"The open-source alternative to Paper.design": one sentence, one person, 76 days, 1,780 stars
What it is: an open-source, self-hostable multiplayer design canvas. You edit in the browser, and agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor draw designs onto the same canvas in real time through a built-in MCP.
Why it took off: it claimed a position nobody occupied. It's the open-source version of Paper.design, which just raised a lot of money, is closed-source and single-player, and has a limited free tier. It also filled a real gap in multiplayer. The author wrote a comparison post first, open-sourced later, and shipped releases frequently. In November GitHub Trending picked it up and amplified it.
BHow you can follow the playbook: don't build another agent design canvas. Instead, take a recently funded, well-reviewed AI tool that is closed-source or rate-limited and build an open-source alternative. Fix the gap people complain about most. Publish a comparison post before open-sourcing, then release frequently after to get on Trending.
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-08-22 · 1,832 stars · 7 days +628
GitHub · stars Data 2026-09-02 → 2026-11-08 (68 days, 32 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
Doop is a design canvas that runs in the browser. People edit on the web while coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor draw designs onto the same canvas in real time through its built-in MCP server. It was built by German founder Kevin Goedecke alone, open-sourced in Aug 2026 22, and by Nov 6 had about 1,780 stars and 209 forks (GitHub). Someone had the same idea earlier and got only a hundred-odd stars. What set Doop apart comes mainly from the first sentence of the repo description, plus three months of steady releases.
A comparison post a week before open-sourcing
In Aug 2026 15, the doop.design blog published "3 Best Paper.design Alternatives in 2026 (Compared)". The opening line was "People look for Paper.design alternatives usually after the honeymoon is over," followed by three alternatives, the first of which was Doop itself. The post praised Paper first: agents are first-class users of design tools, with twenty-odd MCP tools, and "if you work alone in a terminal, it's excellent." It then named three frictions: the canvas lives in a desktop app on one machine, so teammates can't watch the agent work in real time; designs are stored in Paper's own file format; and it's closed-source.
In the comparison table at the end, Doop's column read "Closed, hosted," meaning closed-source and hosted. At that point it was still a cloud product. Seven days later, on Aug 22, the author put the code on GitHub under AGPL-3.0, and changed the first sentence of the repo description to: The open-source alternative to Paper.design.
Paper.design is one of the most highly regarded closed products in this space. Its homepage says it raised a $34M Series A, and Ramp, Vercel, and Perplexity use it. The free tier's MCP allows only 100 calls per week, and Pro costs $16–20 per person per month (Paper's pricing page). Someone searching "Paper.design alternative" first sees Doop's comparison post, and when they click through to GitHub they find the same line again.
What it actually does
- A shared canvas: each design is a shareable link containing artboards, and the artboards render real HTML.
- Agents come in as you: a single
claude mcp addcommand, then OAuth authorization in the browser. After that, agents appear on the canvas with their own cursor, status, and tasks, streaming frames as they draw. People watch alongside, comment, and comments become tasks sent back to the agent. - Model-agnostic: Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, and OpenCode can all connect. The built-in Doop Agent can use your ChatGPT subscription, or your OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or OpenRouter keys.
- Self-host with one command:
docker compose up, with an embedded Postgres database and no other services to configure.
The README's hero image is the pitch itself: Claude Code is drawing a pricing section, while ChatGPT and another Claude Code cursor move across other artboards. You understand it without reading the text. It answers Paper's three frictions one by one: multiplayer, browser, open source. The author also said on X that the personal version will stay free with unlimited use, aimed squarely at Paper's free tier limit of 100 calls per week.
Where the stars came from
| Timeline | What happened | star |
|---|---|---|
| 08-22 | Open-sourced; the next day posted "Open-sourcing Doop… Alternative to Paper.design and Pen.dev" on Reddit r/LLMDevs | About 400 in the first week (one LinkedIn repost post, 08-27) |
| 09-02 | Launched on Product Hunt, 116 votes, ranked #14 on the daily chart | — |
| 09-04 | Submitted a PR to awesome-mcp-servers to add itself; later listed in MCP directories such as glama.ai | — |
| 10-13 to 10-31 | Main releases went from v0.8 to v0.12, desktop from v0.5 to v0.10; 10-20 shipped as an iOS App | 10-17 is 867,10-31 to 1,122 |
| 11-01 to 11-02 | Desktop v0.11 released; 11-02 single-day +232 | 1,436 |
| 11-04 | Hit GitHub's daily Trending, and a wave of auto-generated trend sites picked it up | 1,634 |
| 11-06 | Still gaining +60 to +110 a day | About 1,780 |
(Stars from GitHub daily data and the GitHub page, 10-17 to 11-06; 8–September figures from LinkedIn posts and Product Hunt)
The first two months were a slow crawl: Reddit, PH, awesome lists, MCP directories. These channels cost almost nothing and together brought in a few hundred stars. In early November there was a jump, but I couldn't find a big-account post that drove it; there was nothing on X or Hacker News. Timing-wise, it looks more like consecutive releases plus star momentum, picked up by GitHub Trending, then passed around by a pile of 'trending repos today' aggregator sites. Last 7 days +693; the first 7 days only +139 (GitHub daily data, 11-06).
How dense the releases were: in the contributors list the author alone has 429 commits, everyone else single digits; from Nov 2 to 6, in those five days he alone opened about 70 PRs (GitHub). Shipping at that volume solo suggests batch work by agents, though that's inference. The author's GitHub has 215 followers, and his X bio reads 'bootstrapped two companies past $3M in revenue'; his day job is SlideSpeak, an AI slide generator. He didn't get these stars on personal name recognition.
Who's nearby
| Project | Scale | Compared with Doop |
|---|---|---|
| Paper.design | Closed source, $34M Series A | The target it was aimed at; MCP runs on a local desktop app, solo |
| pen.dev (formerly Pencil) | Closed source, the "6 agents designing together" video spread widely | Designs saved as .pen files in the repo, collaboration via PRs |
| Claude Design / Figma MCP | Big-company features | Tied to a subscription or paid; Claude Design cancellations lose projects, and an HN thread with 302 points complains about it |
| nexu-io/open-design | 106k stars | The leader of 'open-source Claude Design': local, solo, prompts produce prototypes |
| open-codesign / openpencil | 8.2k / 7.1k star | Open source, solo desktop generation or vector design |
| Penpot | 62k stars | Traditional open-source Figma, has MCP, but not designed for agents |
| lassejlv/loora, DeepanshuMishraa/sheet | 144 / 139 star | Almost the same idea; loora even came before Doop |
(Stars from GitHub, 11-06)
"Open-source Claude Design" was already taken long ago. The top repos are at the hundred-thousand-star level. Doop didn't go after that term; it went after a smaller, unclaimed one next to it. On GitHub, the only repo whose description mentions paper.design is this one. Now others are moving in: the closed-source Kite (kite.new) published a "paper.design alternative" comparison page in Oct 28; someone has forked frayingagent/doop, and it is now 404.
Why this one
- Timing: Claude Design(2026-04) made 'letting agents draw interfaces' mainstream, and then people started complaining about being locked into a subscription. Paper had just raised a lot of money and gotten famous, but it's closed, single-machine, with limits on the free tier. People who want something self-hostable that works with any agent have been there all along.
- One-line positioning: 'The open-source alternative to X', where X is the recently funded, well-reviewed but clearly limited closed product. A reader gets what it is in a second, and it also catches X's search traffic.
- The difference is real: multi-user, hosted MCP, agents joining as you, zero-config self-hosting. Those are exactly the gaps in Paper and pen.dev.
- Executed like a company: a cloud product first, comparison writing first, then open source; the README reads like a product landing page with a cloud badge carrying utm tags; five or six releases in three weeks, plus desktop and iOS.
The idea itself isn't unusual; loora and sheet prove that. What created the gap was the positioning line, the comparison post, and the release density.
If it were you
Verdict: B. 'Find a recently funded, well-reviewed closed product and build its open-source alternative' is a clear play you can copy, and Doop shows an unknown person can get close to 2,000 stars with it. But the agent-design canvas space is already crowded, and Doop itself is only mid-sized; the bigger cost is execution. 429 commits solo and dozens of releases is a volume not everyone can sustain.
Who it suits: full-stack developers who can build a complete product alone (or with agents) and are willing to ship releases frequently for months. Writing comparison posts in English and knowing a bit of SEO is a plus.
Who it doesn't suit: anyone expecting one launch to take off. For Doop's first two months, stars rose only a handful to twenty-some a day; it got picked up by Trending because each release followed the last. It's also a bad fit for another agent-design canvas: 'open-source Claude Design' and 'open-source Paper' are both already taken.
How to do it:
- Pick a different target. Look for AI tools that raised a Series A in the last few months, have a good reputation among developers, but are closed, have usage caps, or only run locally. Confirm there's no GitHub repo yet whose description says 'open-source alternative to' that tool, then build its open-source version.
- Fill its most obvious gap. Doop filled 'multi-user'; you should fill whichever gap the target's users keep mentioning in their complaints.
- Write the comparison first, then open source. Before going open source, publish an 'N alternatives to X' post on your own site, rank yourself first, and be honest about what the others do well. The first line of the repo description should be that positioning line, and the first README image should demonstrate the difference.
How to get users: follow Doop's sequence: first post on niche subreddits → Product Hunt → PRs to relevant awesome lists → relevant directories (if it's MCP, go to the MCP directory). After that, keep releasing often so there's always something new; once star momentum gets you into Trending, aggregator sites will amplify it for you.
When to move: the months right after the target raises money, while media is still writing about it, are best. Once 'X alternatives' search results are full of comparison pages (Kite was already grabbing the Doop phrase by late October), you're late.
Signs you misread it: ① Doop is stuck around 2,000 stars a month later, with daily gains dropping to single digits, meaning the 'open-source alternative' label only brings one wave; ② Paper.design lifts its free-tier limits or adds multi-user collaboration, so the target fixes its own gap and the positioning loses its punch; ③ the target you picked already has a 'open-source alternative' repo with over a thousand stars on GitHub, so don't try to take that spot.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Paper.design Web 2025 $34M Series A; used by Ramp/Vercel/Perplexity; Pro $16-20/person/month, free tier 100 MCP calls per week Paper is closed, MCP runs on a local desktop app; Doop is open-source and self-hostable, hosted MCP + OAuth, browser multi-user, unlimited for personal use free pen.dev (formerly Pencil.dev) Other 2026-01 Tom Krcha's product, renamed to August, its "designed by 6 agents together" video spread widely Pencil saves designs as .pen files in the repo and is desktop-first; Doop is a cloud shared canvas Claude Design Big-company features 2026-04-17 HN 1,235 points Tied to Claude subscription; Doop is model-agnostic and self-hostable Figma for Agents / Figma MCP Big-company features 2026-04-14 PH 571 votes, Figma-user audience Closed and paid; Doop is free, open source, HTML-native nexu-io/open-design Open source 2026-04-28 106k star Local-first open-source Claude Design (prompts produce prototypes); Doop is a multi-user real-time canvas + MCP server OpenCoworkAI/open-codesign Open source 2026-04-18 8.2k star Solo desktop generation, not a multi-user canvas ZSeven-W/openpencil Open source 2026-02-17 7.1k star Open-source AI vector design tool; Doop's pitch is browser multi-user + remote MCP Penpot Open source 2015 62k star Traditional open-source Figma, not agent-native lassejlv/loora, DeepanshuMishraa/sheet Open source 2026-07 / 2026-09 144 / 139 star Nearly identical idea; missing the positioning copy, release density, and distribution - Where users come from
- Verified Name-riding positioning + SEO comparison post: the first line of the repo description is 'The open-source alternative to Paper.design'; on its site, 2026-08-15 published '3 Best Paper.design Alternatives in 2026', ranking itself first
- Verified Open source funneling to the cloud version: in August a doop.design blog came first, and open source followed on 8-22; the README carries a Doop Cloud badge with links tagged utm_source=github
- Verified Reddit + LinkedIn: r/LLMDevs 'Open-sourcing Doop…' 2026-08-23; LinkedIn post 'first week 400 stars' 2026-08-27
- Verified Awesome lists / MCP directories: 2026-09-04 opened a PR to punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers; listed in the glama.ai MCP directory
- Verified Product Hunt: 2026-09-02,116 votes, ranked #14 on the daily chart
- Verified GitHub Trending + auto-aggregator sites: notatechguy 11-04 said it made the daily trending; devtrends.ru 11-02, aionradar 11-04, hotrepo, pyshine and others followed
- Verified High-frequency releases / multi-platform (iOS, desktop): 10-13 to 11-04 shipped v0.8→v0.13, desktop v0.5→v0.12; iOS 10-20 on the store; 11-02 to 11-06 the author opened about 70 PRs
- Inferred The specific trigger for 11-02's +232 single day: no big X/HN post found; likely releases plus Trending
kgoedecke/doop: why it took off
Research day 2026-11-06. Sources: our github / hackernews / producthunt / x databases, GitHub API, and web pages found via Jina/Exa/Brave search.
One line
Doop is 'the open-source alternative to Paper.design': a multi-user design canvas in the browser where people edit in the web app, and agents such as Claude Code / Codex / Cursor stream designs live onto the same canvas through a built-in MCP server (OAuth). Its stars came mainly from riding the name of a closed product that had just raised $34M, plus open-source self-hosting and the author's very frequent releases. In early November, GitHub Trending and auto-aggregator sites amplified it once more.
1. Data
- Now: 1,782 stars / 209 forks (GitHub API, 2026-11-06); repo created 2026-08-22, AGPL-3.0, TypeScript.
- Cadence (data card daily + web):
- About 400 stars in the first week (LinkedIn post "AI Design Tool doop Hits 400 GitHub Stars in First Week", 2026-08-27).
- At 10-17 it was 867; after that single digits to twenties a day; from 10-28 it sped up (1,032), 10-31 1,122,11-01 1,204, 11-02 single-day +232 (1,436), then +60 to +110 a day.
- Last 7 days +693, first 7 days +139 (data card).
- A notatechguy.com article from 11-04 said it "hit GitHub daily trending today, 1,589 stars, +125 in 24 hours"; in our database trending_days_any=1.
- Product Hunt: 2026-09-02 listing, 116 votes, #14 on the day (producthunt database). Not much volume.
- Hacker News: our database has no Doop post; related topics are hot though (Claude Design at 1,235 points, 2026-04-17; "Viable open source Claude Design alternative?" Ask HN at 26 points, 2026-05-14).
- X: neither the x-radar corpus nor our x database picked up Doop-related posts; the author @kgoedecke posts it himself (pinned video "Hook up your Claude Code… it's literally insane"), and the GitHub account has only 215 followers.
- Author: Kevin Goedecke, a German in San Francisco, works at GitHub company @SlideSpeak (AI slide-deck company); X bio says "Bootstrapped 2 startups to over $3m in revenue". He alone made 429 commits; other contributors have single digits.
2. Competitors (doing the same thing: letting coding agents draw on a design canvas)
| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How Doop differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper.design | Web/desktop (closed source) | 2025 | Homepage claims a $34M Series A; used by Ramp, Vercel, Perplexity, etc.; free tier MCP 100 calls a week, Pro $16–20/seat/month (paper.design/pricing) | Paper's MCP runs on a local desktop app and teams can't watch agents work in real time; Doop is a hosted MCP + multiplayer in the browser + open-source self-hosting, free for individuals with no call limits |
| pen.dev (formerly Pencil.dev, Tom Krcha) | Desktop/web | 2026-01 | August renamed to pen.dev; the "6 agents designing together" video spread widely | Pencil stores designs as .pen files in the repo; Doop is a shared cloud canvas |
| Claude Design(Anthropic) | Big-company features | 2026-04-17 | HN 1,235 points | Tied to a Claude subscription, projects are lost after cancelling (Ask HN 302 points complaining); Doop isn't tied to a model and can be self-hosted |
| Figma for Agents / Figma MCP | Big-company features | 2026-04-14 (PH 571 votes) | Figma users pool | Closed and paid; Doop is free, open source, HTML-native |
| nexu-io/open-design | Open source | 2026-04-28 | 106k stars, +1,243 over the last 7 days | Local-first "open-source Claude Design" (prompt to prototype); Doop is a multiplayer real-time canvas + MCP server |
| OpenCoworkAI/open-codesign | Open source | 2026-04-18 | 8.2k star | Same, single-user desktop generation; not a multiplayer canvas |
| ZSeven-W/openpencil | Open source | 2026-02-17 | 7.1k star | Open-source AI vector design tool that also talks up Agent Teams; Doop's pitch is multiplayer in the browser + remote MCP |
| JimLiu/baoyu-design | Open source | 2026-06-07 | 6.1k star | It's an agent skill, not a canvas |
| lassejlv/loora, DeepanshuMishraa/sheet | Open source | 2026-07 / 2026-09 | 144 / 139 star | Nearly the same idea (a canvas agents can edit), but it didn't take off |
| Penpot | Open source | 2015 | 62k star | Traditional open-source Figma with MCP; not agent-native |
| Kite (kite.new), Dessn, Lunagraph, Wonder, Paraflow | Web | 2025–2026 | PH 100–500 votes | Closed-source commercial products |
Verdict: the lane is crowded, and open-source "Claude Design alternatives" have already reached projects at the 100k-star level. Doop didn't go after the head keyword "Claude Design alternative"; it targeted the gap "open-source alternative to Paper.design". In our github database, Doop is the only repo whose description mentions paper.design.
3. Growth tactics (evidence)
- Riding the name / positioning as a comparison: the repo description's first line is "The open-source alternative to Paper.design"; the official site published an SEO piece "3 Best Paper.design Alternatives in 2026" a while back (2026-08-15), putting itself at #1. They built SEO landing pages a week before open-sourcing (including landing pages like /design-mcp-for-claude-code). Confirmed.
- Cloud product first, open-source later: doop.design had a blog in August (2026-08-15 "Doop Today: feature tour"), and it open-sourced only 8-22. Open-sourcing itself is an acquisition channel: the README carries a Doop Cloud badge with utm_source=github links. Confirmed.
- Reddit launch: r/LLMDevs "Open-sourcing Doop… Alternative to Paper.design and Pen.dev" (2026-08-23), plus LinkedIn re-sharing, roughly 400 stars in the first week. Confirmed (Reddit body text couldn't be retrieved; title and date come from Brave search).
- Awesome lists: 2026-09-04 submitted PRs to punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers to add Doop (merged/closed); also forked Awesome-Design-Tools and awesome-figma. Confirmed.
- Product Hunt: 2026-09-02,116 votes, ranked #14. Modest results. Confirmed.
- MCP directories / auto-aggregator sites: glama.ai MCP directory, DeepWiki, hotrepo.ai, pyshine (10-02), creatorstoolbox, a Thai dev.to post (09-13), devtrends.ru (11-02), aionradar (11-04), notatechguy (11-04, whose reason was "hit trending"). Most are AI-generated trend roundups, echoes that followed the trending placement. Confirmed.
- Very frequent releases + multiple platforms: from 10-13 to 11-04 they shipped v0.8→v0.13 and desktop v0.5→v0.12; in 10-20 an iOS app "Doop Design" (only 3 ratings on the App Store); in 11-01 desktop v0.11; from 11-02 to 11-06 the author alone opened about 70 PRs and a dozen-plus issues (looks like batch development with agents). External users started requesting features from 11-02 (Android, SVG/PDF import, tokens, etc.). I couldn't find a single big-account post that triggered the early-November wave; by timing, it looks more like 10-31/11-01 consecutive releases plus star growth got picked up by GitHub Trending and then amplified by aggregator sites. Trigger not verified.
- Free pledge: the author said on X "Doop will stay free for individual users without usage limits", aimed directly at Paper's free-tier limit of 100 MCP calls per week. Confirmed.
- Paid acquisition: not found.
4. Why it took off
- Demand timing: Claude Design (April) made "agents drawing UI" a mainstream topic; users then complained about being locked into subscriptions (HN 302 points); Paper raised $34M, has good word of mouth but is closed source, MCP only runs locally, and the free tier is capped. Developers wanted a version they could self-host and connect to any agent.
- Well-chosen positioning: similar open-source projects were all chasing "Claude Design alternative"; Doop went after "Paper.design alternative" and backed it with a comparison SEO piece, so one person claimed the search term.
- Product genuinely differentiated: hosted MCP + OAuth (agents log in with your own identity), multiple agents and multiple people on the same canvas at once, real-time streamed frames, visibility into what each agent is doing, plus zero-config self-hosting (embedded PGlite). These are exactly Paper's and pen.dev's weak spots (single-machine desktop).
- The author executes hard and runs it like a company: five or six major versions in three weeks, plus iOS, desktop, automation, and a Canva plugin; the README reads like a product homepage, and the banner directly demos "Claude Code and ChatGPT cursors on the same canvas", an image that explains itself at a glance.
5. Differentiation, and whether that's why it took off
Differentiation = "multiplayer + hosted MCP + open-source self-hosting + model-agnostic", while Paper is single-machine closed source, pen.dev stores files, and Claude Design is tied to a subscription. That's one main reason for the stars, but what really drove growth was the "open-source alternative to X" name-riding play: one line made the value clear and also captured Paper's search traffic. Looking only at the idea, loora and sheet are nearly identical yet have only a hundred-plus stars; the difference lies in positioning copy, release cadence, and the author's distribution moves.
6. Visibility and copycats
- Visibility: it's circulating in small circles. There's PH, Reddit, and a pile of AI-generated trend articles, and it made GitHub Trending once; no big X accounts or mainstream media coverage found; the author's GitHub has only 215 followers. The non-open-source part (Doop Cloud) has no public revenue; the author says the individual tier is permanently free.
- Copycats: smaller repos with the same idea include lassejlv/loora (July, before Doop) and DeepanshuMishraa/sheet (September); Kite (kite.new) published a "paper.design alternative" comparison page on 10-28, directly contesting the same keyword; Brave search turned up a copied repo frayingagent/doop, now 404.
7. Takeaways
- Find a product that just raised a lot, has good word of mouth but is closed source or capped, and write "The open-source alternative to X" as the first line of the description, alongside an SEO piece titled "X alternatives".
- Open-source while offering a hosted cloud version (the README badges carry utm tags): open-sourcing brings new users, the cloud version keeps them.
- The README hero image demos the core difference directly (several agent cursors on the canvas at once); release frequency is itself a signal that gets amplified automatically by trending and aggregator sites.
- Launch channels: niche subreddits + awesome lists + MCP directories, at nearly zero cost.
8. Uncertain
- The specific source of the single-day +11-02 spike on 232 (no big X/HN post found; our X corpus coverage is limited; stargazer time distribution wasn't pulled due to API rate limits).
- Reddit post engagement wasn't retrieved (403).
- Doop Cloud's real user count, retention, and whether a team plan will charge: unknown.
Sources
- github.com/kgoedecke/doop ;GitHub API(releases / issues / contributors / users/kgoedecke)
- doop.design/ ;doop.design/blog/paper-design-alternatives (2026-08-15)
- www.reddit.com/r/LLMDevs/comments/1vwf4p8/opensourcing_doop_… (2026-08-23, via Brave)
- www.linkedin.com/posts/arthirajendran_github-kgoedeckedoop-t… (2026-08-27)
- www.producthunt.com/products/doop (producthunt database: 2026-09-02,116 votes, #14)
- www.notatechguy.com/doop-open-source-canvas-lets-ai-agents-d… (2026-11-04)
- devtrends.ru/typescript/kgoedecke-doop (2026-11-02);aionradar.com/article/doop-ai-design-canvas-78bff53c
- x.com/kgoedecke ;apps.apple.com/us/app/doop-design/id6820090720
- paper.design/pricing ;kite.new/alternatives/paper (2026-10-28)
- Competitor stars: our github database repo_profile, GitHub API (2026-11-06); hackernews database (Claude Design related posts)