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 document, 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.

The hand-drawn look is Excalidraw's signature, and if that aesthetic is the point, Excalidraw wins it outright. But sketching itself isn't exclusive to it. Any livediagram tab can 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 document: 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 documents of their own. Each import ends with a report of anything that changed on the way in.

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.

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 documents 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 documents directly, with their changes shown live and undoable as one unit.