What flowss is

flowss is a platform for making diagrams, models and publication-ready figures. You can type a sentence, paste diagram code, drop in a dataset, sketch something by hand or photograph a whiteboard, and you end up with a diagram you can keep editing rather than a picture you can only look at. There are nine connected studios on one platform, 110 rendering engines and 5,012 curated templates. One Library, one command palette and one set of quality checks run through all of them. This page explains what each part is for, how the parts connect, what each plan includes, and where to go next.

At a glance

The name

The product is called flowss and the name is always lower case. You will see that spelling in the navigation, on every page title and in this documentation. The formal name, Flow Systems Studio, appears in contracts and legal pages. The company that operates the service, signs the Terms and is responsible for your personal information is Voranox Inc.

Some internal identifiers are older than the current name, and you may see them in web addresses. Weave lives at /lucidflow and Evidence lives at /atlas. These addresses are permanent, so your bookmarks and saved work always keep working. Only the display names changed.

What you can make

flowss started as a code-to-diagram studio and now covers far more ground. In practice, people use it to make:

• Software and architecture diagrams: UML, sequence diagrams, C4 models, entity-relationship diagrams, cloud architecture, state machines and network layouts.
• Business, strategy and planning diagrams: Wardley maps, business model canvases, story maps, customer journey maps, weighted decision matrices, funnels, quadrants, Gantt charts, roadmaps and RACI matrices.
• Process, operations and risk models: real BPMN 2.0 processes you can lint and simulate, value-stream maps, SIPOC, control charts, Pareto charts, fault trees, bowties, decision trees and risk matrices.
• Charts and data visualisations: Vega-Lite, Vega, Plotly, Sankey, treemaps, funnels, waterfalls, heatmaps and choropleth maps.
• Maths, science and academic figures: PRISMA and CONSORT flows, causal DAGs, pedigrees, phylogenies, 3D molecules, circuits, free-body diagrams, chemical equations, KaTeX maths and more.
• Journal-ready multi-panel figures built from your own data, sized to a real journal column.
• Evidence graphs and syntheses from real papers: screening, extraction, meta-analysis and GRADE-style tables.
• Courses and study maps you rebuild from memory on a spaced-retrieval schedule.
• Whiteboards, wireframes and freehand sketches that can be turned into editable diagrams.

Five ways in

The platform is built so that whatever you already have in hand can become working material.

Paste-code detection and the data door do not need AI for formats flowss recognises locally. That means they work on every plan. Describing and photographing always go through AI, which starts on Starter (see AI in flowss).

Tip: You can try the platform on the flowss home page before you even create an account. Paste Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz DOT or a CSV table into the panel beside the headline and it is drawn on the spot, in your browser. Pasted BPMN XML is recognised and the panel names the studio it belongs in, and a typed sentence is routed: the panel names the engine or studio it would use and why. Press Enter and your diagram travels with you into sign-up, so it is the first thing you see after creating your account.

The nine studios

A studio (also called a workstation) is a dedicated workspace for one kind of work. Every studio sits under the same header, keeps its work in the same Library and is reached through the same command palette. They differ in what you work on and in which checks they run.

If your plan doesn't include a studio, opening it takes you to the pricing page with a short note saying the studio is part of Starter. Nothing you have already made is affected. In the app menu's Studios list, a studio your plan does not include shows a lock and the word "Starter".

Studio

Studio is the universal canvas. It renders every engine that can be drawn as source code: Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz, D2, Vega-Lite, Plotly, KaTeX, Wardley maps, PRISMA, causal DAGs, circuits, molecules and around ninety more. You write or paste source, and the diagram updates live beside it. You can also click a label on the rendered diagram to rename it, recolour it or delete it. Around the canvas you have the engine and template library, style presets, an icon library, a Data → Chart panel, Diagram Intelligence, a diagram timeline (version history), TikZ/LaTeX export and an AI prompt. Studio is free. See The Studio editor.

Study

Study turns any subject into a diagram-first course. You get lessons, a tutor beside the course, and knowledge maps you rebuild from memory on a spaced-retrieval clock. Its planner, Scholar (at /scholar), starts from the date of your exam and the minutes you have. It plans backwards through the prerequisites, schedules your reviews and forecasts how ready you will be on the day. Any diagram in flowss can be handed to Study with "Study it", and it becomes course notes. See Study.

Evidence

Evidence turns a research question and a stack of papers into a cited evidence graph you can defend. It handles screening, extraction, random-effects meta-analysis, publication-bias checks and GRADE-ready summary tables. Before a claim can reach the synthesis, it must quote its source; a claim whose quote isn't in the source text is rejected. Any diagram can be sent to Evidence with "Research it" to build an evidence scaffold. See Evidence and Screening, extraction and synthesis.

Lab

The Lab is where you write research figures as typed code in FlowScript, the flowss research language. Every element has a domain type (study, cohort, arm, outcome, service, task and others), and the numbers propagate. If a cohort says 1,240 people were eligible after 198 were ineligible and 64 declined, the Lab checks that the arithmetic matches the parent count. One model can render as several publication views, such as a CONSORT flow. The Lab also carries reporting-standard checks and publication export. See Lab and The FlowScript language.

Weave

Weave is a drag-and-drop diagramming canvas. You place shapes, connect them and let the tidy-up tools align things for you. It checks the canvas as you work for overlapping nodes, unlabelled decisions and dangling connectors, and Fix all safe applies every fix that cannot lose work, in one undoable step. Its templates include ready-made architecture boards such as an AWS three-tier web app in a VPC, a Kubernetes cluster topology and zero-trust network access. See Weave.

Science

Science is an illustrated figure composer for biology, chemistry, physics and maths, built on an icon canvas. It checks your figure as you draw. Deterministic checkers read the figure's text for equation balance, unit consistency, physical constants, identifiers such as DOI, CAS and PDB, and species nomenclature. Each finding comes with a one-click fix where a safe fix exists. See Science and the long-form Science verification model.

Figure

Figure takes a dataset and turns it into a multi-panel figure at your journal's real column width. Journal presets include Nature, Science (AAAS), Cell Press, PNAS, Elsevier, IEEE, PLOS and Springer, plus a generic option. Figure runs a compliance preflight on panel lettering, type-size floors and similar rules before the export gate opens, and has a statistics bench for the analysis behind each panel. Each figure is also kept as a document in your Library, so you can find, rename, trash and restore it there like any other document; it always opens back in Figure, because no other studio reads its panels and data. See Figure and Figure analysis and statistics.

BPMN

BPMN is a full BPMN 2.0 modeller with pools, lanes, events, tasks and gateways, a properties panel and inline lint. It runs a soundness check that decides whether every case can finish, using a state-space search. It also offers token-flow simulation with cycle-time percentiles and bottleneck ranking, and process mining that discovers a model from a CSV event log. See BPMN.

Sketch

Sketch is a freehand whiteboard with pens, shapes, arrows that stay attached, frames and boards. One button reads your drawing and turns it into diagram code. The core canvas is free and includes a starter set of 12 wireframe presets (browser, mobile, navbar, sidebar, button, input, form, card, image, table, modal and login), five saved personal components, and conversion to Auto-detect, Mermaid, Weave, D2 and Graphviz. Starter adds the full kit of 111 wireframes, every conversion target, unlimited personal components, presentation mode (frames as slides) and version history. See Sketch.

Engines and templates

An engine is the renderer behind a notation. Mermaid, PlantUML, Graphviz, Vega-Lite, the Wardley map engine and FlowScript are all engines. flowss ships 110 of them. 108 open on the universal Studio canvas. The other two, BPMN and the Weave canvas, open in their own studios because they are full editors rather than text notations. FlowScript also opens on the Studio canvas, but its home is the Lab, where you get its property panel, specialist and publication tools.

Engine pickers group the engines into domains so you can browse by what you are drawing. Between them, the rows below list all 108 engines that open on the Studio canvas, by their names in the launchpad's Pick an engine door:

Every engine has a reference page under Engines, and the engine-family pages in this guide explain when to choose which (see Choosing an engine).

A template is a ready-made, working example written for one engine. The 5,012 templates fall into 17 categories: UML & Software, Flow & Process, Data & Schema, Architecture, Project & Planning, Research & Academic, Scientific Plots, Mathematics, Life Sciences, Chemistry & Physics, Geo & Spatial, Business & Strategy, Operations & Ops, AI & Pipelines, Lean & Flow, Risk & Reliability, and Custom / SVG. Browse them at /templates, inside the Studio's library, or by typing in the command palette. See The template gallery.

Where rendering happens

Most engines draw your diagram in your browser or on our own servers. Two families are the exception. PlantUML is drawn by a PlantUML server (the public plantuml.com, unless flowss hosts its own), and a small set of Kroki-backed engines is drawn by Kroki, a third-party render service. For those engines your source is relayed by our server to that service, and the Studio says so in a notice under the engine name in the code sheet. We do not store or log that source. The headless render API does not serve these engines, and an embed cannot draw PlantUML; render them in the Studio instead.

One platform underneath

The studios are one platform underneath, not nine separate apps. A handful of shared surfaces make that true.

See Moving work between studios, Your library and the long-form Continuum and Flow explainers.

Checked as you work

Each studio runs its own checks while you work. Each check says in plain words what is wrong and, where a fix is safe, offers the fix. None of these checks is a model guessing; they are deterministic rules.

Every document also carries a readiness level: Empty, Draft, Sound, Reviewed or Publishable. A document only moves up by passing the checks for each level: Sound means every mechanical check passes, Reviewed needs a quality score of at least 70% with no dimension below 60%, and Publishable needs at least 86% with no dimension below 75%. In the BPMN studio, the level that is called Sound elsewhere is shown as Checked. That's because "sound" is a formal BPMN property with its own separate verdict. See Core concepts and glossary for exactly what each level means.

The work model

Underneath every studio, the platform models the work itself as seven stages in the order work usually happens. Only verification is required, because a document whose source does not parse is broken whatever else is true of it. You can skip every other stage.

The long-form work model explains the stages, the critique dimensions and the readiness ladder in depth.

AI in flowss

AI is woven through the platform, but none of the drawing depends on it. Here is how it splits by plan:

Hosted AI is priced in points. One standard AI call costs 1 point, an Architect run 4, an agent run 8 and a deep-specialist run 47, and an attached image adds 2; a multi-step flow costs the sum of its steps. The monthly allowance resets at the start of each calendar month (UTC). Top-up packs are 100 points for $5 or 500 points for $20; purchased points never expire and are spent only after the month's allowance. Packs are available only on plans with a hosted allowance. See AI in flowss, AI points and limits and Bring your own AI key.

What the AI does:

• Drafts diagrams from a description, a photo or a sketch.
• Refines an open diagram from a plain-English instruction ("make the layout left-to-right", "use a colourblind palette").
• Repairs a diagram that fails to render (render, then AI, then re-render). This automatic repair is on by default, so a broken diagram's source is sent to the AI provider without asking; switch it off in the Studio's Settings under Repair broken diagrams automatically. You can always undo a repair.
• Converts between engines where no direct transpiler exists.
• Exports TikZ/LaTeX.
• Gives every studio its own named agent, each with a specialist role: the flowss BPMN Agent (Process architect), the flowss Lab Agent (Lab methodologist), the flowss Weave Agent (Visual designer), the flowss Sketch Agent (Sketch interpreter) and the flowss Studio Agent with its stage specialists and multi-studio Conductor.

Separately, the Resident in the Studio (a small dot at the bottom left of the canvas) watches the diagram with deterministic structural checks, not an AI model, and proposes fixes you can apply in one click and undo with one keystroke. See The flowss Studio Agent: prompt and quick help and The flowss Studio Agent and its modes.

Working together

Collaboration means different things in different studios, so here it is per studio.

Starting a live session begins on Plus, which allows up to 3 people including the host. Ultra removes the cap and adds voice and screen sharing in every live session (a voice call connects up to 8 people). Guests can join a session on any plan, because the session belongs to its host's plan. Comments and shared cloud projects start on Plus. Teams with Owner, Admin and Member roles start on Plus, and shared workspace component libraries are part of Ultra.

Note: Live presence, voice and person-to-person handoffs inside private projects (cloud projects, team projects and Evidence investigations) are temporarily unavailable while access controls are improved. Saved project changes, permissions, comments and component libraries keep working, and public share-link live sessions are unaffected.

See Sharing and permissions, Comments and review, Live collaboration, Teams and organisations and Classrooms, cohorts and assignments.

Learning built in

• flowss Academy at /learn is a hands-on course in a stamped practice sandbox of every studio: seven Foundations tracks on the platform, a Core, Practitioner and Expert level for each of the nine studios, and five Mastery capstones. Each step checks your work as you go, and server-verified exams lead to the flowss Academy Certified Practitioner certificate. A fresh sign-up lands here first. See Learn tracks.
• Reference pages cover the engines at /docs/engines.
• The Classroom at /cohorts lets you start a cohort, share its join code, post assignments with a starter diagram and review your students' submissions and give each a grade and feedback. A graded submission is final until you clear the grade.

Getting your work out

Some studios add their own formats, such as BPMN 2.0 XML, journal bundles from Figure and Lab, and Word reports from Evidence. See Exporting your work, Embedding and the render API, The REST API and The flowss MCP server.

Plans at a glance

Where billing for a paid plan is not open yet, its card shows "Join the … waitlist" instead of a checkout button. Joining costs nothing. See Plans and what they include and Managing your subscription.

Where your work lives

• In your browser. Each studio saves what you are working on to this browser's storage as you type, so a reload never loses an edit.
• In your account. Every studio needs an account, and while you are signed in your workspace, Library and Vault are copied to our servers automatically, on every plan, so they follow you between devices. There is currently no way to turn that off.
• In a link, if you share one. A share link puts the compressed diagram source in the link's query string, and our servers read it to build the link preview. Treat any share link as public.
• With an AI provider, if you use AI. AI features send your prompt and diagram source to our server, which calls the provider. With your own key, the provider bills you directly. Automatic repair of a diagram that fails to render is on by default and sends that diagram's source without asking; you can switch it off in Settings.
• With a render service, for two engine families. PlantUML and the Kroki-backed engines have your source relayed by our server to that service to be drawn.

We do not train models on your work and we do not sell it. See Cloud sync, offline work and devices, Privacy and your data and Security at flowss.

Who flowss is for

See Use cases by role.

Places to know

Tips

• Press ⌘K before you go looking for anything. The palette knows every engine, template, screen and action, and your own documents too.
• Press ? in any studio to see the keyboard shortcuts that apply on that screen. See Keyboard shortcuts.
• Start on the Free plan in the Studio. It is a complete product on its own, with every engine and the template catalogue written for it.
• If you are new, the 6-minute Platform essentials track in the Academy teaches the three skills that work in every studio.
• Use the Flow Dock (⌘J) to pick up where you left off in another studio. Use "Take it further" to send what you are looking at onward.

Limits and known constraints

• Every studio, and opening a shared link, needs a signed-in account.
• Free accounts keep 3 figures per studio and 3 cloud projects. Nothing is ever archived or made read-only when you reach the cap; a fourth is refused with a message asking you to delete one or upgrade. A diagram someone shares with you still opens when your list is full, as an unsaved shared view.
• Free has no AI at all. Describing, photographing, the launchpad's sketch pad, AI style presets, the AI prompt and agent, automatic repair and TikZ export all need Starter (your own key) or Plus (hosted points). Sketch's own conversion of clean drawings to Mermaid, Graphviz or D2 works without AI.
• Workspace sync to your account is automatic and cannot currently be switched off.
• Share links are capped at about 8 KB (8,000 characters of link). Larger diagrams need exporting or a live session.
• A Figure document always opens in Figure; it cannot be handed to another studio, because no other studio reads its panels and data. If browser storage is nearly full, a figure's Library copy is refused and reported, and the figure stays safe in Figure itself.
• Live presence and voice inside private projects are temporarily paused (see the note under Working together).
• Self-service account deletion is temporarily unavailable; data export from the account page works, and support can process a deletion request. See Account settings and your data.
• Enterprise identity, audit, residency and tenancy features are planned for general availability and do not exist yet.
• Installing the app does not download every engine for offline use. Already-loaded editors keep working if your connection drops, but signing in, opening a studio, AI, sync, collaboration and the render-service engines all need a connection.

Troubleshooting

For anything else, see Troubleshooting and FAQ and Reliability, status and support.

Related pages

• Quickstart: your first diagram in ten minutes
• Core concepts and glossary
• Creating an account and signing in
• A tour of the workspace
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Plans and what they include
• AI in flowss
• Your library
• The work model
• Continuum: the one-platform layer