Excalidraw

What Excalidraw does

Excalidraw is a whiteboard for quick diagrams, wireframes, architecture sketches and explanations. Everything is drawn on an infinite canvas in a deliberately rough, hand-sketched style, which keeps the focus on ideas rather than polish. The toolset is small: rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows that stay attached to shapes, lines, text, free drawing, images and reusable shape libraries. Diagrams written in Mermaid syntax can be turned into editable drawings.

The project is two things in one repository. The core is a React component published on npm, which many other products embed. The app at excalidraw.com is described by the project as a minimal showcase built on that component; it adds offline support, autosave in the browser, live collaboration and shareable links.

Privacy and encryption

Excalidraw is local-first. Unless you share a drawing, it stays in your browser. When you create a share link or start a live session on excalidraw.com, the scene is encrypted in the browser with a random key that is placed after the # in the URL. Browsers do not send that part of the address to the server, so the server only stores and relays encrypted data. Anyone who has the full link can read the drawing, so treat links like passwords.

Drawings can be saved as .excalidraw files, which are plain JSON, or exported as PNG and SVG.

Self-hosting Excalidraw

The project publishes a Docker image that serves the client as static files through nginx, and its documentation says the image contains no analytics or tracking. The same build can be placed on any static web host. The important caveat, stated in the official docs, is that a self-hosted instance does not currently support sharing or collaboration. The production build sends share links, collaboration and the library browser to Excalidraw’s own services, and while an example collaboration server (excalidraw-room) is published, there is no packaged setup for running the full stack yourself. For a private multi-user whiteboard you will need to wire those parts up or pick another tool.

Hosted version

excalidraw.com is free to use. Excalidraw+ is the developers’ commercial workspace: its free solo tier gives one scene, while the paid Plus plan adds unlimited scenes and folders saved in the cloud, access management, comments, presentations, voice hangouts and screen sharing, PDF and PowerPoint export of frames, team management and a REST API and MCP server in beta.

Limitations

Excalidraw is a drawing surface, not a full workshop platform. The open source app has no templates library for retrospectives or workshops, no voting or timers, and no comments; some of these are part of Excalidraw+. The sketchy style is a feature, but it is not meant for polished presentation graphics. Self-hosters lose collaboration unless they build it themselves.

Who it suits

Excalidraw fits developers, technical writers and teams who want fast, readable diagrams and a whiteboard they can open in seconds, and product builders who want to embed a drawing canvas in their own software. Organizations that need a self-hosted collaborative board should check the collaboration limits first; WBO is simpler to run with live collaboration built in.