Diagramming without an internet connection.
Every other tool in this category is a web application. If your code cannot go to a browser, that rules all of them out.
The situation
Defence, healthcare, finance and any organisation with a serious data classification policy face the same constraint: source code and architecture cannot leave the network, and often the machine has no route out at all. Every hosted diagram tool is unusable under that constraint, not because of a policy disagreement but because the network connection does not exist.
What fully offline means here
A desktop application running against a local Ollama model. No API key, no telemetry, no outbound connection required for anything: the models are local, the icons are bundled rather than fetched, and the diagrams are files on your disk. Credentials, when you use any, live in the OS keychain. Disconnect the machine and nothing changes.
Icons bundled, not fetched
A small detail that decides whether this actually works: service logos ship with the application. A tool that fetches icon assets renders a diagram full of blank boxes on an isolated network, which is the kind of failure that only appears after deployment.
The quality tradeoff, stated honestly
Local open models are behind frontier hosted ones, and for diagram generation the gap is narrower than for open-ended work, because the task is structured: read files, emit a graph. It is a real gap nonetheless. If your constraint permits a hosted model, you will get somewhat better results; if it does not, this works and the alternatives do not run at all.
Fully local
Questions
Related
- Onboarding Engineers to a CodebaseThe first week is spent building a mental model that somebody already has. A diagram transfers it in an afternoon.
- Documenting Legacy CodeIncluding the newest kind of legacy code: what a coding agent wrote for you over several sessions that nobody has looked at as a whole.
- Architecture ReviewMost of the effort in an architecture review goes into producing the diagrams, and most of those diagrams describe the system as remembered rather than as built.
- System Design Interview PreparationThe diagram is the easy part. Interviews are decided by the tradeoffs you can defend when the interviewer pushes.