Excalidraw: Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like
Excalidraw is a self-hosted diagrams and whiteboard tool. Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams.
Why self-host Excalidraw
Running Excalidraw yourself means you control the data, the uptime policy, and the upgrade schedule. That is a different relationship with software than subscribing to a hosted service.
What it does
Excalidraw falls into the Diagrams, Whiteboard category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.
Community traction
The project has 78k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.
Deployment
Most users run Excalidraw via Docker Compose. The typical setup involves one or two containers and a volume for persistent data.
Maturity
The current version is 0.17.3, which means the project is still pre-1.0. That is not a disqualifier, but it is worth checking the changelog before upgrading in a setup where stability matters.
License
It is licensed under MIT, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
For anyone already running a home server, Excalidraw is a natural addition. It handles diagrams and whiteboard without requiring a paid subscription or an account with a third party.