OpenPolotno

Hey everyone 👋

I’ve been working on a Canva-like design editor and recently open-sourced it.

The main reason I built this was frustration with limited flexibility in existing tools like Polotno — especially around customization and vendor lock-in.

The problem I kept running into:

• Hard to fully customize editor behavior

• Dependency on external ecosystem

• Limited control when scaling features

So I built an alternative that:

• Supports Polotno templates

• Has a similar API structure

• Can be fully customized and self-hosted

It’s still early, but already supports:
• Drag & drop canvas
• Text, images, layers
• JSON import/export

I’m curious:

👉 If you’ve built or used design editors, what was the hardest part?
👉 What features matter most in such tools?

Would love to learn from others building in this space 🙌

(Sharing link in comments if anyone’s interested)