ERDone vs dbdiagram.io — your schema in your repo, not their cloud

dbdiagram.io is the tool most developers reach for when they need to draw a database schema, and it earned that position. It’s been around longer than ERDone, it’s built around DBML — a thoughtful text-based schema language that a lot of developers genuinely enjoy — and its cloud has the AI features and real-time collaboration that newer entrants are still catching up to. If you’re evaluating both, you should know what dbdiagram.io does well before deciding it’s not for you.

The shortest version: dbdiagram.io is the established DBML-based ERD tool with strong AI features and a polished cloud experience. ERDone keeps your diagrams in your own GitHub repo — never on ERDone’s servers — and generates migration scripts with safety warnings before you run them. If you like writing schemas in code and want AI to generate one from a description today, dbdiagram.io is a strong fit. If you want your schema design checked into your repo like the rest of your code, and you want the migration script that gets you from yesterday’s schema to today’s — with a warning before any DROP COLUMN — ERDone is built for that.

How they compare

The matrix is the surface. Four differences below it determine which tool fits which developer.

Your schema in your repo

dbdiagram.io stores your diagrams in its cloud. That’s the model — there’s no self-host option, no BYO-storage, no export-to-git workflow. Your schema design lives on their servers, and you visit their cloud to work on it. For most users, that’s fine; their cloud is reliable and the convenience is real.

ERDone is built for the developer who already commits SQL migrations to their repo and wants their schema design to live in the same place. Connect a GitHub repo on signup, and ERDone commits your diagrams as designs/{slug}/diagram.json alongside generated schema.sql and a migrations/ directory. ERDone’s hosted servers handle authentication, billing, and share-link snapshots — the diagram itself lives in your repo with full git history. Switch branches, open PRs, blame a column change to the engineer who introduced it. The free tier doesn’t even reach our servers for storage: diagrams live in your browser’s local storage until you sign in and connect a repo.

For the indie SaaS engineer who values “own your data, avoid lock-in,” that workflow matters more than a polished cloud experience. Your schema is part of your codebase, not a thing rented from a vendor.

Private by default, even on the free tier

There’s a quieter difference between the two free tiers that matters more than it looks at first.

On dbdiagram.io’s free tier, your diagrams are public — anyone with the link can view them, and password protection and private diagrams are paid features. That’s not a problem for tutorials, open-source schemas, or sketching ideas you’re happy to share. It is a problem the first time you absent-mindedly model the internal table layout for a client’s billing system or a not-yet-launched product and realize the link is sitting in a Slack message somewhere.

ERDone’s free tier stores your diagrams in your browser’s local storage. Nothing leaves your machine until you sign in and connect a repo, at which point your diagrams live in your private GitHub repo. There is no public-by-default state at any tier of ERDone. Read-only share links exist on paid tiers, but you create them deliberately, one diagram at a time, and they point at a snapshot — not your live diagram.

For developers modeling private business data, this isn’t a small distinction.

Migration scripts with safety, not just schema dumps

Both tools generate SQL. The difference is what kind, and what they do to protect you from your own changes.

dbdiagram.io’s Export Schema to Database produces DDL — CREATE TABLE statements for your current schema, with support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. Useful for greenfield work and for handing a schema to someone who needs to stand it up fresh. Less useful for the workflow most engineers actually have: “I changed the schema yesterday, what ALTER statements take production from yesterday’s state to today’s?”

ERDone tracks a baseline per diagram. When you change the diagram, ERDone generates the migration that takes the database from the baseline to the current state — not a full re-create, an actual ALTER script. Before you save it to your repo, ERDone flags every destructive operation: dropped columns, dropped tables, narrowed types, type-class changes, NOT NULL added without a default. A summary banner tells you “3 destructive operations detected” and a click-through dialog makes you confirm. The buyer who’s lost production data to a quiet DROP COLUMN once is the buyer who pays for this.

ERDone also generates DDL for 8 dialects, not 4 — adding MariaDB, SQLite, Snowflake, and Redshift to the list. If your team runs PostgreSQL in development and Snowflake in the warehouse, ERDone produces both from the same diagram.

Visual vs DBML — a real preference split

This one isn’t a “win” for either side, but it determines which tool you’ll enjoy using.

dbdiagram.io is code-first. You type DBML — a clean, well-designed schema language — and dbdiagram.io renders the diagram. For developers who think in code and find drag-and-drop editors clunky, this is the right model. The diagram is a view of your DBML; you edit the source.

ERDone is visual-first. You drag tables on a canvas, draw relationships by clicking from one column to another, edit columns inline. The canvas is the source; the SQL is generated from it. For developers who think spatially about data models — who want to lay out the User and Tenant tables on opposite sides of the canvas because that’s how they remember the schema — this is the right model.

There’s no universally correct answer. Try both for ten minutes; you’ll know which one fits your brain.

Where dbdiagram.io wins

• Dominant mindshare in the developer ERD audience — the default answer when someone asks "what should I use to draw a schema?"
• DBML, a thoughtful text-based schema language that lots of developers genuinely prefer to a visual editor
• AI Assistant for schema generation (capped usage on paid tiers) — ERDone reviews designs with AI but doesn't generate schemas yet
• Real-time collaborative editing — Personal Pro bundles up to 4 free editors; Team adds unlimited editors and viewers
• Public API on the Team tier; multiple diagram views, table groups, header colors, and detail levels on paid tiers

dbdiagram.io has earned its position. DBML is a real contribution to how developers think about schemas — it’s not just dbdiagram.io’s input format, it’s a language other tools have adopted. The AI Assistant solves the cold-start problem for new schemas. And Personal Pro’s “up to 4 free editors” is a generous bundle that ERDone doesn’t match today — if you need a handful of people actively editing the same diagram, dbdiagram.io is the answer at this price point.

It’s also the incumbent. When a developer asks “what should I use to draw an ERD?” on Stack Overflow or Reddit, dbdiagram.io is what gets recommended. That mindshare is real and it took years to build.

The AI story now splits by direction. ERDone ships Pair with Claude — an on-demand AI review of the schema you’ve modeled, flagging missing keys and indexes, normalization, and naming on Pro and Team. dbdiagram.io’s AI Assistant runs the other way: it generates a schema from a description. That’s the piece ERDone hasn’t shipped — “Describe → schema” is on the roadmap. On AI schema generation, dbdiagram.io leads; on AI design review, ERDone has it today.

When to pick dbdiagram.io over ERDone

Comparison pages that pretend the competitor is always wrong are easy to spot and easy to ignore. dbdiagram.io is a good tool with real strengths. There are buyers for whom it’s the right answer, and we’d rather tell you up front than have you trial ERDone, find it doesn’t fit, and churn.

Why ERDone

ERDone is built for the developer who already has a GitHub repo, already commits SQL migrations, and wants their schema design to live in the same place as the rest of their code. If that’s you, the differences in the matrix aren’t just feature-level — they’re workflow-level.

Your diagrams live in your repo, not on our cloud. Your free-tier diagrams live in your browser, not on a public URL. When you change the schema, ERDone generates the migration script — not a full re-create — and flags every destructive operation before you can save it. The DROP COLUMN that would silently lose production data is the kind of mistake the tool was built to catch. SQL generation spans 8 dialects, so the same diagram can target PostgreSQL in development and Snowflake in the warehouse.

At $7/month with no annual commitment, ERDone is priced for the indie founder and solo backend engineer paying out of pocket. The 14-day full-feature trial — twice as long as dbdiagram.io’s Team trial — doesn’t ask for a card. If at the end of it ERDone isn’t right for you, your diagrams export as JSON or as SQL DDL for any of the 8 supported dialects, and your repo is still your repo. There’s nothing to disentangle.

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