Free diagram maker
Network diagram maker
A network diagram answers the question everybody asks in an incident: what is connected to what. Drawn once and kept somewhere findable, it saves an hour every time something breaks.
Free, no account, and nothing you draw is uploaded.
Published . By the DiagramDesk team.
The palette has the shapes this needs, including a cloud, a 3D node for servers and a cylinder for storage, and connectors that route themselves around your layout.
Who a network diagram is for
- Documenting a small office or home lab before you forget how you wired it
- Planning a change, and showing what it touches
- Explaining an architecture to somebody who does not work on it
- Handover notes, so the next person is not guessing
Physical or logical: pick one per diagram
A physical diagram shows where things are and how they are cabled: which switch sits in which cabinet and which port goes where. A logical diagram shows how traffic moves: subnets, VLANs, the firewall between them and the routes out. Both are useful, and a diagram that tries to be both is the hardest kind to read.
If you only draw one, draw the logical view. It answers the questions people ask during an outage, such as what can talk to what, and it changes less often than the cabling does.
What to put on it, and what to leave off
- Roles beat model numbers
- “Web server” is more useful in an incident than the exact hardware. Put the model in a note if you need it.
- Draw trust boundaries
- A dashed container around everything inside the firewall makes the security story readable at a glance.
- Do not draw every cable
- One line per logical connection. A diagram that shows all four uplinks is harder to read and no more useful.
- Date it
- Put the month in a corner. A network diagram with no date gets trusted long after it stopped being true.
Drawing the network
- Open the template, which has an internet cloud, a firewall, a switch and three machines.
- Rename each box with its real hostname or role.
- Add machines by dragging a dot down from the switch onto empty canvas.
- Put the IP address or VLAN on the connector label rather than inside the box.
- Colour by zone: one colour for public, one for internal, one for management.
- Export a PDF and keep it with the runbook, not on somebody's laptop.
Ready to draw yours?
The example above opens in the editor, so you can edit rather than start cold.
Network diagram questions
Are there AWS or Azure icon sets?
No. The palette is a general one, so cloud services are drawn with the cloud, node and database shapes and labelled. Official icon sets come with their own licence terms, which is why they are not bundled here.
Can it scan my network?
No. Nothing in this editor touches a network or a server; it is a drawing surface that runs entirely in your browser.
Can I put a real photo or logo on it?
Yes, with Insert image. The image is embedded in the diagram on your device.
How do I show redundancy?
Draw both paths and mark the standby one with a dashed connector, with a label saying what triggers the failover.