✏️ Excalidraw is a free and open-source virtual whiteboard that allows users to create diagrams, sketches, and visual concepts in a hand-drawn style. Designed to simulate the look of informal sketches, it offers a playful yet functional way to visualize ideas, plan projects, and collaborate with others. Unlike traditional diagramming tools that aim for polished, rigid layouts, Excalidraw embraces rough edges and fluid lines, making it ideal for creative thinking, brainstorming sessions, and rapid prototyping. At its core, Excalidraw is built for simplicity and ease of use. Users can draw shapes like rectangles, circles, and arrows, add text, and use a freehand tool to sketch ideas. The interface is intuitive and minimalist, allowing even those with no prior design experience to jump in and start drawing immediately. It supports real-time collaboration, enabling multiple people to work together on the same canvas simply by sharing a link. This feature makes it a popular choice for remote teams, educators, and facilitators who need a shared visual space for interaction. One of the standout features of Excalidraw is its offline capability. As a progressive web app, it works directly in the browser and saves data locally, so users can keep working even without an internet connection. It also supports exporting drawings in multiple formats, including PNG, SVG, and JSON, which makes it easy to use content created in Excalidraw elsewhere. Because it is open source, Excalidraw has gained a strong developer following. The codebase is available on GitHub, allowing contributors to extend its features or integrate it into other platforms. This flexibility has led to its adoption in tools like Obsidian, Visual Studio Code, and various project management environments, where visual collaboration is a valuable asset. Overall, Excalidraw stands out as a lightweight, accessible, and community-driven alternative to more complex design and diagramming software. Its focus on clar...
Excalidraw is commonly used as a self-hosted alternative to Miro, Figma, Lucidchart. Replacing a SaaS tool with a self-hosted equivalent lets you avoid recurring subscription fees, keep full control of your data, and continue working even when the original vendor changes pricing, ships limits, or shuts down.
Built with: TypeScript, SCSS, Dockerfile, JavaScript, HTML. Website: https://excalidraw.com. Source: https://github.com/ozencb/excalidraw-persist.
Most self-hosted apps including Excalidraw install through Docker or Docker Compose. The typical workflow is: install Docker on your host, pull the official image (or clone the repository), supply a configuration file with database credentials and storage paths, then start the container. Many homelabbers run Excalidraw alongside other self-hosted services behind a reverse proxy like Caddy, Traefik, or nginx-proxy-manager for HTTPS and routing. Check the official repository for the most current instructions.
Self-hosting gives you three things SaaS can’t: data ownership (the files live on disks you control), cost predictability (a one-time setup vs. recurring per-seat fees that grow with your household or team), and longevity (open-source means the app keeps working even if the maintainers move on, since you can pin a working version). The trade-off is that you take on the operational work of running a server, applying updates, and handling backups.
Most self-hosted apps run comfortably on modest hardware — a Raspberry Pi 4, a mini PC, a NAS with Docker support, or a small VPS is usually enough for personal or family use. CPU and RAM requirements scale with how many simultaneous users or how much data you push through Excalidraw. Storage requirements depend on the kind of data you keep; check the README for guidance on data retention.