Introducing Excalidraw+
- Published May 3, 2021
- by Excalidraw Team
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+.
Going beyond Excalidraw
In Excalidraw+, whether you’re a company or an individual, you can create a workspace where you can manage and organize all the drawings you have created. The drawings are easily accessible to your workspace co-workers, and securely saved to the cloud. The live collaboration is enabled by default with no extra steps necessary.
With account-based access you can rest assured 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 focus on making collaboration more robust, especially when collaborating in multiple continents.
We didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer, but we are hard at work to bring many more awesome features to Excalidraw+.
Try Excalidraw+ for free, and then for $7/month.
Going forward
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.
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.
We’re just beginning
Think big, start small. Excalidraw has a bright future ahead, and we extend an invitation for you to come and shape that future with us!
