Open-source Whimsical alternatives

Excalidraw is a browser-based whiteboard that renders shapes, arrows and text in a deliberately hand-drawn style, which makes diagrams feel like quick sketches rather than polished slides. It is used for architecture diagrams, wireframes, brainstorming and teaching, and works on an infinite canvas with zoom and pan.

The editor offers rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows, lines, free-draw and an eraser, along with labeled arrows that stay bound to shapes, image support, shape libraries, dark mode and undo and redo. Drawings export to PNG, SVG or the clipboard, or to an open JSON-based .excalidraw file. The hosted app adds real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption, offline use as a progressive web app, autosave in the browser and shareable read-only links.

The editor is also published as an npm package under the MIT license, so developers can embed it in their own products and customize it. A separate paid plan, Excalidraw+, is linked from the project for people who want a hosted workspace.

AFFiNE is an open-source workspace that combines writing, drawing and planning in a single app. Documents, an edgeless whiteboard and table views share the same blocks, so you can place rich text, sticky notes, embedded web pages, database views, linked pages, shapes and even slides anywhere on one canvas. It is presented as an alternative to Notion and Miro.

The project stresses local-first storage, meaning your data lives on your own device first, together with real-time collaboration. A multimodal AI assistant helps write reports, turn outlines into slides, summarize articles into mind maps and organize tasks. Under the hood it uses CRDTs for syncing and is built mostly in TypeScript and Rust, with Electron for the desktop app. It also supports Markdown, wiki and knowledge-base use, and presentations.

AFFiNE's license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub, so review it before commercial use. There is a live demo and documentation on the project site, a hosted version is available, and the app can also be self-hosted.

tldraw is an SDK for building infinite canvas applications in React. It supplies a complete canvas engine that serves as the foundation for whiteboards, diagramming tools, design editors and other canvas products, and it ships a default whiteboarding tool set that you can use as is or replace with your own primitives.

Out of the box it offers pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, rich text, arrows with snapping, image and video support and image export. Developers can extend it with their own shapes, tools, bindings, interface components, side effects and event hooks, and can drive the canvas at runtime through the Editor API. Multiplayer collaboration is available through a self-hostable sync package, there are canvas primitives for building with LLMs, and the DOM-based rendering can embed websites such as YouTube, Figma and GitHub. It works in desktop and touch browsers.

Starter kits provide the custom shapes, tools and interface for common application types, and each kit is MIT licensed. The SDK itself is under tldraw's own license rather than a standard open-source one, so review the terms before shipping it in a commercial product.

Drawnix is a free, open-source whiteboard that brings mind maps, flowcharts and freehand drawing together in a single workspace. Instead of switching between separate diagramming apps, you can sketch ideas, structure them into diagrams and annotate everything on one infinite canvas that you can zoom and scroll freely.

The editor supports inserting images, undo and redo, copy and paste, light and dark themes, and a layout that adapts to mobile devices. Mermaid syntax can be converted into flowcharts and Markdown text into mind maps, while work is saved automatically in the browser and can be exported as PNG images or as .drawnix JSON files for later reuse.

Drawnix is released under the MIT licence and is built on Plait, an open-source drawing framework from the PingCode team, using a plugin architecture that can work with different UI frameworks. The hosted app at drawnix.com is a minimal version, and the repository includes Docker instructions for people who prefer to run their own copy.

draw.io is a diagramming and whiteboarding application, with many configuration options, written in JavaScript and running entirely in the browser. It is co-owned and built by draw.io Ltd (formerly JGraph) and draw.io AG, and the same code powers the production deployment at app.diagrams.net.

The repository's source code uses the Apache License 2.0, while the icon sets, stencil libraries and diagram templates come with extra terms, including a restriction on using them in Atlassian products or marketplace plugins without written permission, although diagrams you create are unaffected and the project makes no copyright claim on them. The scope is diagramming and whiteboarding, not SVG editing, and this version does not offer real-time collaborative editing.

The team does not accept pull requests; development is done entirely by the core team. Because the editor is client-side, it can be embedded or hosted on your own infrastructure, and the hosted app is free to use in a browser. It suits anyone drawing flowcharts, architecture diagrams, network maps or UML.

Freeplane is a free and open-source application that supports thinking, sharing information and getting things done, at work, at school and at home. It provides tools for mind mapping, also called concept mapping or information mapping, and for navigating the information you have mapped. It is also used for knowledge management and light project management.

The README presents it as an alternative to commercial mind mapping software such as Xmind and MindMeister, aimed at more demanding users. Capabilities hinted at by the repository topics include Groovy scripting, Markdown and LaTeX support, an outliner view, presentation features and writing aids. It is built in Java on OSGi with a Swing interface, so it runs on any operating system with a current Java installation, and it can run from removable storage such as a USB drive.

Freeplane is licensed under GPL-2.0 and runs locally on your computer, so there is no server or hosted version. It suits students, researchers, writers and teams that want a capable offline mind mapping tool.

Excalidraw-CN is a whiteboard tool built on top of Excalidraw that adds support for Chinese handwriting-style fonts and multiple canvases. It was created for users who wanted the familiar Excalidraw drawing experience but with hand-drawn Chinese typography and the ability to manage several canvases rather than a single board.

The README notes that this project, previously known as Handraw, has been fully upgraded into a separate project called ReveZone, which adds more convenient multi-canvas file management and custom fonts, with both an online version (data stored in the browser) and a desktop app (data stored locally). An older, deprecated online version remained available separately, and a companion Obsidian plugin was also developed to bring the same Chinese handwriting style into Obsidian.

Excalidraw-CN itself is written in TypeScript, requires Node.js, Yarn and Git for local development, and is released under the MIT license. New users are directed toward Revezone as the actively developed successor rather than this original repository.