OpenDesign is a collaborative design agent workspace positioned as the open-source alternative to Anthropic's Claude Design. You start with a brief, and a coding agent (or OpenDesign Cloud) produces a prototype that follows your design system. The team reviews it, and the agent refines it in the same project. The result is an artifact rather than prose: single-page HTML prototypes for web, desktop, and mobile, live dashboards editable in place, decks, generated images, and HTML-to-MP4 motion graphics.
OpenDesign does not ship its own model or agent. The coding-agent CLIs already installed on the machine are the design engine: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Cline, Kimi CLI, Hermes Agent, and others connect through skills, the CLI, and MCP, with DeepSeek Harness as a native runtime. Without a CLI, a bring-your-own-key proxy talks to OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with SSRF protection at the daemon edge.
Every render reads the active design-system package's DESIGN.md as the brand contract, and 151 brand-grade design-system packages ship with the repo. Four composable planes cover the rest: plugins carry runnable workflows, functional skills (100+, following the Agent Skills SKILL.md convention) carry agent behavior, design templates carry rendering blueprints for prototype, deck, image, video, and audio modes, and design systems carry the brand. Plugins can also migrate Figma or Pencil workflows into React, Next.js, or Vue code, and refresh an existing repository to a brand spec.
It runs local-first as a native desktop app for macOS and Windows (Linux from source), in Docker, or as a web deployment. A local daemon spawns the chosen CLI, serves the skills, design-template, plugin, and design-system registries, and exposes a read-only stdio MCP server so an agent working in another repository can read live project files (tokens CSS, components, entry HTML) by name instead of re-attaching exports. Exports cover inlined HTML, PDF, agent-driven PPTX, ZIP, Markdown, and MP4 via HyperFrames, and a Claude Design ZIP can be imported.
Features
- Artifact outputs: web, desktop, and mobile prototypes, live dashboards with a tweaks panel, magazine-style decks, generated images, and HTML-to-MP4 motion graphics
- Agent-native, model-agnostic: the coding-agent CLIs on your machine do the rendering, switchable with one click, across 26 supported CLIs
- Platform compatibility: MCP install for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Antigravity, Cline, Trae, Kimi CLI, Kiro, Pi Agent, Mistral Vibe CLI, and Hermes Agent, with DeepSeek Harness as a native runtime
- BYOK proxy: streams to OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint when no CLI is installed, with SSRF guarding
- DESIGN.md design systems: 151 brand packages, some with manifest, compiled tokens, components, assets, and provenance, where switching a system changes the next render
- Skills and design templates: 100+ functional skills in the SKILL.md convention, plus templates grouped by mode (prototype, deck, image, video, audio) and scenario (design, marketing, product, engineering, finance, HR, sales)
- Plugin marketplace: 277 official plugins across scenarios, image and video templates, design systems, atoms, and examples, installable from the web UI or the CLI with JSON output
- Codebase refresh and migration: plugins that point at a git repo plus DESIGN.md to refactor components to the brand spec, and migrate Figma or Pencil workflows into React, Next.js, or Vue
- MCP server for other agents: a read-only stdio server exposing live project files (tokens CSS, components, entry HTML) as a structured, queryable API
- Exports and import: inlined HTML, PDF, agent-driven PPTX, ZIP, Markdown, and MP4 through HyperFrames, plus Claude Design ZIP import
- Local-first deployment: desktop apps for macOS and Windows, Docker, Sealos, or a web deployment, with a loopback-bound daemon and consent-gated product analytics
- Quality gates: an artifact lint API and a five-dimension self-critique step before an artifact is emitted
