What is Excalidraw?

Excalidraw is a free, open-source virtual whiteboard tool for creating hand-drawn style diagrams. It runs entirely in the browser — no installation, no account required. Just open excalidraw.com and start drawing.

Since its launch in 2020, Excalidraw has become one of the most popular diagramming tools among developers, designers, and educators. Its source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license, and a thriving community contributes to its ongoing development.

Excalidraw packs a surprising amount of power into a minimal, distraction-free interface:

• Shapes and connectors — rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows, lines, and freehand drawing
• Text — add labels, titles, and annotations anywhere on the canvas
• Real-time collaboration — share a link and draw together with others live
• Libraries — import reusable element collections from the community library
• Export — save as PNG, SVG, or the native .excalidraw JSON format
• Dark mode — full dark theme support for comfortable use
• Privacy-first — end-to-end encryption for shared sessions

What makes Excalidraw instantly recognizable is its hand-drawn, sketchy visual style. Lines aren't perfectly straight. Corners aren't perfectly sharp. Fills use crosshatch patterns instead of solid colors.

This isn't a limitation — it's a deliberate design choice. The hand-drawn look signals that diagrams are informal and evolving, which encourages collaboration and reduces the pressure to make things "perfect." It's the digital equivalent of sketching on a whiteboard.

Excalidraw stores drawings as plain JSON — a list of elements with their properties. This makes diagrams easy to version-control, diff, and generate programmatically.

// Excalidraw stores elements as simple JSON
{
  "type": "rectangle",
  "x": 100,
  "y": 200,
  "width": 200,
  "height": 80,
  "strokeColor": "#1e1e1e",
  "backgroundColor": "#a5d8ff",
  "fillStyle": "hachure",
  "roughness": 1
}

This openness is key to Excalidraw's ecosystem. Tools and integrations can read, write, and manipulate Excalidraw files directly. Many note-taking apps, documentation platforms, and development tools have built-in Excalidraw support.

Excalimate is built on top of Excalidraw's open-source editor. It includes the full Excalidraw drawing experience — every shape, every tool, every feature — and adds a complete animation layer on top.

With Excalimate, you can:

• Animate any element — add keyframe animations for opacity, position, scale, rotation, and draw progress
• Control timing — use a visual timeline to orchestrate when elements appear and move
• Add easing — apply easing curves for natural, professional motion
• Camera animations — pan and zoom the camera to guide viewers through complex diagrams
• Export animations — render to MP4, WebM, GIF, animated SVG, dotLottie, and Lottie JSON
• AI-powered — use the MCP server to let AI assistants create animated diagrams from text prompts

Excalidraw has grown beyond a standalone tool into a broad ecosystem:

• VS Code extension — edit Excalidraw files directly in your code editor
• Obsidian plugin — embed diagrams in your knowledge base
• Notion, Confluence, Docusaurus — integrations for popular platforms
• @excalidraw/excalidraw — React component for embedding in your own apps
• Excalidraw+ — the official hosted version with collaboration features
• Excalimate — animation and export capabilities for the Excalidraw editor

Whether you're sketching architecture diagrams, wireframing UIs, or mapping out ideas, Excalidraw and its ecosystem provide a lightweight, approachable toolset that stays out of your way.