Excalidraw
In-depth reviewCollaborative virtual whiteboard with a hand-drawn feel. Open-source Miro/Figma FigJam alternative — real-time collaboration, offline support, and end-to-end encrypted rooms.
Not sure how to add Excalidraw to your home screen? Step-by-step for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge — it takes about ten seconds, and there is no app store involved.
Own Excalidraw? Have us re-run this measurement — we open it in a real browser, cut the network, and send you what survived.
How to install Excalidraw as a PWA
Screenshots
4 images · scroll →
Why we recommend Excalidraw
Excalidraw is the canonical answer when an engineer says 'let me sketch this real quick.' The hand-drawn aesthetic is intentional — it lowers the perceived investment in any diagram, which makes people willing to throw boxes-and-arrows at problems they'd never bother to formalise in Lucidchart or Figma. The MIT-licensed core has been adopted by Notion (their whiteboard shipped on top of Excalidraw), VS Code (the Excalidraw extension), and Obsidian (excalibrain plugin), which tells you something about the quality of the underlying code. As a PWA, it works fully offline — your boards live in IndexedDB, no cloud account needed. When you do want collaboration, the free public service supports E2E-encrypted rooms (the URL contains the encryption key), and self-hosting via excalidraw-room takes ~10 minutes if you want to keep everything internal. The library of community-built shape libraries (icons, AWS/GCP/Azure assets, mermaid sequence diagrams) means you can go from sketch to publishable architecture diagram in the same canvas.
Best use cases
Best for: software architecture sketches in standups, system-design interview preparation, classroom whiteboarding, async PR reviews where a diagram explains intent faster than text, and quick collaborative brainstorming on a Zoom call (everyone hits a shared link). The Mermaid-to-Excalidraw bridge is excellent for turning text-defined sequence/flow diagrams into editable shapes.
Honest limitations
Not for: high-fidelity UI mockups (Figma owns this — Excalidraw's strength is purposeful imprecision). Not for: massive boards with 1000+ elements — the canvas slows down past a few hundred shapes. Real-time collaboration via the public server has no persistence: when the last participant leaves, the room disappears unless someone exports the file. For team-grade persistence, self-host or use a wrapping product like Excalidraw+.
Are you the maker of Excalidraw? Claim this listing →
More in Productivity
GIF Compressor is a free online tool designed to reduce GIF file sizes directly within your web browser without requiring file uploads or account creation. It processes files locally to ensure privacy and offers a range of advanced settings, including adjustable compression levels, custom width resi
Free site-plan software for drone light shows and fireworks displays. Draw flight areas, geofence rings, start grids, and NFPA 1123 fallout zones on satellite imagery, measure audience separation, and export a permit-ready PDF. Works as a guest — no account needed to plan.
ScanCompta is a receipt scanning app for freelancers and small businesses. Photograph any receipt and AI extracts the total, VAT, date and category in seconds. Organise receipts by client folder, log mileage, then send your accountant a CSV and every supporting document in one click.
Free suite of browser apps — PDF merge/compress, background removal, image converters, audio transcription, notes, media player — on a desktop-style workspace where apps share files. No accounts, no limits; processing runs on-device, works offline after first visit.
Measure download, upload, and ping in one clean tap. It reports download, upload and latency separately, with no account and no install, so you can check a connection from any device in a few seconds and compare the three figures over time.
The open-source web editor for slide decks — create, present, and share presentations from the browser, with live audience interaction. The project is now archived: the hosted editor is offline, but the code remains open source and self-hostable.