A free, open-source, self-hostable design editor that runs in your browser — layers, templates, animation, print-ready PDF, and video export — pitched as a Canva alternative you can run on your own server, with no account and no paid tiers.
Last verified · 2026-10-12 · by Moe Ameen
Doory (github.com/shaongitbd/doory) is a full graphic design editor that runs in the browser, published by the developer Siam and described in its own About line as an "open source canva alternative." The pitch is three promises: every feature is free, you need no account to start, and you can run the whole thing on your own server. There are no plans, paywalls, ads, or watermarks. Guest work is saved in the browser; sign in and your designs are stored on the server you (or your host) control.
As an editor it is genuinely capable. It designs posters, social posts, stories, slides, invitations, resumes, thumbnails, and business cards, with layers, groups, masks, filters, curved text, snapping, and multi-page documents. It ships ten starter templates (admins can add more), a built-in music and sound library, a present mode, comments, share links, brand kits, and real-time co-editing. Animation is a real feature set, and exports are broad — PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF (including print-ready with bleed and crop marks), plus MP4, WebM, and animated GIF — with background removal running in the browser.
Technically it is a React 19 + TypeScript front end on Fabric.js (Yjs powers the live co-editing) with a Django 5 and PostgreSQL back end, packaged to self-host with Docker Compose. The license is the Attribution Assurance License: use, modify, and redistribute it commercially, but keep the license text in redistributions and prominently display the author's credit each time the app launches.
Two honest boundaries. It is an early, independent project — a single primary contributor, a small commit history, and no tagged releases yet — so treat it as a promising community tool rather than a funded product with a support SLA. And it is a design editor: it produces individual assets on a canvas you drive, and it does not generate avatar video, clip long footage, write copy in a governed brand voice, or schedule and publish anything. Its output is a finished design file.
Doory is where you hand-craft the asset you want to control to the pixel; [Kompozy](/) is where that asset becomes a week of published, multi-platform content. The two meet cleanly at the export button. Because Doory gives you broad, clean exports — a transparent PNG logo, an SVG mark, a brand-kit palette — those files are exactly the brand inputs Kompozy uses to keep generated content on-brand. Design your logo, wordmark, and a hero template in Doory (free, and self-hosted if you like), export them, and drop them into Kompozy's brand assets. From there Kompozy generates the formats a design editor fundamentally can't: an avatar [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) or [Persona Frames](/glossary/persona-frames) clip where your face-locked influencer reads a script to camera, a brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes) rendered through HyperFrames, [Quote Graphics](/glossary/output-buckets), native Text Posts, a Blog Article, and an Email Newsletter — all held to one voice by the [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief).
The division of labor is the point, and it maps onto a nice ownership story: self-host your design surface in Doory, then let Kompozy handle the generation and distribution that no canvas does. Where Doory stops at a finished file you export one at a time, Kompozy turns one source — a video, a podcast, an article — into the batch, then schedules and publishes it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email on [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot), behind a per-post review gate. You keep the craftsmanship of a hand-made asset and add the volume and reach a design tool was never built to produce.
Doory is a free, open-source graphic design editor that runs in the browser, pitched as a Canva alternative. You can start designing with no account, and you can self-host the whole app on your own server via Docker Compose. It supports layers, templates, animation, print-ready PDF, and MP4/GIF export, with real-time co-editing, built on Fabric.js and Django. It is released under the Attribution Assurance License.
Yes to both. Doory is free and open-source with no paid tiers, ads, or watermarks, and no account is required to start. It ships a Docker Compose setup so you can run it on your own server with your designs stored on infrastructure you control. The only costs are your own hosting, and the license permits commercial use if you credit the author.
It ships only ten starter templates (admins can add more) versus Canva's huge library, and it is an early single-contributor project with no tagged releases and no vendor SLA. Self-hosting also assumes you can run Docker. And like any design tool, it makes individual assets — it does not generate avatar video, clip long footage, write copy in a brand voice, or schedule and publish across platforms.
No. Doory produces finished design files on a canvas you drive by hand. To turn designs and a single source into persona video, carousels, quote cards, blogs, newsletters, and scheduled posts, you pair it with a content engine. Kompozy accepts Doory's exported assets as brand inputs and generates and publishes finished content across nine platforms.