An independent developer ships a browser-based design editor with layers, templates, animation, video export, and real-time co-editing — free, with no account required and no paid tiers, and the whole thing runs on your own server.
2026-10-12 · by Moe Ameen
Doory is a new open-source design editor that runs entirely in the browser, published on GitHub by the developer Siam (user shaongitbd) and described in its own About line as an "open source canva alternative." Its README sums up the pitch in one sentence: every feature is free, nobody needs an account to start, and you can run the whole thing on your own server. There are no plans, no paywalls, no ads, no watermarks, and no locked templates. Guest work is saved in the browser; once you sign in, designs are stored on the server you (or whoever hosts it) control.
As a design tool it is more complete than "weekend project" would suggest. It handles posters, social posts, stories, slides, invitations, resumes, thumbnails, and business cards, with layers, groups, masks, filters, curved text, snapping, and multi-page designs. 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 genuine feature set rather than an afterthought — the README lists dozens of enter/exit, emphasis, and page-transition effects — and exports cover PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF (including print-ready PDF with bleed and crop marks), plus MP4, WebM, and animated GIF. Background removal runs in the browser.
Under the hood it is a React 19 + TypeScript front end built on Fabric.js (with Yjs powering the live co-editing) and a Django 5 / PostgreSQL back end, packaged to self-host with Docker Compose. The license is the Attribution Assurance License: you can use, modify, and redistribute it commercially, but you must keep the license text in redistributions and prominently display the author's credit each time the app launches.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. First, this is an early, independent project — a single primary contributor, a few hundred GitHub stars, and no tagged releases yet — so treat it as a promising community tool, not a funded product with a support SLA or a guaranteed roadmap. Second, its template library is ten starters plus whatever you add, which is nowhere near Canva's enormous catalog. No precise public launch date is confirmed from a primary source, so this is reported as a recent 2026 release without pinning a specific day.
The useful way to read this launch is that it makes the design canvas free — and leaves the actual treadmill untouched. A free, self-hosted editor removes the cost of building one asset, but it does not remove the cost that bites content teams: hand-making posts, clips, carousels, blogs, and newsletters for every platform, every week, forever. Doory, like Canva before it, is a surface you drive one asset at a time. That is where [Kompozy](/) sits in a different layer. Instead of a canvas to design on, Kompozy is a generation-and-publishing engine: feed it one source — a video, a podcast, an article, a Persona Brief — and it produces a week of on-brand content across five buckets (video, image, text, blog, newsletter), then schedules and publishes it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email on [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot), behind a per-post review gate.
In practice the two complement each other rather than compete. Design a hero graphic or a brand-kit template in Doory for free and self-hosted, then let Kompozy generate the formats a design editor can't — an avatar [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts), a brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes), [Quote Graphics](/glossary/output-buckets), native text posts, a blog article, and a newsletter — all held to one voice by the [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief). Doory just dropped the price of the canvas to zero; Kompozy is the part that turns what you make there into a published, multi-platform cadence. If you want the design-tool comparison in depth, see [Kompozy as a Canva alternative](/alternatives/canva).
Yes. Doory is free and open-source, with no plans, paywalls, ads, or watermarks, and you do not need an account to start designing. It is licensed under the Attribution Assurance License, which permits commercial use but requires you to keep the license text in redistributions and prominently display the author's credit in the running app. Self-hosting it incurs only your own server costs.
Yes — self-hosting is a core part of the pitch. The project ships with a Docker Compose setup so you can run the whole editor on your own server, with your designs stored on infrastructure you control. The front end is React and Fabric.js; the back end is Django and PostgreSQL.
Doory is free, open-source, and self-hostable, and you can design without an account — things Canva is not and does not allow. It supports layers, animation, video and GIF export, background removal, and real-time co-editing. Canva still wins decisively on template library size (Doory ships ten starters) and on maturity as a funded, supported product.
No. Like any design editor, Doory produces individual assets on a canvas you drive by hand — it does not generate avatar video, clip long footage, write copy in a brand voice, or schedule and publish across platforms. To turn designs and a single source into a full week of multi-format content and publish it, pair it with a content engine such as Kompozy.