Software Alternatives & Reviews

Excalidraw VS yEd

Compare Excalidraw VS yEd 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.

yEd logo 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.
  • Excalidraw Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-04-05
  • yEd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-16

Excalidraw videos

Rapid Mockup Creation Using Excalidraw

yEd videos

yEd Graph Editor in 90 seconds

More videos:

  • Tutorial - yED Graph Editor Tutorial - Make flowcharts, trees, graph Freeware.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Excalidraw and yEd)
Sketching
100 100%
0% 0
Diagrams
19 19%
81% 81
Digital Whiteboard
100 100%
0% 0
Flowcharts
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Excalidraw and yEd. 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 yEd

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

yEd Reviews

Best 7 Free Online XMind Alternatives for Windows
Another excellent tool that you can use for common and complex visual illustration is yEd. This aims to help users in terms of creating diagrams like UML, flowcharts, network diagram, org chart, and other process illustrations. With this XMind free alternative, you will find every icon and symbol you need for the aforementioned diagrams. On the other hand, users are...
Source: gitmind.com
40 Open Source, Free and Top Unified Modeling Language (UML) Tools
yEd is a desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams. Users can create diagrams manually, or import their external data for analysis. yEd’s automatic layout algorithms arranges even large data sets with just the press of a button. yEd is freely available and runs on all major platforms: Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac OS X.With...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Excalidraw seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 207 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 (207)

  • 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 / 2 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 / 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
View more

yEd mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of yEd yet. Tracking of yEd recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Excalidraw and yEd, 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.

draw.io - Online diagramming application

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

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.

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.