Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a browser-based whiteboard that produces diagrams in a deliberately hand-drawn style. Open it, start sketching, and share a link with anyone who needs to collaborate. There is no sign-up, no account, no onboarding flow. For teams that reach for Miro or FigJam mainly to do quick sketches and architecture diagrams, it covers the common case without the seat pricing.

The collaboration mode uses end-to-end encryption. When you share a session link, the encryption key is embedded in the URL fragment, which is never sent to the server. This means the server that hosts the collaboration relay cannot read the content of your diagrams. For teams working on anything sensitive, that is a meaningful difference from SaaS whiteboard tools that store everything server-side.

The hand-drawn aesthetic is intentional and polarising. Diagrams look sketched rather than polished, which works well for architecture discussions, wireframes, and brainstorming where rough is the right tone. It is not a replacement for draw.io or Lucidchart if you need swim lanes, UML notation, or precise technical diagrams.

Self-hosting requires two components for the full experience: the static frontend and the excalidraw-room WebSocket server for live collaboration. The frontend alone gives you a private drawing tool. Adding the room server enables shared sessions. The MIT licence means you can embed it in internal tools or products without restrictions.

The Excalidraw component is also published as an npm package, which is why it appears inside tools like Notion, Confluence, and Obsidian as an embedded diagramming surface.

Excalidraw: Pros & Cons