About
Nowline is a roadmap-native drawing tool, backed by a human-readable DSL.
The .nowline file is the product. CLI output, embedded views, the free web
viewer, the Pro editor — all of them are views of that file.
What Nowline is
Nowline is a text-first DSL for product and engineering roadmaps. The
.nowline file format is plain, indented, and diff-friendly. You commit it,
review it, and merge it like any other source file. The toolchain parses, validates,
lays out, and renders it across SVG, PNG, PDF, HTML, Mermaid, XLSX, and MS Project XML.
It exists because roadmaps deserve the same engineering discipline as code: version control, code review, structured grammar, clear errors, automated rendering. Spreadsheets and whiteboards trade those away for flexibility. Nowline trades flexibility back for consistency.
What Nowline isn't
- Not a project management tool. No resource contention, critical path analysis, or approval workflows. Deliberate exclusions, not gaps.
- Not an issue tracker. Items link out to Linear, Jira, GitHub, Shortcut, Asana, Notion. Nowline never replaces them.
- Not a whiteboard. The grammar constrains what you can express. That's the point.
For the full set of guiding principles, see the OSS principles spec.
License & repos
- lolay/nowline — OSS monorepo (Apache 2.0). DSL, parser, renderer, CLI, embed, IDE extension, GitHub Action.
- Apache 2.0 license — Copyright Lolay, Inc.
- Free, Pro, Enterprise, FedRAMP — proprietary, on the way. See Pricing.
Get involved
The OSS repo welcomes contributions. Bug reports, feature ideas, docs improvements, and new examples all go through GitHub Issues and Discussions. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the developer setup and the Code of Conduct.
For commercial inquiries — Pro, Enterprise, FedRAMP, partnerships — email hello@nowline.io.