Comparison
Chinilla vs diagrams.net (draw.io)
diagrams.net is the Swiss Army knife of diagramming. Chinilla is a chef's knife for one specific job. Here is how to choose.
Short answer: diagrams.net wins on breadth (thousands of stencils, many export formats, integrations everywhere). Chinilla wins on depth in one domain: the components actually run. If you need a diagram for a wiki, use diagrams.net. If you need to know whether the design holds under load, use Chinilla.
| Feature | diagrams.net | Chinilla |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | General-purpose diagramming | System design simulation |
| Live simulation engine | No | Yes (deterministic, discrete-event) |
| Components have behavior | No | Yes (12 behavior modes) |
| Stencil and shape breadth | Thousands (AWS, Azure, GCP, UML, BPMN, networks, floor plans) | 7 universal types (focused) |
| Traffic and load modeling | No | Yes (rate, capacity, queue depth) |
| Failure modes (drops, retries, breakers) | No | Yes |
| Storage integrations | Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, GitHub, GitLab, Confluence | Cloud (Supabase) and JSON export |
| Code-to-diagram | No (some plugins) | Yes (15+ languages) |
| GitHub repo to diagram | No | Yes (Pro) |
| AI design partner | No | Yes (xAI Grok, Pro) |
| Templates for system design interviews | No (general templates) | Yes (16 templates, 8 problems) |
| Export formats | PNG, SVG, PDF, HTML, XML, VSDX, and more | PNG, SVG, GIF (Pro), Python, Mermaid, JSON |
| Open source | Yes (Apache 2.0) | No (free tier available) |
| Free tier | Fully free | Yes (3 projects, full engine) |
When to use diagrams.net
- Network diagrams, UML, BPMN, ERDs, floor plans, organizational charts
- Cloud architecture diagrams using official AWS, Azure, or GCP shape libraries
- Embedding into Confluence, Notion, or wiki tooling
- Anything where you need a polished static diagram across many domains
When to use Chinilla
- System design interview prep with running templates
- Validating service topology before writing code
- Teaching how queues, retries, and circuit breakers actually behave
- Stress-testing a design against traffic spikes and outages
- Anywhere you want "press play and see what happens"
Honest tradeoffs
diagrams.net is the better choice when you need breadth, polish, integrations, and a diagram that lives in a wiki. The shape library is enormous and the export pipeline integrates everywhere.
Chinilla is the better choice when the diagram needs to do something. You give up the general-purpose stencils and get a programmable simulation in return. They are not really competitors; they live in different parts of the design workflow.