Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a whiteboard for hand-drawn-style diagrams: architecture sketches, flowcharts, wireframes and anything you would draw on a napkin. Developers and product teams use it because the editor loads instantly and the result looks deliberately rough. The core app at excalidraw.com is open source and free with no account, and Excalidraw+ adds a free tier alongside the paid cloud workspace.

What the free plan gives you

• The full editor with every drawing tool, at no cost and without signing in
• 1 infinite scene in the Excalidraw+ Free tier, with unlimited scenes if you save files locally from excalidraw.com
• Unlimited live collaborators on a shared link
• Export to PNG, SVG or a .excalidraw file
• End-to-end encrypted collaboration handled in your browser
• Integrations with Notion, Obsidian and others
• Self-hosting of the open source editor

Where the free plan stops

• Cloud storage. Free drawings on excalidraw.com live in your browser; there is no library of saved scenes unless you keep the files yourself.
• 1 scene in the Plus Free tier, with no folders.
• No access management, read-only links, comments, presentations or team workspaces.

Excalidraw+ costs $6 per user per month on the annual plan, which the vendor lists as 14% cheaper than monthly billing, after a 14-day trial. It adds unlimited scenes and folders, cloud saving, sharing with edit or view rights, embeds, voice hangouts, presentations, comments and extended AI features.

Who it suits

The free editor is all most people need for a one-off diagram or a shared sketch during a call. Teams that want a searchable archive of diagrams with permissions should look at Plus, and anyone with a hard requirement to keep data in-house can self-host the open source app.