Alternatives
Best Excalidraw alternatives in 2026
Six whiteboards worth switching to, what each one is genuinely better at, and exactly where its free tier stops. We make the first one on the list, and we say where the others fit you better.
Prices reviewed · written by the team behind Drawdy, which is first on the list
The alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Your AI on your boards (MCP) | Extensions on the board | Best for | Free tier | Paid starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drawdy | Yes, free, from any MCP app | 36 in the marketplace, or build your own | Excalidraw users who want history, presentation, and an extensible canvas without the bill | Unlimited local boards, 3 cloud boards | Pro, starts with 1 month free |
| tldraw | Saved boards from ChatGPT and Codex; other AI apps draw in the chat | Scripts in the offline app, no marketplace | Developers embedding a canvas in their own product | The full app at tldraw.com | SDK production licence, priced through sales |
| draw.io | Free; new diagrams or .drawio files on your disk | A built-in plugin list, none on desktop | Formal diagrams: UML, ERD, network and rack | The whole editor, no account | Self-hosting in production, and the Confluence and Jira apps |
| Miro | Every plan, 100 calls a day on free | 250+ marketplace apps, every plan | Facilitated workshops and enterprise rollout | 3 editable boards | $10 / member / month, or $8 billed annually |
| FigJam | Beta, Full and Dev seats on paid plans | Figma plugins and widgets | Teams already living inside Figma | 3 team FigJam files, unlimited drafts | $5 / Collab seat / month, or $3 billed annually |
| Apple Freeform | None | None | Solo thinking on Apple hardware, with a pencil | The whole app, Apple devices only | Apple Creator Studio, $12.99 / month, for AI features and watermark-free premium images |
Prices, MCP support and extensions come from each vendor's own pages, checked October 2026. Applying the same standard to ourselves: Drawdy's free tier is unlimited boards on your device plus three cloud boards for syncing and sharing, and Pro lifts that cap.
Is Excalidraw free?
Yes. The full editor at excalidraw.com is free forever, needs no account, and is open source under the MIT licence, with end-to-end encrypted live collaboration and export to PNG, SVG or file. The free plan keeps one saved scene. Excalidraw Plus, at $7 per user per month ($6 billed yearly) with a 14-day trial, adds unlimited scenes, cloud saves, comments, presentations and extended AI.
Source: Excalidraw's pricing page, checked
Why this list exists
Let's start with the uncomfortable part: Excalidraw is very good, and most people looking for an alternative are not unhappy with the drawing. They are unhappy with something specific, such as the paywall in front of cloud boards or the missing team features.
So this is not a list of tools that beat Excalidraw. It is a list of the six whiteboards worth switching to, what each one is genuinely better at, and exactly where its free tier stops. Full disclosure: we make Drawdy, which is first on the list. You should read the rest anyway, because a couple of them will fit you better than we do.
What Excalidraw already gets right
The bar every alternative has to clear
- It is free and open source. The full editor at excalidraw.com costs nothing, needs no account, and the source is public and self-hostable.
- The hand-drawn feel is the original. Every tool in this category, including ours, is chasing the thing Excalidraw got right first.
- Collaboration is end-to-end encrypted. Free live-collaboration links, with the board encrypted in the browser.
- The ecosystem is enormous. Hundreds of community shape libraries, plus a VS Code extension and an Obsidian plugin.
What sends people looking elsewhere
- Keeping more than one saved scene is a Plus feature. Excalidraw's own comparison table lists unlimited scenes under Plus, alongside cloud boards, comments, presentation export and extended AI, at $7 per user per month ($6 billed yearly).
- Drawings in the free app live in your browser, which is fine until you want them on your laptop and your phone.
- Your AI can only draw on saved scenes with Plus. Excalidraw's free MCP app draws inside the chat window and exports a share link; the Excalidraw+ MCP server is the one that creates and edits scenes in your workspace.
1. Drawdy: the Plus features, free
We built Drawdy because we kept hitting the same wall in Excalidraw: the moment a sketch mattered enough to keep, it needed a cloud board, and that meant a subscription.
Drawdy's answer is that version history, presentation mode, and three cloud boards sit in the free tier instead.
Key features
- Your own AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, VS Code or any MCP app) connects over MCP and draws on your cloud boards. Drawdy has no built-in AI.
- Infinite canvas with the hand-drawn feel, plus sketched-shape recognition: draw a rough rectangle, pause, and get a clean one, with your original stroke one undo away.
- Local-first storage. Boards live on your device, are unlimited, and work with no network at all. Cloud sync is optional and per board; the free plan covers three cloud boards and Pro lifts the cap.
- End-to-end encrypted snapshot links. The board is encrypted in your browser with AES-GCM and the key travels in the link fragment, which browsers never send to a server.
- Real-time collaboration with live cursors, and guests who join from a link without an account.
- Built for speed on a crowded board. Elements are indexed spatially, so selecting, erasing, and hit-testing stay quick instead of degrading with every shape added.
- An extension host on the canvas. Presentation mode ships as an extension, the extension marketplace adds more, such as Serene, which plays your drawing back as music, and its extension API is open for building your own.
- Version history, presentation mode, lasso selection, and export to PNG, SVG, or open .drawdy JSON.
Pros
- Version history and presentation mode with no subscription.
- Boards stay on your machine unless you turn on cloud sync or share one.
- No account needed to start drawing.
Cons
- Only three cloud boards on the free plan; past that, syncing and live sharing need Pro.
- No community shape-library ecosystem and no Obsidian plugin. VS Code connects over MCP to draw on your boards, not as an editor for .excalidraw files.
- No comments, voice, or screensharing in the canvas.
- You cannot save a board as a .excalidraw file. Copy-pasting elements from Excalidraw and opening a saved .excalidraw file both work; exporting to one does not.
Pricing. Free to start and free to keep using, with no card: unlimited boards on your device and three cloud boards. Pro lifts the cloud-board limit and starts with one month free; the free tier itself does not expire.
| Feature | Excalidraw | Drawdy |
|---|---|---|
| Your AI draws on your boards (MCP) | Paid plan only | Yes |
| Extensions run on the board | No | Yes |
| Unlimited boards | Paid plan only | Yes |
| Cloud boards | Paid plan only | 3 free, then Pro |
| Version history | No | Yes |
| Presentation mode | Paid plan only | Yes |
| Shape recognition | Yes | Yes |
| Community libraries | Yes | No |
2. tldraw: if you are building, not drawing
tldraw is the best-engineered canvas on this list, and its interaction polish is what the rest of us measure against. The free app at tldraw.com needs no account and feels immediately right.
But tldraw's actual product is the SDK. It exists so you can put a canvas inside your own software, and that is where it has no real competition.
Key features
- An embeddable canvas SDK with real documentation, a multiplayer sync engine, and custom shapes and tools.
- A polished free web app, with sticky notes and a comment tool, plus a downloadable offline app.
- Source available to read and fork.
- A plugin for ChatGPT and Codex that draws on your saved tldraw.com boards with a free account, and an MCP app that draws inside the chat for other AI apps.
- Scripts in the offline app, saved with each file and written by hand or by a coding agent; there is no marketplace.
Pros
- The obvious choice if a canvas is a feature of your product.
- Free to use as an app, free while you develop, and a hobby licence for non-commercial projects.
Cons
- Shipping the SDK in production needs a licence key: a trial, a commercial licence priced through sales, or a hobby licence that shows a “made with tldraw” watermark.
- As an everyday whiteboard it is thinner on the keep-this-board-forever features: no version history in the free app, and tldraw lists no presentation mode for it.
- No end-to-end encrypted sharing advertised, and sharing a live board from tldraw.com asks you to sign in.
Pricing. The app is free. The SDK needs a licence key in production: a 100-day trial with no card, a commercial licence with value-based pricing through sales and startup discounts, or a hobby licence for non-commercial work.
3. draw.io: for diagrams someone has to maintain
draw.io, also known as diagrams.net, is the answer when the drawing is a formal diagram rather than a sketch. The editor is free forever under Apache 2.0, needs no account, and never hosts your files: they go to Google Drive, OneDrive, GitHub, Confluence or your own device, and draw.io cannot read them.
Key features
- Shape libraries for UML, entity-relationship models, network and rack diagrams, org charts and floorplans.
- Files kept wherever you choose, from Google Drive and OneDrive to GitHub or a folder on disk.
- An offline desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and an official Docker image for self-hosting.
- A sketch style you can switch on when you want the hand-drawn look.
- A free official MCP server: your AI draws a diagram in the chat or a new editor tab, or edits a .drawio file on your disk. It does not save into your Drive or Confluence files.
Pros
- Free with nothing held back: no board cap, no trial clock, and no paid tier for the hosted editor.
- The deepest technical diagramming on this list.
Cons
- Its own sources disagree on live co-editing: drawio.com markets real-time collaboration, while its repository says it does not support real-time collaborative editing in this version.
- The hand-drawn feel is an option you switch on, not the default.
- No end-to-end encrypted share links of its own; sharing security is your storage provider's.
Pricing. Free forever under Apache 2.0, with no account and no card. The paid products are a production version for teams that host it themselves and draw.io for Confluence and Jira, sold through the Atlassian Marketplace.
4. Miro: for workshops, not sketching
Miro is not really an Excalidraw alternative; it is a different job. If your canvas work is facilitated, with sprint retros, workshops with fifteen people, voting, timers and templates, Miro is far ahead of everything else here, and it plugs into Jira, Asana, and the rest of the enterprise stack.
Key features
- Enormous template library, facilitation tools, voting and timers.
- Deep integrations, SSO, admin controls, enterprise governance.
- Comments and async collaboration built for large teams.
- An MCP server that reads and writes boards on every plan, capped at 100 calls a day on free, and a marketplace of 250+ apps built on its Web SDK.
Pros
- The strongest option for structured group sessions.
- Unlimited members even on the free plan.
Cons
- The free plan caps you at 3 editable boards, the single most common reason people go looking for a Miro alternative.
- Heavy compared with a sketchpad: slower to load, more UI between you and the drawing.
- No hand-drawn aesthetic to speak of.
Pricing. Free with 3 editable boards; Starter $10 per member per month ($8 billed annually); Business $25 ($20 billed annually); Enterprise custom. Annual billing saves 20% over monthly.
5. FigJam: if your team already lives in Figma
FigJam's advantage is gravity. If your designers are in Figma all day, FigJam is one tab away, shares the same file permissions, and drops straight into design handoff. As a whiteboard it is genuinely pleasant, and the sticky-note-and-arrow work feels good.
Key features
- Native to the Figma workspace: same accounts, same sharing model, same plugins.
- Strong facilitation basics: stickies, stamps, cursor chat, templates.
- Easy to move work from a jam into an actual design file.
- Figma's MCP server can write to FigJam files, in a beta for Full and Dev seats on paid plans.
Pros
- Zero adoption cost for teams already on Figma.
- Cheap paid tier compared with Miro: Collab seats are $5 per month ($3 billed annually).
Cons
- The free plan caps FigJam files in the team folder at 3; drafts are unlimited but can only be shared view-only.
- No unlimited version history on free.
- It pulls you into the Figma ecosystem, which is a strange place to be if you are not a design team.
Pricing. Free with 3 FigJam files in the team folder plus unlimited drafts; paid FigJam access is a Collab seat at $5 per month ($3 billed annually).
6. Apple Freeform: free, and already installed
If you are on Apple hardware and mostly thinking alone, Freeform is a genuinely good answer that costs nothing and is already on your devices. With an Apple Pencil on an iPad it is the nicest sketching feel on this list.
Key features
- Built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS; syncs over iCloud.
- Excellent Apple Pencil support, native handwriting.
- Sharing and collaboration with other Apple users.
Pros
- Free, no account setup, no new app to adopt.
- The best pencil-and-paper feel if you own an iPad.
Cons
- Apple devices only, with no web version, so a Windows or Linux colleague cannot open your board.
- No export story worth the name.
- No MCP server and no extensions, so neither your AI nor a tool of your own can work on the board.
Pricing. Free, on Apple devices. Since 2026 three AI features (Image Generation, Super Resolution, Auto Crop) and watermark-free Content Hub images need an Apple Creator Studio subscription at $12.99 per month or $129 per year; everything else in Freeform stays free.
How to choose, in one pass
- Your own AI should draw on your team's boards, free
- Drawdy
- You want version history and presentation mode without a subscription
- Drawdy
- You want a canvas you can extend with your own tools
- Drawdy for extensions that run inside the whiteboard; tldraw if you would rather build the whole app around a canvas yourself
- You need the source, self-hosting, or the library ecosystem
- Stay on Excalidraw
- You are embedding a canvas in your own product
- tldraw
- You draw UML, ERD or network diagrams and want the files in your own Drive or repository
- draw.io
- You run workshops for a dozen people
- Miro
- Your team already lives in Figma
- FigJam
- You sketch alone on an iPad
- Apple Freeform
How we compared
Every price and free-tier limit on this page comes from the vendor's own pricing page, and the reviewed date at the top moves only when we have read them again. The last full pass was October 2026.
Each tool is judged on the reasons people leave Excalidraw: where the free tier stops, how collaboration and privacy work, how boards are kept and exported, and what the tool is genuinely built for. A tool that is better at a different job says so, which is why draw.io and Miro are here although neither is a sketchpad.
We make Drawdy and put it first, so every tool gets the same treatment: features, pros, cons and pricing, and a line on where another tool fits you better than we do.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
How much is Excalidraw Plus?+
$7 per user per month billed monthly, or $6 billed yearly, with a 14-day free trial. Plus adds unlimited scenes and folders, cloud saves, sharing with edit or view rights, read-only links and embeds, comments, voice and screensharing, presentations, team management and extended AI. The free app stays free and keeps the full editor, one scene and encrypted live collaboration.
Is there a completely free alternative to Excalidraw?+
Yes, several. draw.io's hosted editor is free forever with no paid tier, and the tldraw app and Apple Freeform are free outright. Drawdy is free with unlimited boards on your device plus three cloud boards, and its free tier includes version history and presentation mode, neither of which is in Excalidraw's free app. Read the free tiers carefully everywhere though: Miro caps you at three editable boards, FigJam at three team files, and Drawdy at three cloud boards.
What is the best Excalidraw alternative for teams?+
It depends what the team does with the canvas. For facilitated workshops with a dozen people, Miro is the strongest option on this list. For a team already inside Figma, FigJam costs nothing to adopt. For a team that mainly wants shared boards and history without a per-seat bill, Drawdy gives you those free.
Is Excalidraw still worth using in 2026?+
Yes, and we would say so even though we compete with it. Excalidraw is free, open source, self-hostable, encrypts collaboration end to end, and has an ecosystem none of the alternatives match. The reasons to leave are specific rather than general: you want cloud boards without the $7 per user per month ($6 billed yearly) subscription, or you want version history.
Can I move my Excalidraw drawings to another tool?+
Partly, and it depends where you are going. Excalidraw exports PNG, SVG, and its own .excalidraw JSON. Drawdy accepts elements pasted straight out of Excalidraw as editable objects and opens saved .excalidraw files, though it cannot save back to that format. Most other tools will only take the flat image, which means you keep the picture and lose the ability to edit it.
Which Excalidraw alternative works offline?+
Drawdy is local-first: boards live on your device, the canvas works with no network, and cloud sync is optional and per board. tldraw has a downloadable offline app. Excalidraw itself keeps drawings in your browser and works offline too. Miro and FigJam are cloud-first and expect a connection.
Keep reading
- Is Excalidraw free? What Excalidraw+ costs and what it adds
- Drawdy vs Excalidraw, the full head-to-head, feature by feature
- Drawdy vs tldraw, an SDK and a whiteboard, compared honestly
- Drawdy vs Miro, a facilitation platform against a sketchpad
- Drawdy vs draw.io, free forever and open source, with live co-editing that depends on where the file is stored
- Drawdy vs Apple Freeform, free and lovely on an iPad, and closed to everyone outside Apple
- Excalidraw vs Apple Freeform, the two of them head to head
- Excalidraw vs Miro, a sketchpad against a facilitation platform
- Excalidraw vs draw.io, sketching with live collaboration against free-forever diagramming
- Excalidraw vs tldraw, an MIT whiteboard against a licensed canvas SDK
- Whiteboard use cases
- Example boards drawn in Drawdy
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