A more structured Excalidraw alternative

livediagram and Excalidraw agree on the important things: MIT-licensed, free, and no sign-up wall in front of the canvas. Where they diverge is what happens after the first sketch. Excalidraw keeps to a freeform board, and that simplicity is a feature. livediagram assumes the sketch is going to grow: you start from a real template instead of a blank page, split the work across tabs inside one canvas, group tabs into folders, and separate annotation from content with per-tab layers.

Themes carry that structure visually. Instead of styling shapes one by one, a single click restyles the entire canvas (shapes, arrows, text), and style presets plus a format painter keep new elements consistent with the rest.

Every livediagram tab has a finish, the way its elements are drawn, and two of the four are by hand. Sketch draws wobbly double-stroked outlines, pencil-shaded fills, arrowheads as two loose strokes and lettering in a handwriting font, like a diagram drawn on paper. Marker draws one bold, slightly see-through stroke per edge, darker where strokes cross, like a flip chart. Professional is the opposite: square corners, thin lines and crisp lettering for print. A finish is set per tab, or on one element, and it is only a look: switching back restores exactly what was there.

Excalidraw's own style is still its signature, with its own typeface and sloppiness controls, and if that exact aesthetic is the point, Excalidraw wins it. But sketching isn't exclusive to it. Any livediagram tab can also switch into Draw mode, a plain whiteboard with three pressure-sensitive markers, text, an eraser and shapes, on a plain, dotted or grid board in light or dark. In Diagram mode, the Freehand pen keeps a stroke exactly as drawn and the Shape Pen tidies a rough box into a clean element on release. Switching mode never changes the canvas: the same tab can hold a structured diagram and the freehand notes scribbled over it.

An Excalidraw copy pasted onto a tab, or a file dropped on it, lands as whiteboard-native content in Draw mode. A .excalidraw file (or a PNG or SVG exported with the scene embedded) imports with shapes, arrows, text and connections intact, and the Explorer can import Excalidraw files as canvases of their own. Each import ends with a report of anything that changed on the way in.

Excalidraw’s wobble and hatched fills are a matter of look, so an import draws its shapes in the tab’s own finish: switch the tab to Sketch to keep the hand-drawn feel. Export goes the other way too: any diagram or whiteboard tab saves back out as a .excalidraw file. Excalidraw has fewer element types, so richer livediagram elements simplify on the way out.

Presenting is one of the things Excalidraw+ adds on its paid plan. In livediagram it is part of the free product. Pick elements on any tab and make them a slide, so the deck points at the real diagram and changes when it does. A Plan board can be a slide too, presented live.

Present full screen with presenter notes, a time budget per slide, Slide or Fade transitions, auto-advance and loop, a laser pointer and a spotlight. Animate an element so a drawing draws itself on or a title types itself in.

The free Excalidraw editor deliberately stays a single board, and its paid Excalidraw+ plan adds the workspace around it. livediagram ships that workspace to everyone for free: an explorer with folders, thumbnail previews and a details list, teams with shared libraries any member can manage, a 30-day Trash, and share links that can carry a password or an expiry date.

Collaboration is more than co-drawing, too: comments attach to elements, action items can be assigned to teammates and tracked in the Collaborate panel, and the Timeline gathers what happened across your canvases into one day-by-day feed.

livediagram treats diagram text formats as first-class: Mermaid flowcharts import as real, editable diagrams and export back out, state and ER diagrams import too, and Markdown outlines import as laid-out node-and-link maps. There is also a free REST API with personal tokens and an MCP server that lets AI assistants read and edit canvases directly, with their changes shown live and undoable as one unit.