ERDone vs DrawSQL — your repo, more dialects, less money

DrawSQL and ERDone are both browser-based ERD tools aimed at developers who want to design a database schema without installing a desktop app. They draw similar pictures. The differences are in pricing, what they support, and where your work actually lives.

The shortest version: ERDone Pro is $7/month vs DrawSQL Starter at $19/month for the same solo-developer, private-diagrams use case. ERDone supports twice as many SQL dialects, and your diagrams commit to your own GitHub repo instead of DrawSQL’s cloud. Both tools now ship AI schema review; DrawSQL also has real-time multiplayer editing and AI schema generation ERDone hasn’t shipped yet. If you need live co-editing or AI that drafts a schema from a description today, DrawSQL is the safer pick. If you’d rather pay less, work in more dialects, and check your schema design into the same repo as your code, ERDone is built for that.

How they compare

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

Price: $7 vs $19 for the same job

DrawSQL Starter is the tier that gets you private diagrams, AI review, and the visual editor without team-level features. It’s $19/month for one user, capped at 10 private diagrams and 50 tables per diagram. That’s the closest equivalent to ERDone Pro.

ERDone Pro is $7/month. Unlimited diagrams, no table cap, every dialect supported, full migration tooling, unlimited read-only share links. For a solo founder or indie backend engineer paying out of pocket, the difference is real — $144/year is a meaningful number when you’re already paying for hosting, a domain, monitoring, and three other SaaS subscriptions.

The 14-day free trial is full-featured and doesn’t ask for a card. If ERDone doesn’t fit, you walk away with your diagrams exported as JSON or SQL DDL for any of the eight supported dialects.

Where your work lives

DrawSQL stores diagrams on their cloud. The free tier requires sign-up and gives you public diagrams only — private diagrams unlock at the Starter tier ($19/month). Either way, the canonical copy of your schema lives on DrawSQL’s servers, and the exact rules about who can find or view a “public” diagram are theirs to set and change.

ERDone is built differently. On paid tiers, every diagram commits to your own GitHub repo as designs/{slug}/diagram.json and schema.sql, with full git history alongside the rest of your code. Visibility is whatever your repo’s visibility is — private repo, private diagrams. ERDone’s servers handle authentication, billing, and share-link snapshots (only when you explicitly create one). The diagram itself isn’t stored on ERDone’s servers. On the free tier it doesn’t even reach our servers — it lives in your browser’s local storage, never sent anywhere.

The short version: ERDone never shares your work. You decide who sees a diagram through the repo it lives in, or by generating a share link yourself when you want one. For the developer who values data ownership and would rather not delegate visibility decisions to a vendor, that’s a meaningful difference. For the developer who’s happy with cloud storage either way, it’s neutral.

Eight dialects vs four

DrawSQL supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MariaDB. That covers most web-app stacks, and if you live entirely in one of those four, it’s enough.

ERDone supports those same four plus Oracle, SQLite, Snowflake, and Redshift. The freelancer or consultant working across client stacks notices first — paste a Postgres dump, switch the dialect, regenerate as Oracle DDL. The data engineer touching Snowflake or Redshift notices second. Neither tool supports BigQuery; if that’s a hard requirement, look at Datanamic or ChartDB.

Migration scripts with safety, not just DDL exports

Both tools can export SQL. DrawSQL exports the current schema as DDL — useful for kicking off a fresh database — and as Laravel migrations for PHP shops.

ERDone tracks a baseline per diagram. When you change the diagram, ERDone generates the ALTER script that takes the database from the baseline to the current state — not a full re-create, an actual migration. Before saving that migration to your repo, ERDone flags every destructive operation: dropped columns, narrowed types, NOT NULL added without a default. A summary banner counts them, and a click-through dialog makes you confirm. The buyer who’s had a DROP COLUMN slip through a “quick schema change” once is the buyer who pays for this.

Where DrawSQL wins

• Real-time multiplayer editing with live cursors — ERDone has commit-broadcast sync today, full multiplayer is on the near-term roadmap
• AI schema generation — describe a schema and DrawSQL drafts the tables; ERDone reviews designs with AI but doesn't generate them yet
• Laravel migration export — useful if you're working in a Laravel codebase
• 200+ ready-made templates (SaaS, e-commerce, CRM, Laravel/Rails/Django app schemas)
• Larger logo wall — Cisco, Instacart, Accenture, Storytel, Fujitsu, Asurion among public references

DrawSQL has shipped real things ERDone hasn’t. Real-time multiplayer is the biggest one — two people on the same canvas with live cursors, editing together. ERDone has commit-broadcast sync today (a snackbar when a teammate commits to the repo) but not the live co-editing experience. Full multiplayer is on ERDone’s near-term roadmap, and the snapshot-and-share-link model means ERDone takes a different shape for async collaboration even after it ships. If your team’s workflow depends on synchronous design sessions today, DrawSQL is the safer pick.

On AI, the two tools now split by kind. ERDone ships Pair with Claude — an on-demand AI review of your schema’s design (missing keys and indexes, normalization, naming) on Pro and Team. DrawSQL ships AI schema generation — describe a schema and it drafts the tables — which ERDone has on the roadmap but hasn’t shipped. If you want AI to generate a schema for you today, DrawSQL is ahead; if you want AI to review the schema you’ve already modeled, ERDone now does that.

The template library and the public logo wall are also real advantages. DrawSQL has been in market longer and has the social proof to show for it.

When to pick DrawSQL over ERDone

Comparison pages that pretend the competitor is always wrong are easy to spot and easy to ignore. DrawSQL is a good tool. If your workflow depends on the features above, ERDone isn’t the better answer — and we’d rather tell you up front than have you trial it, 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 would rather their schema design live in the same place as the rest of their work — for less than half of what DrawSQL charges.

At $7/month, ERDone Pro is priced for the indie founder and solo backend engineer paying out of pocket. Unlimited diagrams, no table cap, eight SQL dialects, full migration tooling with destructive-op warnings, and your work committed to your own repo with full git history. The 14-day full-feature trial doesn’t ask for a card.

When the schema changes, ERDone generates the migration script — not a full re-create, the actual ALTER statements — and flags every DROP, type narrowing, and NOT NULL-without-default 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.

If at the end of the trial ERDone isn’t right for you, your diagrams export as JSON or as SQL DDL for any of the eight supported dialects, and your repo is still your repo. There’s nothing to disentangle.

Try ERDone

Start the 14-day trial →