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Excalidraw

The free alternative toWhimsical

🟢 Beginner⏱️ ~2 min to installYou save €11/mo

Excalidraw is an open source whiteboard that replaces Whimsical. Draw on excalidraw.com with no account, or host it yourself with Docker: shapes, arrows that stay attached when you move them, ready-made libraries, including wireframe kits. Working together is free: share a link and everyone draws live, end-to-end encrypted. PNG or SVG exports, no watermark. The Claude trick: have it write your sales process in Mermaid, paste it into Excalidraw and touch up the drawing by hand. The limit: the free version keeps a single drawing at a time in your browser. To keep several, save them as files, or take Excalidraw+ (about €5 a month) and its unlimited online saving.

Screenshot of Excalidraw, the free open source alternative to Whimsical
GitHub stars135,272
View on GitHub ↗

Versus Whimsical: the match

  • Price

    Excalidraw

    €0, no account

    Whimsical

    €11/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 ↗

How to install it (even from zero)

Nothing to install: excalidraw.com opens in the browser, no account. The prompt shows you the useful moves, how to keep your drawings, and, if you want, the install on your own server.

  1. 1

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It gets you going with the tool, then draws your first diagram with Mermaid:

    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.
  2. 2

    Have Claude write your diagrams

    Describe your process to Claude, ask for Mermaid, paste it into Excalidraw: you start from a clean diagram instead of a blank page.

  3. 3

    Keep your drawings in Obsidian

    With the Excalidraw plugin, each diagram becomes a note in your second brain, linked to the rest. No more drawings lost in a tab.

What you actually do with it

Your diagrams with no object counter

Whimsical's free plan stops at 50 objects a month. Here you draw as much as you want, and your exports come out with no watermark.

A group workshop in one link

You share a link, your team or your client draws with you live, without creating an account. The content is end to end encrypted.

Claude draws, you touch up

Org chart, customer journey, app architecture: Claude writes it in Mermaid, Excalidraw turns it into an editable drawing.

Project health, at a glance

Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.

87/100

Excellent

Very active, well-maintained project: go ahead with confidence.

Activity
100

Is the code moving? (commits in the last 30 days)

Maintenance
100

How fresh is the latest update? Fresher is better.

Community
100

Stars and contributors: people around means help and fixes.

Maturity
100

Project age. Old enough to be solid, still alive.

Momentum
34

Current pace versus its usual pace: speeding up or dozing off?

The repo in numbers

GitHub stars
135.3k
Forks
16k
Contributors
363
Commits
4.1k
Project age
6.8 yrs
Last commit
today
Size
106.6 MB
License
MIT

Built with

  • TypeScript 94.6%
  • SCSS 2.4%
  • MDX 1.5%
  • JavaScript 1.4%

Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.

Loucash’s take

7/10

Excalidraw does one thing very well: drawing a diagram fast, alone or with others, with no account and no bill. Against Whimsical's free plan, capped at 50 objects a month with a watermark, there is no contest for sketching a process or preparing a workshop. What I like: the Mermaid import. I describe a process to Claude, it gives me the diagram, I paste it and touch it up. And with the Obsidian plugin, my diagrams stay filed next to my notes. Why 7 and not more: it is not a full replacement for Whimsical. No docs, no real mind maps, and the hand drawn style sits badly in a polished client deliverable, even set to its cleanest. The free version keeps only one drawing at a time in the browser, so you have to remember to save. And to file your drawings online and share them properly with a team, you need Excalidraw+, which is paid.

It’s for you if: 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.

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