Software Alternatives & Reviews

Excalidraw VS Notion

Compare Excalidraw VS Notion 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.

Notion logo Notion

All-in-one workspace. One tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized.
  • Excalidraw Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-04-05
  • Notion Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12

Excalidraw videos

Rapid Mockup Creation Using Excalidraw

Notion videos

The Most Powerful Productivity App I Use - Notion

More videos:

  • Review - I switched to Notion for a week... Here's what happened!
  • Review - Notion is Truly an All-in-One Productivity Tool (App Review)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Excalidraw and Notion)
Sketching
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Digital Whiteboard
100 100%
0% 0
Task Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Excalidraw and Notion. 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 Notion

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

Notion Reviews

  1. As someone who's always on the lookout for the perfect productivity app, I was excited to try out Notion. It promises to be an all-in-one tool for everything from note-taking to project management to personal wikis.

    From the moment you open Notion, you can tell that it's different from other productivity apps. The interface is sleek and modern, and it's easy to navigate. The app is divided into pages, which can be customized with different templates to fit your needs. You can create to-do lists, databases, wikis, calendars, and more.

    One of the things I love about Notion is the ability to create relationships between pages. For example, you can create a database of your favorite books and then link to a page with your book reviews. Or you can create a to-do list and link to a page with notes about the task. This feature makes it easy to keep all of your information in one place and to connect related items.

    🏁 Competitors: Microsoft Loop
    👍 Pros:    Highly customizable|All in one|Collaboration|Cross platform
    👎 Cons:    Steep learning curve

20 Obsidian Alternatives: Top Note-Taking Tools to Consider
Notion is a popular alternative to Obsidian for its simplicity, minimalistic interface, and large community. On top of note-taking, you can use Notion as a task management tool to create simple to-dos or build a personal knowledge base. You can also embed links, images, videos, code snippets, etc. Notion also has bi-directional functionalities enabling you to interconnect...
Source: clickup.com
The 6 best note-taking apps in 2024
Notion integrates with Zapier, so you can connect it to thousands of other apps to do things like automatically generate GitHub or Jira issues from new Notion database items. Learn more about how to automate Notion, or check out these templates for inspiration.
Source: zapier.com
The best note-taking apps for collecting your thoughts and data
In fact, its lack of limitations may be a problem for some users. If you like to really get into the workings of a complex app and screw around with it until it does everything you want it to do — and then some — then you may want to check out Notion and play a bit with its features. (For example, I currently use Notion to track my various workflows and upcoming tasks.)...
12 Best ClickUp Alternatives for Innovative Management in 2023
Benefits of Notion compared to ClickUp: Notion allows users to interlink content between project boards. There’s no need for copying and pasting information as this interlinking connects already existing cards and allows easy access to information. Combined with notes, this leads to a robust database of valuable information that is surprisingly very useful for project...
Source: ayanza.com
Best Gitbook Alternatives You Need to Try in 2023
Another alternative to Gitbook is Notion. This all-in-one workspace allows users to organize notes, tasks, wikis, and more. If you are looking for a tool for internal collaboration, Notion is a good choice. It has a large community of users that share templates you can import to your account.
Source: www.archbee.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Notion should be more popular than Excalidraw. It has been mentiond 438 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 (208)

  • 17 Best Developer Productivity Tools to Try
    Diagrams and visualizations are often indispensable when explaining complex concepts or designing system architectures. Excalidraw and Whimsical are two popular quick drawing tools that allow developers to create diagrams easily. With their simple yet powerful interface, developers can create wireframes, flowcharts, and other visual representations in no time. These tools are great for both brainstorming ideas and... - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • An infinite canvas for code exploration
    To fix this, I added a digital whiteboard to my workflow, and this is phenomenal. You can use any digital whiteboard, such as https://www.figma.com/figjam/, https://excalidraw.com/, https://miro.com/, or https://obsidian.md/canvas. My workflow generally goes like:. - Source: Hacker News / 6 days ago
  • 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 / 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 / 3 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
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Notion mentions (438)

  • My blog post workflow
    I manage my non-work and work-adjacent tasks in Notion. Whenever I have an idea, regardless of how big or small or silly or achievable it is, I'll add it to Notion, and use labels to categorise it by type of output (e.g. blog, silly project, website update). Today I wanted to write a short post for my site. I clicked on the filtered blog post view, and selected this one (because I hoped it would be a quick one!). - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • 6 AI tools that feels illegal to know🤖
    Notion.so redefines workspaces. With its intelligent organization and collaboration features, it's more than a productivity tool—it's a digital haven. Discover the art of streamlined and efficient teamwork. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Dead Matter Refund Policy and Discord
    A quote as I could not directly send a discord screenshot and am not sure that people want to make an account at notion.so simply to see the FAQ:. Source: 8 months ago
  • UI frameworks are stuck in the last decade
    I work on a large SPA: https://notion.so It’s a document editing application. A document title might occur in the browser’s titlebar, in the header of the main editor, in a “mention” (a link to the document), and in multiple places in the user’s sidebar - like in both their “Favorites” section and in the the contents of their team. When the user edits the document title, we need to update all those UI bits to... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • [H]Notion One Year Subscription Pro Account | unlimited storage unlimited uploads - $5 [W] Paypa/BTC/
    Notion (Notion.so) is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate and get organized - it allows you to take notes, add tasks, manage projects & more. Imagine a lego structure. Notion provides the building blocks and you can create your own layouts and toolkit to get work done. Source: 8 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Excalidraw and Notion, 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.

Obsidian.md - A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

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

Trello - Infinitely flexible. Incredibly easy to use. Great mobile apps. It's free. Trello keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details.

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

Evernote - Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important projects forward.