Excalidraw in 2024

First, we’re happy to say that you have not only remained with us, but many more of you have come on board. We’re counting around 850,000 monthly active users on excalidraw.com⁠ — a steeper increase than last year!

And we’re not attracting just the end users of the app, but also of the open-source project itself, which among other metrics can be seen on the number of GitHub stars — we’ve just crossed 89,000 stars, making us the 75th most popular repository on GitHub⁠. 💜

Our socials were also doing great. We’ve reached 30,000 followers on 𝕏⁠, 4,000 followers on our LinkedIn⁠, and hit 2,000 subscriptions on our YouTube channel⁠ (which we bet you didn’t even know about)!

Numbers aside, let’s have a quick look on what we’ve shipped last year. Let us know what you’ve missed!

The whiteboard editor

The editor itself has seen several improvements.

One of the big ones was a brand new undo/redo manager⁠ allowing for more granular and most of all more predictable history management.

We’ve added the command palette⁠ so you can do stuff faster, but also discover features you may not know about.

Editor theme can now be set to your system theme⁠. Set once and forget! (A better dark mode coming soon…)

Libraries can now be bigger⁠, and on Excalidraw+ they are persisted across devices on the server.

You can also search across text⁠ on your canvas which is mighty useful on large boards if you’re in the mood of composing poems.

You might then want to link across those poems so it’s easy to jump around (or share specific poems with your lover) by using the canvas element links⁠!

Text editing

Speaking of text, last year we’ve revamped our default font selection⁠.

We’ve touched up the Virgil⁠ font so it’s a tad more legible, improving a few characters in the process, thus introducing Excalifont⁠. You can still use either if you need, but from feedback it looks like it was a good move!

We also swapped our regular and code fonts to better align with the hand-drawn aesthetic.

And we’ve finally managed to add support for CJK⁠ (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) fonts, which turned out more complex⁠ than anticipated.

On top of that, we’re now embedding⁠ the fonts in your SVG files for better portability, and only encoding the subset⁠ of the font faces you end up exporting so that we can keep the file size on a tight leash.

To further improve working with text, you’re now able to wrap it⁠ even outside of text containers, and your text will no longer span multiple screens when pasting long paragraphs⁠.

Editing some more

Erasing experience got improved with an updated eraser⁠.

Resizing got also better, allowing you to freely resize⁠ on the X/Y axis even with multiple selected shapes at once.

We’ve redesigned our advanced shape properties⁠, making them editable for the extra precision when needed. For that purpose you can now also customize the grid step⁠.

Performance of creating shapes should be much better now, which you’ll feel on large canvases as new shapes are temporarily drawn on its own layer⁠.

A big improvement for many came with the support for cropping images⁠, and a smaller quality of life of supporting rounded edges⁠.

Charts and arrows

A big thing for diagramming⁠ came with the addition of elbow arrows⁠ so you don’t have to micromanage your arrows as much as you had to previously.

This was followed by easier creation of flowchart type of diagrams by adding quick shortcuts⁠ for them.

And speaking of flowcharts⁠, if you’re using Mermaid you can just paste it directly on canvas⁠ for some extra speed, too.

On the Excalidraw Plus side

We’re continuing to improve Excalidraw+⁠, our premium app targeted at teams or Excalidraw addicts in general. While many things weren’t very visible and happened in the background, we’ve shipped some exciting things.

One of them was the voice chat support⁠, allowing you to discuss your canvas or presentation with colleagues without having to leave the app. But we’ve soon realized that just a voice support is not enough to cover the full gamut of collaboration so we’ve tacked on the necessary screen sharing⁠ support, as well.

To make collaborating even sweeter, we’ve improved our commenting experience. Among other things, you can add emojis⁠, or disable email notifications from your preferences⁠.

And you can also finally export the canvas to PDF⁠ or your slides to PPTX on top. We’ve recently also improved its performance so it runs fast even on large drawings.

If you haven’t played presentations⁠ in a while, we’ve made several improvements such as editing multiple slides at once, or ability to present without a roundtrip to the server, so give it a try.

We’ve also refurbished the landing page⁠ with a brand new look since we just like to keep our designers on their toes. Do some wireframing⁠ yourself, or see how to start⁠ with Excalidraw, today.

Onward

Many great things are slated for Excalidraw in 2025!

On the editor side, coming up are more improvements to arrows and diagramming, as well as better customization and user experience goodies to sand off the sharp edges.

On the Excalidraw+ side, businesses will appreciate we’re cooking up the SOC 2 certification and SSO/SAML support, and many user-facing features on top, such as better search, organization, and versioning.

And we’ll be redoubling our effort on the SDK, publishing the next stable version of our npm package⁠ soon.

Stay up to date

Whether you have feedback for us or a request, we’d love to hear from you!

We’ve recently revived our r/Excalidraw⁠ subreddit, where you can share drawings and discuss ideas.

To get help or chat about, join our Discord server⁠ or post in the GitHub Discussions⁠.

For latest news, follow us on 𝕏⁠, and newly on Bluesky⁠. You should also check our monthly LinkedIn newsletter, Excalinews⁠.

For video guides and tutorials, subscribe to our YouTube channel⁠.