Pricing: Free is enough for most people, but Excalidraw+ is $6/mo
Excalidraw is a fast, browser-based drawing tool built for clarity, speed, and real-time collaboration. It’s perfect for whiteboarding sessions where you need to sketch out ideas on the fly—especially when discussing abstract concepts like forecasting, data models, or system architecture.
Getting people on the same page starts with understanding, and that’s hard to do with just words. Excalidraw gives you a lightweight way to visually anchor the conversation—whether you’re brainstorming, explaining, or mapping things out mid-call. It’s not trying to be Lucidchart (which is great for polished diagrams); it’s a digital napkin for visual thinking in the moment.
One cool trick I use all the time: I keep an iPad at my workstation and use an iOS Shortcut that opens Excalidraw in Safari with one tap. From there, I start a Live Collaboration session, which copies the shareable link to my universal clipboard (shared across devices via iCloud). I can then paste that link into my laptop browser, share my screen on a Zoom/Meet call, and draw directly on the iPad using a $10 stylus from Amazon—no need for the official Apple Pencil. My drawings appear in real time on the shared screen for everyone in the meeting. It feels like magic, and it’s a super smooth way to enhance remote collaboration.
If you’re someone who talks through complex problems often, Excalidraw is one of those tools that earns its spot in your everyday kit. Also worth noting—it’s open source and self-hostable, but the free web version is more than enough for 99% of use cases.
A note on tldraw
There is another app similar to Excalidraw called tldraw. I really like a few things about tldraw, such as the fact that you can save sessions, name them, and keep them in a handy left-side drawer even without a paid license.
However, when I tried it on 7/2025, it had a couple of issues that make me not be able to completely recommend it: (1) on iPad, the page didn’t render correctly and the zoom in/out options were cut off; (2) the “Share” button and menu were clunky and didn’t always work; (3) clicking the “Copy link” button didn’t work for me.
These are problems for me because of how I use Excalidraw, and how I would want to use tldraw, which I explained above on this page. If I can’t quickly and easily share a session to draw live on Zoom with colleagues, then it has no purpose for me.
I’ll revisit this one later and see if they’ve cleaned up some of the bugginess, then I could see this being a strong contender to replace Excalidraw as my daily driver drawing tool.