BASALT✓ Verified · basaltarch.io

The problem it solves. Most architecture-diagramming tools stop at the drawing. They'll help you produce a clean picture of your system, but the picture is inert — there's no notion of whether the architecture you've drawn is actually sound against any standard. For teams building industrial and operational-technology (OT) systems, that gap is expensive: the diagram is only the front door to a compliance obligation (IEC 62443, NIST 800-82, the Purdue Model), and today that checking happens manually, in review meetings, spreadsheets, and someone's head. Basalt closes that gap by rendering the diagram from a text DSL and pairing every diagram with a deterministic compliance validator, so the architecture and the "is this allowed?" check live in the same artifact. Who it's for. Teams designing OT and industrial control systems — the people who have to satisfy 62443/800-82/Purdue and can't treat a diagram as just a picture. Basalt treats OT/industrial systems as first-class rather than bending a general software-diagramming tool to fit them. How it differs from Eraser and draw.io: Eraser is diagram-as-code aimed at software/DevOps teams — it's excellent at turning text into clean cloud-architecture and sequence diagrams and living docs, but it has no concept of compliance validation, and its world model is general software infrastructure, not OT. You get the drawing, not the verdict. draw.io (diagrams.net) is a free, general-purpose drawing canvas. It's maximally flexible and maximally unopinionated — shapes on a grid. It knows nothing about your domain, enforces nothing, and validates nothing. It's a whiteboard, not a design authority. Basalt's wedge against both is the deterministic validator: the diagram isn't just rendered, it's checked against named standards, and the check is deterministic rather than an LLM guessing. Combined with the OT-first framing, that's the thing neither Eraser nor draw.io offers — they compete on drawing quality and flexibility; Basalt competes on being right about a regulated domain. One thing worth pressure-testing in how you pitch this: "diagram-as-code with a text DSL" is the part where Eraser overlaps most directly, so leaning on the DSL as the differentiator invites the "isn't that just Eraser?" objection. The compliance validator and OT-first positioning are the parts that have no clean equivalent — that's where the sharper contrast lives.