Excalidraw

Excalidraw is an open-source whiteboard for hand-drawn style diagrams, published under the MIT licence in its official repository. The free editor at excalidraw.com supports real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption, works offline as a PWA, autosaves to the browser and exports to PNG, SVG or an .excalidraw JSON file.

The paid service, Excalidraw+, adds cloud-saved scenes and folders, access management, read-only links and embeds, comments, presentations, voice hangouts with screen sharing, and PDF and PPTX export. Excalidraw ranks fifth because its open licence and free tier are strong, while the hosting of the paid service is outside Europe.

The Excalidraw+ terms name Excalidraw s.r.o., Prazakova 1008/69, Brno, Czech Republic, as the operator, and Czech law governs the terms.

The Excalidraw+ privacy policy states that the servers are located in the United States and that standard contractual clauses cover transfers of European personal data. The Excalidraw+ site shows a SOC 2 badge. The project publishes a Docker image for self-hosting, but the documentation says that a self-hosted instance does not support sharing or collaboration unless the separate excalidraw-room server is set up.

Excalidraw is free for the full editor with one scene and unlimited collaborators. Excalidraw+ costs USD 6 per user per month, with a 14% saving on annual billing and a 14-day free trial; prices are listed in USD.

Excalidraw suits engineers who sketch architecture diagrams and are comfortable keeping files locally or running their own instance. Organisations that need stored boards to stay in the EU should not choose the hosted Excalidraw+ service, and workshop facilitators will miss the voting and timer tools that Collaboard and Spreo provide.

What Excalidraw does well

• The Excalidraw source code is released under the MIT licence.
• The free Excalidraw editor offers real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption in the browser.
• Excalidraw works offline as a PWA and autosaves locally.
• Excalidraw+ has a single published price of USD 6 per user per month and a 14-day trial.
• Excalidraw is operated by a Czech company, Excalidraw s.r.o. in Brno, under Czech law.

Where Excalidraw falls short

• The Excalidraw+ privacy policy states that its servers are located in the United States.
• A self-hosted Excalidraw instance does not support sharing or collaboration without the separate collaboration server.
• The free Excalidraw plan is limited to one scene.
• Excalidraw publishes its prices only in USD.

Standout feature. Excalidraw is the only open-source whiteboard in this comparison, with MIT-licensed code, an official Docker image and end-to-end encrypted collaboration in the free editor.