Software Alternatives & Reviews

Excalidraw VS draw.io

Compare Excalidraw VS draw.io and see what are their differences

Excalidraw logo Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.

draw.io logo draw.io

Online diagramming application
  • Excalidraw Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-04-05
  • draw.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-20

Excalidraw videos

Rapid Mockup Creation Using Excalidraw

draw.io videos

draw.io - Draw diagrams in the cloud or as an AppImage

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Draw.io Tutorial - Getting Started || How to use Draw.io
  • Review - Creating Entity Relationship Diagrams using Draw.io
  • Review - Using Layers, an advanced draw.io feature
  • Review - Draw.io (aka diagrams.net) Basics
  • Review - Better, faster, stronger; draw.io introduces AI-powered Smart Templates

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Excalidraw and draw.io)
Sketching
100 100%
0% 0
Diagrams
9 9%
91% 91
Digital Whiteboard
100 100%
0% 0
Flowcharts
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Excalidraw and draw.io. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Excalidraw and draw.io

Excalidraw Reviews

5 great diagramming tools for enterprise and software architects
As your system evolves, you must update your diagrams to reflect those changes. Because Excalidraw is a browser-based tool, you have to open a browser tab and make changes visually, which can be inconvenient. You also can't easily see your history of changes. While Excalidraw has fans, I prefer a text-based diagram tool.
Source: www.redhat.com

draw.io Reviews

5 great diagramming tools for enterprise and software architects
Where do you even begin with Diagrams.net, formerly known as Draw.io? Besides being free of charge, it also has a low learning curve, so anyone can quickly start creating diagrams or whiteboards. Many people use Diagrams.net for diagramming business processes, data flows, and networks. You can also modify elements without having to change the entire diagram with this tool.
Source: www.redhat.com
Software Diagrams - Plant UML vs Mermaid
There are many generic diagramming tools that can be used to design software such as diagrams.net (formerly draw.io), Miro, or Lucid Charts. These generic tools do allow a lot of flexibility but end up costing you more time than you intended to align all boxes and arrows and to get the colour schemes just right.
10 Best Visio Alternatives for Cost Effective Diagramming [2022]
Price may vary from time to time as Draw.io does some promotions and might give discounts as well. You should check their website for the latest prices. Also, the pricing depends upon the features you are taking it for. So, it has very distinctive processing. You’ll get all your options in the right column and the drawing and editing options you’ll get in the space provided...
Top 10 Alternatives to Draw.io / Diagrams.net - Flowchart Maker Reviews
Drawio is a free online software for creating flowcharts and process maps. It is an easy way to create professional diagrams and share them with your team, your clients, or the whole world. Drawio's user-friendly interface lets you drag and drop shapes from our library onto the canvas and format them using our comprehensive set of tools. Drawing charts has never been easier!...
Best 8 Free Visual Paradigm Alternatives in 2022
Another cost-efficient option as an alternative to Visual Paradigm is Draw.io. This is an online flowchart maker that you can use for free. Draw.io is absolutely free to use so you won’t have to worry about spending any amount. The only drawback that we saw upon reviewing the tool though, is the lack of templates. It is purely made for flowchart creation so the interface...
Source: gitmind.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, draw.io should be more popular than Excalidraw. It has been mentiond 714 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Excalidraw mentions (206)

  • Tools that Make Me Productive as a Software Engineer
    However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Ask HN: Anyone use a code to mindmap/flowchart tool?
    I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!". - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Show HN: Batch Image Manipulation Toolkit in Browser
    Would love more ideas for what I could add to bother, ideally mundane batch image processing tasks that can be automated. [1] https://excalidraw.com/#json=VB-95wXb8mmw-WEIe2pNu,Abn9sV1PylQ2ZPuRfwKjKQ. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: What development tools are you using for your current project?
    I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize I've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things. Here are a few tools that I've been using lately that I really enjoy: https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Penrose – Penrose
    Sketch easy and go back to work... https://excalidraw.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
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draw.io mentions (714)

  • Reactor controller
    Glad you like it! :D Feel free to reuse/edit it for the Steam page if you want. Also happy to send you the draw.io file if you'd like :). Source: 12 months ago
  • Note taking app
    Shraing, LDAP, sync, reminders are all possible. draw.io can be integrated by an app in nextcloud. Also, there is "Deck" which is a Kanban board for Nextcloud. Source: 12 months ago
  • Diagramming on Note 2 Air+
    I've been using draw.io web to diagram, but I can't find it on android... Is there any good alternatives? Source: 12 months ago
  • Tips and tricks for picking up Visio?
    Visio isnt hard, but stencils are a pain in the ass. So, I suggest draw.io instead, also its free and they have both a cloud GUI tool and desktop tool on Git. I have not used visio since 2019. Source: 12 months ago
  • Creating wiring schematics with ease!
    Adding the desired temperature instead of multiplying by x75 caused my reactor to overheat but maybe I did a mistake in the wiring. :D Why don't you show how you wire your reactor controller by using draw.io with my libraries. ;) You don't have to, of course. Source: 12 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Excalidraw and draw.io, you can also consider the following products

Miro - Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration tool for distributed teams. Join 2M+ users & 8000+ teams from around the world.

LucidChart - LucidChart is the missing link in online productivity suites. LucidChart allows users to create, collaborate on, and publish attractive flowcharts and other diagrams from a web browser.

Kanboard - Kanboard is a free and open source Kanban project management software.

yEd - yEd is a free desktop application to quickly create, import, edit, and automatically arrange diagrams. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux.

Kinopio - Thinking canvas for mind mapping, brainstorming, and moodboards

PlantUML - PlantUML is an open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw UML diagrams.