Free alternative

Free alternative to Whimsical

Whimsical costs €10 a month. Excalidraw does the same job for free, in open source: you install it on your machine or a small server, and you stop paying.

Public entry price, taken from Whimsical’s website (whimsical.com). Over a year, that is €120 that stays in your pocket.

What replaces Whimsical

The main alternative

Excalidraw

🟢 Beginner⏱️ ~2 min to installSave €10/mo

Excalidraw is the whiteboard everyone ends up using: more than 130,000 stars on GitHub, close to 400 contributors, an MIT licence, and it is built into Notion, Obsidian and Google Cloud's tools. You open excalidraw.com and draw, no account needed: rectangles, diamonds, arrows that stay attached to shapes when you move them, text, images, and ready made shape libraries, including wireframe kits. The hand drawn style can be tuned, from clean to sketchy, and the interface speaks French. Working together is free: you share a link, everyone draws live, and the content is end to end encrypted. PNG or SVG exports, with no watermark. The detail that changes everything with Claude: Excalidraw imports diagrams written in Mermaid. You ask Claude for your sales process, it writes it, you paste it, and it becomes a drawing you touch up by hand. One limit to know: the free version keeps a single drawing at a time in your browser. To keep several, you save them as files, or go through Obsidian's Excalidraw plugin. The Excalidraw+ plan, about €5 a month, adds unlimited online saving and team folders. And you can host it yourself with Docker.

Loucash’s verdict on Excalidraw

8/10

Excalidraw is one of the few free tools that clearly beat their paid competitor. Whimsical for free means 50 objects a month and a watermark: enough to try, not enough to work. Excalidraw is unlimited, needs no account, and works live with others. What I love: the Mermaid import. I describe a process to Claude, it gives me the diagram, I paste it, and in ten seconds I have a drawing that would have taken me twenty minutes. With the Obsidian plugin, my diagrams live in my second brain next to my notes. What may bite: the hand drawn style does not please everyone in a client meeting, even though it can be tuned. The free version keeps only one drawing at a time in the browser, so you need the habit of saving. And if you live in Whimsical's docs and mind maps, Excalidraw does not replace them.

Who it is for: You make diagrams, flows or quick wireframes, alone or in workshops, and you pay for Whimsical mostly to get past the object limit. If your team relies on Whimsical's docs and mind maps, keep it.

See the full page →See the tool ↗

Excalidraw versus Whimsical: the match

  • Price

    Excalidraw

    €0, no account

    Whimsical

    €10/month per editor

  • What you can create

    Excalidraw

    Unlimited

    Whimsical

    50 objects a month for free

  • Exports

    Excalidraw

    PNG and SVG with no watermark

    Whimsical

    Watermark on the free plan

Whimsical ↗

The prompt that installs Excalidraw

Paste this prompt into Claude: it checks the repository, asks you its questions and installs the tool step by step.

Je veux remplacer Whimsical par Excalidraw, le tableau blanc open source (dépôt GitHub excalidraw/excalidraw, site excalidraw.com). Montre-moi d'abord la version en ligne, gratuite et sans compte : dessiner un schéma, accrocher des flèches aux formes, utiliser les bibliothèques de formes, travailler à plusieurs en direct et exporter en PNG ou en SVG. Explique-moi comment garder mes dessins, puisque la version gratuite n'en sauvegarde qu'un à la fois dans le navigateur : enregistrement en fichier .excalidraw, ou plugin Excalidraw pour Obsidian. Si je veux l'héberger moi-même, installe-le sur mon serveur avec le Dockerfile du dépôt excalidraw/excalidraw, et dis-moi ce qu'il faut ajouter (le serveur excalidraw/excalidraw-room) pour que la collaboration en direct reste chez moi. Enfin, demande-moi un processus de mon entreprise, écris-le en Mermaid et montre-moi comment l'importer dans Excalidraw pour le retoucher à la main.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.

Frequently asked questions

Is Excalidraw really free?
Yes. Excalidraw is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Whimsical, on the other hand, costs €10 a month.
Do I need to code to install Excalidraw?
No. The level is beginner and the install takes about 2 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.
How is it different from Whimsical?
Excalidraw does most of what Whimsical does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.
Do I own my data?
Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

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