jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pWe study bipartite unitary operators which stay invariant under the local actions of diagonal unitary and orthogonal groups. We investigate structural properties of these operators, arguing that the diagonal symmetry makes them suitable for analytical study. As a first application, we construct large new families of dual unitary gates in arbitrary finite dimensions, which are important toy models for entanglement spreading in quantum circuits. We then analyze the non-local nature of these invariant operators, both in discrete (operator Schmidt rank) and continuous (entangling power) settings. Our scrutiny reveals that these operators can be used to simulate any bipartite unitary gate via stochastic local operations and classical communication. Furthermore, we establish a one-to-one connection between the set of local diagonal unitary invariant dual unitary operators with maximum entangling power and the set of complex Hadamard matrices. Finally, we discuss distinguishability of unitary operators in the setting of the stated diagonal symmetry.</jats:p>