Software Alternatives & Reviews

Kroki VS Excalidraw

Compare Kroki VS Excalidraw and see what are their differences

Kroki logo Kroki

Creates diagrams from textual descriptions! It provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag, BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), Ditaa, Erd, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, PlantUML, SvgBob, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom

Excalidraw logo Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.
  • Kroki Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-07
  • Excalidraw Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-04-05

Kroki videos

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Excalidraw videos

Rapid Mockup Creation Using Excalidraw

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Kroki and Excalidraw)
Diagrams
40 40%
60% 60
Sketching
0 0%
100% 100
Flowcharts
100 100%
0% 0
Digital Whiteboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Kroki Reviews

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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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Excalidraw should be more popular than Kroki. 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.

Kroki mentions (31)

  • D2 Playground
    Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow is the other general purpose one and older than d2. It is "Source-Code License: 0-clause BSD" as it says on the page. Someone made it into wasm and put playground for pikchr here https://www.jakethaw.com/pikchr_webassembly_demo/ Can also try pikchr online here on https://kroki.io/#try which is hosting many other text to diagram tools as well. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Nomnoml
    If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted? I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps before I hit them. I'm thinkin generous linking between diagrams will be one path. [1] Project:: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz [select Diagram>WireViz]. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • LaTeX for publishing tabletop role-playing games
    The SVG output is embedded into the PDF file. https://kroki.io/examples.html#mind-map Kroki has other text-based formats for flow charts, Gantt charts, UML diagrams, packet diagrams, network diagrams, word clouds, etc. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Documentation as Code for Cloud Using PlantUML
    My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2]. KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Pikchr: A PIC-like markup language for diagrams in technical documentation
    Did you try to use https://kroki.io/ as renderer instead? - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
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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 / 4 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
  • 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
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Kroki and Excalidraw, you can also consider the following products

whatplugin.ai - Easily Find Plugins For ChatGPT

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

asciiflow - Infinite ASCII diagrams, save to Google Drive, resize, freeform draw, and export straight to text/html.

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

Graphviz - Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. It has several main graph layout programs.

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