The real-time draw.io alternative

draw.io is built around a diagram file. It does support real-time co-editing, with shared cursors, when that file lives in Google Drive, OneDrive, Confluence Cloud or Nextcloud; otherwise working together means passing the file around. livediagram is multiplayer on every document from the ground up: share a link and everyone is on the same canvas at once, with live cursors, presence, and a selection lock that shows when someone is already editing an element.

The collaboration layer goes further than co-editing: comments attach to elements, action items can be assigned to a teammate (tracked in the Collaborate panel, with optional email notification), and a facilitator can run a shared timer, dot-voting and live polls when a diagram review turns into a workshop.

draw.io gives you enormous power and expects you to wield it: picking stencils, styling shapes, routing lines. livediagram optimises the first ten minutes instead. Templates give you a real starting structure (flowchart, kanban, org chart, timeline, ER and sequence diagrams and more), one-click themes style the whole canvas at once, and the diagram maintains itself as you work: arrows re-route around shapes and avoid colliding with each other, and alignment guides snap things into place.

For architecture diagrams specifically, a Technology palette ships full-colour brand icons for the services people actually draw: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, databases and more, no library hunting required.

A livediagram document is a URL, not a file. Share links open instantly for anyone, need no account, and can be protected with a password or an expiry date. Any share link also embeds as an iframe that live-updates in your wiki or docs as the diagram changes, so embedded copies never go stale: an editor link embeds an editable canvas, and a participant or view-only link a read-only one.

When you do need a file, any tab exports as PNG, SVG, PDF or a portable JSON file, the explorer shows thumbnail previews so you can find the right document at a glance, and signed-in users can mirror their documents to their own Google Drive.

If you keep diagrams next to code, livediagram round-trips Mermaid flowcharts: paste the text (from a README, an issue, or an AI assistant) and it becomes a real, editable, themed diagram; export turns the diagram back into Mermaid. State and ER diagrams and Markdown outlines import too. And for automation there is a free REST API with personal tokens and an MCP server for AI tools.