Onlook

TL;DR – Onlook is building the Cursor for designers, making it easy for designers and developers to collaborate in code. Onlook’s open-source visual editor was the #1 trending repo on GitHub, and has over 6.8k stars.

➡️ Try Onlook today ⬅️

Here’s a sneak peak of what it’s like to design with Onlook.

Hey there, we’re Daniel and Kiet, and we’re building Onlook (onlook.com), the Cursor for Designers.

The Problem

There have been many attempts at solving the problem of design to dev handoff. But for so many tools in the market, there was always compromise. Either the tools were too complex for designers or too cumbersome for engineers to implement.

They were all built to abstract away code, but we’re in a new era of product development—where code isn’t the barrier. The real challenge is giving builders the best way to work with it. In other words, creating things with code has become more of a UX problem than a technical one.

Our Solution

Our product can be best described as a visual IDE – you can either start with building a new app from a prompt, or import your existing NextJS / Tailwind app with Onlook. Once you run your app, you can start designing the interface directly as it’s rendered.

Want to change a color? Want to move a div? Want to create a new page? You can do it yourself, or ask Onlook’s AI chat to do it for you. Because everything is one-to-one in code, you’re creating the real product with your edits, and you can always right-click to view your code in your preferred code editor.

And, when you’re ready to share your creation with the world, you can host your project through Onlook with just a click.

How we got here

We started Onlook because we had experienced both sides of the design / engineering gap. Daniel has been a designer for over a decade, and Kiet was an engineer at ServiceNow and Amazon working directly with designers.

Kiet reached out to Daniel on YC’s Cofounder matching platform after starting the company in January of 2024, and shortly after we decided to team up and work together. If you’re looking for a cofounder, we wrote a bit about that process that you may find useful on our company Substack.

We launched on Hacker News and the project quickly earned over 1k GitHub stars. People were compelled by the idea of an open-source visual editor for code, and it felt like the timing was right. Since launching, we’ve continued to refine our editor to make it even better, and have since earned 6.8k stars, tons of contributions.

Also, Onlook was recently ranked as the #1 trending repo on GitHub!

Use Onlook

You can get started today by downloading Onlook.

People use Onlook for prototyping ideas, for building their product, and for hosting their website. Thanks to Paratus Health, SalesPatriot, Calltree.ai, NextByte, Casixty, TrainLoop, and Scout for being early partners and for using Onlook to build their sites and products!

Asks

• Try Onlook out and reach out to us with your feedback and questions. We love when people send us screen recordings, written feedback, and ideas. Email Daniel – daniel@onlook.com.
• Contribute – Help us build the future of design and development tools! We have an active community of contributors from all over the world, and working on a design editor is very fun. Feel free to browse our open issues and contribute, or support the project with a star! ⭐
• Follow us – We put out a lot of content in a lot of places:
  • Join our Discord community
  • Follow Onlook on X
  • Follow Onlook on LinkedIn
  • Subscribe to Onlook on YouTube
  • Subscribe to Onlook on Substack – we like sharing our learnings of building a company in detail here

Onlook is building the uncompromising design and development tool – One familiar to designers and infused with AI to make excellent code that developers love.

With Onlook, we hope to empower anyone to make incredible websites, incredibly fast, and we can’t wait to see what you create!

About Us

Onlook is founded by Daniel Farrell (LinkedIn), a designer with a decade of design consulting experience, a first 100 Bird employee, and former Head of Growth at DIMO, and Kiet Ho (LinkedIn), a former engineer at Amazon and ServiceNow.