Introducing Excalidraw+

Excalidraw, the virtual whiteboard app for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams, has come a long way. With the remote work becoming the status quo, Excalidraw was able to show its true potential and we’ve come to a point where over 100K people have used it just the last month!

While it has been extremely successful as a free open source project, the biggest source of complaints nowadays is around adoption within companies: How do you share diagrams with your co-workers easily? Can your company depend on the service for live collaboration? Is your data secure?

We’ve thought long and hard about how to make it happen in a volunteer-based open source model but haven’t found a great solution. So we decided to build a company around Excalidraw with the first product being Excalidraw+.

Excalidraw+

Excalidraw+ lets you have a workspace for your company where you can manage and organize all the drawings your team has created. The drawings are easily accessible to your workspace co-workers, automatically server-persisted, and the live collaboration is on by default, no extra steps necessary. With all the features and the quality you expect from the team that built Excalidraw.

With account-based access you can rest assured all and only the right people will have access to your data, while still retain the ability to share specific drawings with outside collaborators or interviewees lest the need arise.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more collaboration servers, and more importantly adding them to different regions to keep your collaboration sessions fast.

During the initial release there might be some rough edges, but we’ll work with your company to smooth them out and listen to your feedback and other needs you may have to make Excalidraw+ experience better.

Sign-up for Excalidraw+ for $7/month.

https://plus.excalidraw.com/lp/organize.mp4

Open Source & Excalidraw

One of our goals is to get Excalidraw to as many people as possible, and our commitment to the open source project remains strong. Excalidraw+ is built on the same platform that you can build on yourself using our npm package, and you have, from HackerRank⁠, Replit⁠, RoamResearch⁠, to Facebook and others.

In fact, one of the reasons for creating Excalidraw+ is to ensure that the Excalidraw ecosystem not only survives, but thrives going forward. We will be able to invest more time and resources into it, which will benefit all, no matter what app you use Excalidraw to draw in.

As for the excalidraw.com website, it will of course continue to be free and actively developed.

Conclusion

We believe that this is going to be a win-win situation. People that want to use Excalidraw in a work environment will finally have a solution that works well for them and the open source project will be properly funded so that it can stand the test of time.