deployed design tool: send clients a password-protected share link while the data stays on your own server.
• Budget-conscious individuals and studios: no paid tier at all, and exports cover both print (PDF with bleed) and social.
• Developers wiring it into their own stack: React 19 with a Fabric.js canvas on the front, a Django API behind it, and Docker Compose for the full stack.

Quick start

cp .env.example .env     # set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY and POSTGRES_PASSWORD
docker compose up -d --build
docker compose exec api python manage.py createsuperuser   # no admin account is created for you

Open http://localhost:8080 and start designing; the web container serves /api and /ws too, so the browser only ever talks to one address. A new site starts empty — use seed_templates, sync_fonts, seed_elements and friends to load in templates, fonts, icons and audio as needed.

Summary

For small teams and individuals who want a self-hosted design editor. It is young: the README states plainly that the editor is complete but the template library ships only ten starter templates, and bug reports are welcome — do not expect Canva-scale template ecosystems. At 1,305 stars as of 2026-10-15, last pushed 2026-10-14. One licensing note: gh api reports the license as NOASSERTION, so check the LICENSE file before adopting.

For self-hosting mail instead of design, we previously covered Mailflare, which moves domain email onto your own Cloudflare account; like that one, NocoDB and Doory both bring a SaaS category back onto your own machine — spreadsheets for one, design for the other.