DIAGRAMS · ONE OF THE THREE CANVASES · V2026.9.16.3
Draw it once. Let the lines find their own way.
Diagrams is the third canvas in Binse, beside Data Flow and Dashboards, and it is in the installer you already have. 6,161 shapes in 74 libraries, 111,893 icons, and 98 templates to start from. Connectors glue themselves to shapes and re-route while you drag. And because the canvas sits beside a data engine, a diagram can be drawn from a database, from a spreadsheet or from a Data Flow workflow rather than from memory.
6,161
shape definitions in 74 libraries, counted from the registries the product generates its own guide from
111,893
icons in 1,045 packs, searchable by name and usable as a shape or inside one
98
templates in 24 categories, every one of them a real file you can open and take apart
38
formats read, and 32 written, from the same registry the Import and Export dialogs ask
THE EDITOR
The editor with one of the shipped templates open, captured from the running application. The palette is on the left, the page and its scale on the right, and the search box at the top of the palette covers every shape and every icon at once.
01 · THE CANVAS
Open a template. Move a shape. Watch the line follow.
Below is a hands-on sample of the canvas, cut down to run in a browser tab. Switch between templates the product actually ships, drag a shape somewhere else, and see the connectors glued to it re-route around whatever is in the way.
The sample carries a few of the 98 shipped templates and a handful of the 6,161 shapes, drawn in your browser. The app draws all of them, on your own machine, over your own files.
02 · SHAPES, ICONS AND TEMPLATES
6,161 shapes, and a search box over all of them.
The libraries are data rather than code, so the count can be read rather than estimated: 6,161 definitions in 74 libraries, with 111,893 icons in 1,045 packs beside them.
What is in the libraries
Basic shapes and flowchart symbols, swimlanes and frames. Process notations: BPMN 2.0, data flow, IDEF0 and IDEF3, SDL, and DMN 1.3 decision requirements. Software: UML 2.5, entity relationship in three notations, and the C4 model. Infrastructure: network, rack elevation, cloud architecture and ArchiMate 3.
Then the drawing that is not software at all. Floor plans at real scale and site plans. Engineering: P&ID to ISA 5.1 and ISO 10628, electrical and electronic to IEC 60617 and ANSI/IEEE 315, power one-line, ladder logic to IEC 61131-3, logic gates. Building services: plumbing and drainage, heating and ventilation. Safety and emergency planning: evacuation plans, fire pre-plans, accident reconstruction. Business: org charts, customer journeys, timelines and roadmaps, planning boards. Mind maps, Venn sets, whiteboard stamps, and four wireframe kits.
Your own shapes
Make a shape out of a selection, a picture or a vector file and it joins a library of your own. A stencil file exported by another drawing program imports into that library too, so the shapes your team already uses come with you.
98 templates, in 24 categories
Each one is an ordinary diagram file, so opening one and pulling it apart is how most people will learn what the canvas does. Process maps and swimlane processes, BPMN, org charts, mind maps, entity relationship, UML, network, cloud architecture, C4, floor plans, wireframes, timelines, Venn and matrices, retrospectives, workshops and meetings, roadmaps, customer journeys, data flow, enterprise architecture, engineering and building services, vector drawings, safety and emergency plans, and blank starters.
Save any diagram as a template of your own and it appears in the same gallery, beside the shipped ones, out of a folder in your Documents. A team template is therefore a file on a shared folder rather than a service.
The template gallery, with the categories and their counts down the side and a preview card for each template. Every card is a file that installs with the product.
03 · CONNECTORS AND LAYOUT
A line that stays attached, and a page that tidies itself.
The two things that separate a diagram tool from a drawing program. A connector is glued to a shape rather than parked near it, and a layout is one keystroke and one undo.
Two kinds of glue
Glue to the shape and the line picks whichever side makes sense and changes its mind as things move. Glue to a point and it stays on that exact point, which is what a wiring diagram wants.
A connector is right-angled by default, routed around shapes and around other connectors rather than through them, and re-routed while you drag rather than after you let go. Straight, curved with draggable control points, and polyline with corners you place yourself are the other three. Drag a waypoint and that segment is pinned until you reset the route. Where two lines cross, the one on top hops over.
Twenty arrowheads, at either end. Any number of labels on one line, each keeping its place as the line changes. A dash pattern, a width, a cap and a join. A line can be animated so the flow runs along it, on screen, in the exported web page and in an animated .gif. For a line that leaves the page there is an off-page pair, two shapes that name each other and link to each other.
Built from the keyboard
With a shape selected, Tab adds the next shape at the same level and Enter adds a child, both already connected. That is the fastest way to build a tree or a mind map, and it is why the whole canvas is operable without a mouse: F6 moves between the areas of the window, the arrow keys move, resize and rotate, and F2 edits the text of whatever is selected.
19 layouts
Layered, flowchart, orthogonal, tree, org chart, mind map in two directions, radial, balloon, circular, force, stress, series-parallel, swimlane-aware, sequence-diagram, rectangle packing, grid, list and flow. Lay out the whole page, the selection, or the inside of a frame, and keep the previous positions if you would rather nothing jumped.
The menu reads the shape of what you have drawn and suggests one, with the reason written next to it. Apply is a single step, so one undo puts every shape back exactly where it was. A layout frame re-arranges its children as you add to them.
Accessible by design
The outline lists the diagram in reading order, which is what a screen reader announces, and you set that order there rather than inheriting the order things were drawn in. A checker covers alternative text, contrast against the real background in both themes, text size, meaning carried by colour alone, reading order and page names, each with a fix. Every shape definition and every template that ships with the app passes in the light theme and the dark one.
The layout menu, with the suggestion at the top and its reason beside it, and the settings for the chosen layout on the right. The line under the settings is the product's own: applied as one step, undo puts everything back.
04 · DIAGRAMS DRAWN FROM DATA
A picture of your systems, built from the systems.
This is the part a drawing program cannot do, and the reason the canvas is here rather than somewhere else. It shares the connections, the file readers and the formula language with the rest of Binse.
Binding a diagram to data
Shapes bound to rows. A data source is a spreadsheet, a .csv, a .tsv, a .json or a .parquet file, a bounded query on any connection you have already set up in Binse, a table Dashboards already holds, or a web service read as a table. Each source has a key column and a refresh setting: when you ask, every time the diagram opens, or on a schedule. Link a shape to a row and {column} in its text becomes the column, its fields fill in, and rules can read any of them.
Rules, and what they can change. A rule watches a condition and changes one thing: fill, stroke, text, a corner badge, whether the shape is shown, its width, its height, a value written into one of its own fields, the icon it wears, its opacity, the container it belongs to, or a data graphic. A legend is generated from the rule set, each entry carrying its swatch and the number of shapes it currently matches, so a diagram coloured by rules explains itself.
Formulas, the same language as the canvas next door. The Binse formula language can be typed into any data field, and into text between {= and }. It is the implementation Data Flow uses, checked against the data engine's own answers.
13 kinds of chart, drawn as shapes. Bar, column, line, area, pie, donut, scatter, gauge, key figure, sparkline, progress, table and radar, drawn natively so they scale, theme and export like everything else on the page.
Three ways a whole diagram gets built for you
From a table. A flowchart, a cross-functional flowchart or an org chart from a spreadsheet of steps or of people. What it makes stays linked, so a refresh brings changes across, and the link works both ways: write-back sends your edits on the canvas, a renamed step, a new box, a changed owner, back to the spreadsheet, after showing you exactly what it will write.
From a database. Point it at a connection and it reads the schema and draws it: a box per table with its columns, primary and foreign keys marked, and a line per relationship in whichever of the three notations you choose. Refresh goes back to the database and shows what has been added, removed and changed since you drew it, each with a tick, so you choose what to bring across. Going the other way, the tables export as CREATE TABLE statements in nine SQL dialects.
From a Data Flow workflow. Open one of your saved workflows as a lineage diagram: a shape per tool, lines for the data between them, and columns traced through the joins, selects and renames, so you can see where a field came from and what happens to it downstream.
The three canvases pass work to each other
Data Flow has a Send to Diagrams button and a Send to Diagrams tool, handing over the workflow as lineage, the last run step by step, or the table a step produced. Diagrams has a Send to Dashboards button, and Dashboards has a diagram visual that renders a saved diagram, applies the same rules and cross-filters the page when you click a shape. A scheduled run can open a diagram, read its sources again, recolour it and deliver it, with no browser and nothing listening.
An entity relationship diagram of the sample shop database, in crow's foot notation. The dashed box is a view, and the key in the corner is part of the drawing.
05 · WORKSHOPS, PROCESS AND PRECISION
The same canvas, running a workshop or a floor plan.
Three kinds of work that usually need three products, on the page you already have open, with the same undo and the same file.
Whiteboard
Sticky notes with colours, authors, tags and votes. A pen, a highlighter, a marker and an eraser that read pressure and tilt. Lasso, sketch-to-shape, freehand connectors that glue, bucket fill. Stamps, stickers, tape and marks. Tables that take a .csv in and give one back, code blocks with highlighting, notes in Markdown, and embeds that show a poster and load nothing until you ask them to. Voting, polls, estimation and card sorting; meeting, agenda, kanban and timeline frames; clustering by colour, tag, author or keyword.
Process
BPMN 2.0 with a structural validator and a problems panel, typed element properties, and sub-processes that drill down. Modelling conventions you configure, with hints on the canvas as you draw. Token simulation you can play, pause and step, and a discrete-event simulation for time, resources, calendars and cost with what-if scenarios and result charts. DMN decision tables and requirement diagrams with hit policies. Value chains, landscape maps, variants with change propagation, role overlays, and documentation that publishes as a document, a spreadsheet or a web site.
Precision
Rulers with a movable origin, manual guides, real units and a document scale, so a measurement on the drawing means something. A Bezier pen and a point editor. Boolean operations kept as editable compounds, so a shape cut out of another can be uncut. Join, split, reverse and outline stroke. Object snaps and typed entry, for the cases where dragging is not accurate enough.
Walls mitre as you draw them and host doors and windows. Rooms compute their own areas. Dimension lines measure what they are attached to and follow it when it moves, so changing the page scale makes every dimension read again. .dxf goes both ways.
A workshop board on the left, and on the right the same Data tab that turns a table into a diagram. They are the same canvas and the same file, which is the point of putting them in one product.
06 · WHAT IT READS, WRITES AND HANDS OVER
38 formats in, 32 out, and the diagram itself is a zip.
A diagram is a .binsediagram: a zip on your own disk, in a synced
folder or in a repository. Everything on this page writes out into something somebody else can
open.
What it reads
Drop a file on the canvas or ask for it by name. Drawings in .vsdx, .vdx, .vssx and .vstx, with masters, groups, glue, text formatting, layers, pictures, containers and pages. Diagram files in .drawio and .xml, .gliffy, .excalidraw and .tldr. Diagram text in .mmd, .puml, .d2 and .dsl. Process models in .bpmn, .dmn and .xpdl. Graphs in .graphml, .gml, .tgf, .ged and node-and-edge .json. Spreadsheets and .csv files as node and edge lists, as org charts or as tables you map column by column. Six readers for infrastructure as code, including .tf and .tfstate, deployment templates in .json, .yaml and .bicep, and cluster manifests, grouped by region, network, zone and subnet. A local repository as a class or module diagram, SQL DDL, API and schema descriptions, and pages of a .pdf as pictures or vectors. Every import ends with a report saying what came across, shape by shape.
What it writes
Pictures as .png, .jpg, .webp, .bmp, .tif and .gif, plus an animated .gif of the slides or of the moving lines. Vectors as .svg with the text still text and the fonts embedded, an interactive .svg that runs show-and-hide actions, .emf, .eps and .dxf. Documents as .pdf, written by the product itself with selectable text, embedded fonts, paper sizes and tiling; as .docx; and as a self-contained web page. Slides as .pptx, either editable shapes or pictures. Diagram files back out as .drawio, .vsdx, .bpmn, .dmn, .graphml, .mmd, .puml, .d2, .dsl and .bdx. Process documentation as a document, a spreadsheet or a static web site. And source code from a class page in five languages.
A diagram is also text
.bdx is a lossless text form of the same diagram, with a split view: edit the text or edit the canvas, either way. It takes imports, variables and glob selectors, so several files compose into one drawing, and a code frame keeps its source beside it and redraws when the text changes. That is the answer for a diagram that belongs in a repository and has to survive a review.
One element, many views
One element can appear in many views. Rename it once and every view follows; a variant is a page with overrides. Architecture, process, class and deployment models all use it, which is what keeps a large model agreeing with itself.
Presenting, and giving it away
Frames or pages become slides, in an order you set, with presenter notes, a presenter view on a second screen, transitions and an autoplay time. While presenting there is a laser and a spotlight. A shape can do something when it is clicked, in the presentation, in the exported web page and in embed mode: go to a page or another diagram, show or hide a layer, zoom to a shape, open an address, or run one of your scripts.
The web page export writes one self-contained .html file. No server, no internet, nothing to install. It pans and zooms, follows the links in the diagram, honours the show-and-hide actions and the hotspots, and carries every page. Printing takes a sheet size and an orientation, fits to a number of pages or prints at a scale, and tiles a big drawing across several sheets with an overlap you set.
07 · WHAT Binse ENTERPRISE ADDS
Everything above is in Binse. Enterprise adds four more.
Binse Enterprise is in development and has no price and no date yet. The parts of Diagrams that belong to it are built, and this is what they are. What Binse Enterprise is.
Working on one diagram together
Live editing over a relay your organisation runs: who else is in the diagram, where their pointer is, what they have selected, and edits arriving as they are made. Lose your connection and you keep working; the changes queue and merge by operation, so two people editing different shapes keep both edits. Follow somebody and your view goes where theirs goes.
Comments, versions and branches
Comments anchored to a shape or a point, as threads with replies, mentions, reactions and a resolve, written into the file so they are still there for somebody who opens it on their own. Every save is a version: name the ones worth naming, compare any two on the canvas, restore one as a new version. A branch is a copy that knows where it came from, merged back through a review that lists every difference.
Sharing, policy and audit
Share links carrying a role, view, comment or edit, with an expiry, a passphrase and revocation. Guests from outside the organisation. An organisation policy for who may share outside and how long a link lives, and an append-only audit log of who opened, shared, exported, restored, merged and revoked. A diagram can be end-to-end encrypted, in which case the relay stores and forwards ciphertext alone.
The assistant
It edits the diagram rather than a picture of it: it reads the document as structured data and writes structured operations through the same interface every tool uses. Generate a diagram from a description, edit by instruction, explain or summarise, write alternative text, suggest a layout, cluster sticky notes, build a diagram from a pasted document or table, write rules from a description, or fix the validation problems it finds. It runs on a key you enter, kept by Windows for your account, and the settings panel shows exactly what an instruction will send before it goes.
08 · SPECIFICATION
Claim, figure, method.
The same figures as above, gathered into one place, for a reader who would rather scan than press. The claim, then the figure, then how it was got.
Shape definitions
6,161
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE LIVE LIBRARY REGISTRY
Libraries they sit in
74
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE LIVE LIBRARY REGISTRY
Icons, and the packs they come in
111,893, 1,045
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE GENERATED ICON LIBRARIES
Templates, in 24 categories
98
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE TEMPLATE FOLDER AND ITS CARDS
Automatic layouts
19
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE LAYOUT REGISTRY
Formats read, and written
38, 32
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE IMPORT AND EXPORT REGISTRIES
Chart kinds drawn as shapes
13
COUNTED 2026-09-16 · THE CHART REGISTRY
Entity relationship notations
three
CROW'S FOOT, IDEF1X AND CHEN, FROM THE SAME REGISTRY
A saved diagram on disk
.binsediagram
A ZIP IN A FOLDER OF YOUR OWN, ALSO WRITTEN AS TEXT IN .bdx
Editions it is in
both
BOTH EDITIONS, AT THE SAME PRICE, LIKE THE OTHER TWO CANVASES
Operating system
Windows, 64-bit
ONE INSTALLER, PER USER, NO ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS
Version this page describes
2026.9.16.3
COUNTS 2026-09-16 · THE REGISTRIES THE PRODUCT GENERATES ITS GUIDE FROM
Your diagrams stay files
A .binsediagram is a zip in a folder you chose, and the same diagram writes out as text, as a picture, as a document or as a web page that opens on a machine with nothing installed.
Where to go next
The whole user guide that ships inside the product is published here, unedited.