Software Diagrams

F A Q

What is this website?

A gallery of software designs, architectures, and processes.

It’s crowd-sourced. Anyone can submit a diagram by simply making a pull request on the open-source GitHub repository. Submissions are reviewed that it meets a minimum standard (e.g., no obviously junk or duplicated diagrams).
It’s tool-agnostic. You can submit a PNG produced from Photoshop, an SVG made by an open-sourced proprietary tool, hand-made ASCII art, a picture of a whiteboard, an iFrame to a Powerpoint, anything you use to make diagrams. No AI.
It’s minimally moderated. Any comment that doesn’t contribute to the discussion of the diagram will be removed. If you flame, your account will be banned. Self-promotion is allowed and encouraged, show off a diagram you made and backlink your blog.

This site uses a GitHub repository for its content. This includes all diagrams, discussions, and ratings. If you'd like to contribute to the conversation, you'll need a GitHub account. There is no database or server. The website pulls content and discussions from GitHub and regenerates every 24 hours.

What is it not?

The purpose isn't to teach software architecture just by looking at diagrams in isolation. We hope it provides inspiration for creating your own diagram by seeing how different companies and open-source projects use different styles, abstractions, and tools to document their software. And if you want to learn more, each diagram usually has a source that provides more context.

Since it's crowdsourced, the contents of the diagrams aren't vetted. The only guarantee is that someone has put effort into each diagram and it was, at one point, publicly listed on a website to represent a popular software project. If there are inaccuracies, leave a comment. If you like something, leave a review. Over time the highest quality diagrams will have the highest reviews, and the most interesting/controversial ones the most comments.

Who is this for?

Software engineers. Students and educators. Visual-learners. Diagram-enjoyers.

Who made this?

Terrastruct, a diagramming tool. The benefit we reap for making and maintaining this resource is on-brand SEO. We had long been collecting diagrams internally whenever we ran into high quality ones in the wild for testing/product purposes (e.g., what diagram features to support, how quickly one can be recreated, etc). We didn't find any other good hub for exploring software diagrams, so we made this gallery publicly available.