Excalidraw Alternatives

tldraw is the closest thing to Excalidraw that is not Excalidraw. It is an infinite canvas that runs in the browser at tldraw.com, free, with shapes, arrows, sticky notes, text, frames and freehand drawing, and real-time multiplayer. The look is the main difference: tldraw draws clean, slightly rounded shapes instead of the sketchy hand-drawn lines, so a diagram you paste into a slide deck or a spec reads as finished rather than as a napkin. If your reason for leaving is "my boss says the diagrams look like doodles", this is the shortest move.

The second half of tldraw is a developer product. The same canvas is sold as a React SDK that companies embed in their own software, and its GitHub repository has 51.4k stars. Here is the catch that most comparison guides skip: the SDK is source available, not open source. You can use it freely in development, but production use requires a license key, either a 100-day trial, a commercial license (priced on value, so you talk to sales) or a free hobby license for non-commercial projects, which shows a "made with tldraw" watermark on the canvas. Excalidraw, under MIT, has none of these conditions. The starter kits are MIT-licensed, and the multiplayer kit runs on tldraw sync and Cloudflare Durable Objects.

Tip: moving over is a paste. Select shapes in Excalidraw, copy them, and paste them into tldraw: rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows, lines, freehand strokes and text arrive as editable tldraw shapes, labels and arrow bindings included. On tldraw.com you can draw without an account, but sharing a board asks you to sign in, where Excalidraw lets anyone join a live session by link. For other canvas tools, see our ranking of the best online whiteboards.

draw.io (also known as diagrams.net) is the alternative people pick when Excalidraw feels underpowered for real diagramming. It is a diagram editor with large shape libraries for flowcharts, UML, network and cloud architecture, entity relationship diagrams and org charts, with connectors that snap and reroute when you move a box. Excalidraw is a sketching canvas; draw.io is a drafting table. On a developer forum one user summed it up as "excalidraw is fairly underpowered for diagramming", while another found draw.io slower to edit. Both views are fair: you trade speed of sketching for precision.

The price is the easiest part: it is free, with no sign-up. The source code is under the Apache License 2.0, and the desktop app, an Electron build available for Windows, macOS and Linux, is free under GPL v3 for any purpose if you use it as provided. The desktop repository has 64.0k stars on GitHub. There is even a portable Windows build: extract the zip and run draw.io.exe with no installation, which helps on a locked-down work laptop. draw.io makes no copyright claim on the diagrams you create, and files can live on your own disk or in the storage you connect. One thing to know: the project does not accept pull requests, so you cannot fix a bug yourself the way you could on Excalidraw.

Tip: on a work laptop where you cannot install software, the portable build or the web app keeps your diagrams on your own disk. For more tools of this kind, see our best diagram software ranking, our guide to switching from Lucidchart, and the reverse move in switching from draw.io.

FigJam is the whiteboard inside Figma. It covers the jobs people try to stretch Excalidraw into: brainstorms with sticky notes, user flows, retros, standups and project kickoffs, with over 300 ready-made templates, audio and live chat, stamps and emotes, and AI that sorts stickies into themes or summarizes a session into action items. Its strength is where it sits. FigJam is included with all seats on every Figma plan, so a design team does not buy a new tool; the board and the mockups share the same files, comments and access rules.

How the price reads against Excalidraw: Figma bills by seat type. The Collab seat, which includes full access to FigJam, Figma Slides, Figma Buzz and Figma Specs, costs $3 a month on the Professional plan and $5 on Organization, billed annually. That is half the Excalidraw+ price of $6 per user. A Full seat for designers is $16 a month on Professional with annual billing, or $20 billed monthly. The free Starter plan includes unlimited drafts, which is enough to try FigJam alone.

Two pricing details are worth knowing before you invite a whole team. First, you can invite people from other teams or companies to contribute to a file free for 24 hours, with no login, which covers a one-off workshop with a client. Second, on Professional, seats you add during an annual term are billed as a separate monthly subscription at the monthly price, so a team that grows mid-year pays more per seat than its renewal suggests. See also our guide to switching from Figma.

Miro is what most companies mean by "online whiteboard", and it appears in almost every list of Excalidraw alternatives. It is a full visual workspace: an infinite canvas with 7000+ Miro and community-made templates, diagrams, docs, tables, Kanban boards, slides and timelines, plus timer, voting and private mode for running workshops on paid plans, from Starter. Where Excalidraw is a blank sheet you share by link, Miro is a place where a team keeps all its boards, organizes them in spaces and turns sticky notes into tasks through its integrations. Our full Miro review scores it 3.8 out of 5, and this ranking uses the same score.

How the price reads against Excalidraw: the Free plan costs $0 and gives 3 editable boards; you can create more, but only the three most recent stay editable. Starter is $8 per member a month billed yearly, or $10 billed monthly, and adds unlimited and private boards and visitor editing, which lets people edit a public board with no sign-in. Business is $20 billed yearly, or $25 monthly, with unlimited guests and AI workflows. Starter includes 25 AI credits per member a month.

The trap that costs teams money: the Free plan has no Guest role, so anyone you invite to collaborate becomes a Member and uses a paid seat once you upgrade. On Excalidraw, a collaborator joining a live session never costs anything. Before you upgrade, remove the people who only needed to look once. If Miro itself is the tool you want to leave, see our Miro alternatives, and if you automate boards, our Miro integrations with Make and Zapier.

AFFiNE is a workspace that combines documents, an infinite whiteboard, databases and AI. It appears in the open source lists of Excalidraw alternatives because its editor is MIT-licensed and it is local-first: your workspaces live on your device by default, and cloud sync is optional. For someone who uses Excalidraw inside Obsidian or Notion to draw next to notes, AFFiNE puts both in one app: any page can turn into a canvas and back.

Read the license carefully before you call it fully open source. AFFiNE uses component-specific licenses: the root license is MIT outside its listed exceptions, the backend and some client parts of the Community Edition are under MPL 2.0, and the rest of the covered code is under Enterprise terms. That is still far more open than Miro or FigJam, but it is not the single MIT license of Excalidraw.

The price: the Free cloud plan includes unlimited local workspaces, 10 GB of cloud storage, real-time collaboration with up to 3 members per workspace and 7 days of version history, with no time limit. Pro costs $6.75 a month billed annually, for up to 10 members per workspace and 100 GB. Team costs $10 per seat a month, also billed annually. The Believer plan is a one-time payment of $499.99 for lifetime personal use of Pro. AFFiNE AI is an extra $8.9 a month billed annually. Tip: if you are a solo user, the $499.99 Believer plan pays for itself after about six years of Pro at $81 a year, so it only makes sense if you are sure you will stay. For more options, see our Notion alternatives.

Whimsical is the tool for people who like how fast Excalidraw is but want the result to look clean on its own. It combines boards for flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps and sticky notes with docs, and its shapes snap and align automatically, so a flowchart drawn in a hurry still reads well. It also has custom templates, voting and a timer on every plan, a desktop app, and integrations with Slack and GitHub.

How the price reads against Excalidraw: Whimsical charges per editor, and viewers are always free. Pro is $10 per editor a month with annual billing, or $12 with monthly billing; Business is $20 annually, or $24 monthly, and adds private teams, SAML single sign-on and SCIM. That puts Pro above Excalidraw+ at $6, but a team where only two people draw and ten people read pays for two seats. Non-profits get a 20% discount.

The Free plan is where people get caught. It lets you create up to 50 board objects per month, and a single brainstorm with sticky notes can reach that in an hour; exports carry a watermark and version history covers 7 days. You can create 2 free workspaces, which doubles nothing that matters here. Use Free to judge the editor, then budget for Pro. If you connect Whimsical to an AI assistant, see our Whimsical integration with Claude.

Mural is a visual collaboration tool built around facilitation. Its Facilitation Superpowers are included in every plan, the free one too: summon participants, timer, anonymous voting, private mode, an outline with instructions, a laser pointer, hide and reveal and a facilitator lock that stops people moving content by accident. It also offers 250+ expert templates and lets you choose between an infinite and a resizable canvas. Excalidraw+ lists a presentation mode and comments, but no timer or voting, which is fine for two people sketching, and painful for a 30-person workshop.

How the price reads against Excalidraw: Free is $0 for unlimited members, with unlimited murals but only 3 editable at a time, and unlimited visitors with view-only rights. Team+ is $9.99 per member a month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly, and adds unlimited editable murals, visitors who can edit, private rooms and Mural AI. Business is $17.99 per member a month billed annually, with SSO and unlimited guests.

Tip: because the facilitation tools are free, a consultant can run a one-off client workshop on the Free plan if the board fits in three editable murals; archive old murals before the session to free a slot. If you plug Mural into your other tools, see our Mural integrations with Make and Zapier.