Nothing in Excalidraw is paywalled except the filing cabinet

77 sits in our Strong band and puts Excalidraw fifth in this category, behind Inkscape at 91, draw.io at 87 and both Penpot and Photopea at 81. Read the shape of it rather than the total: freedom scores 92 and generosity 80, while sentiment sits at 55.

That 55 is not a complaint about the product. We hold one third-party rating for Excalidraw, G2 4.4 (checked 24 July 2026), with no Trustpilot or Capterra profile on file, and one provider rating the product overall is not evidence about free users. A pillar carrying 20% of the total sits near the middle when we have nothing to read, which is why the number is lower than the free plan feels.

Against the other free whiteboards here, Excalidraw loses on organisation rather than drawing. tldraw and draw.io both let you keep many files for nothing. Excalidraw's free app keeps one, and that single difference is most of the gap between its 77 and tldraw's 73 going the other way on generosity.

The free app stores exactly one scene, and it stores it in your browser rather than on a server (as of July 2026). Two consequences follow, and the second is the one that costs people work.

First, there is no multi-file organisation. No folders, no scene list, no way to keep last month's architecture diagram next to this month's. You get one infinite canvas, and starting something new means clearing or exporting what is on it.

Second, browser storage is not backup. Clearing site data, wiping a profile, or a fresh machine all take the scene with them. The habit that fixes this is exporting the .excalidraw file to disk whenever a drawing matters, which takes two seconds and is the single most useful thing to know about the free tier.

The rest of the limits are product shape rather than plan gates. There is no native desktop app, though the web app keeps working offline once it has loaded. Comments, presentations and read-only share links are Plus features. And the hand-drawn style is a deliberate choice that reads as "this is a sketch", which is exactly wrong for pixel-exact UI mockups or anything going to print.

Excalidraw+ is $6 per user per month billed annually, about 14 percent more if you pay monthly, and the list of what it adds is revealing: unlimited scenes, cloud storage, folders, comments, presentations and read-only share links. Not one of those is a drawing tool. The paid product is a place to put your drawings and a way to show them to other people.

That makes the upgrade decision unusually clean. If you sketch, screenshot and move on, there is nothing here to buy. If Excalidraw is where your team's diagrams live and someone needs to find one from March, the $6 is the whole point.

There is a third option the pricing page does not sell you. The editor is MIT licensed, so you can self-host or embed it at no cost, which is how it ends up inside other companies' products. Self-hosting gets you the editor, not Excalidraw+'s cloud features, so it solves the embedding problem rather than the filing problem unless you build storage yourself.

Yes, and we are placing it a step above where a score of 77 would normally land. The reason: the job Excalidraw exists for, sketching something with another person right now, has no paywall anywhere in it, and the score is held down by an empty sentiment pillar and by storage rather than by any limit on the drawing.

Who lives here permanently: engineers sketching system diagrams on calls, anyone who wants a whiteboard link in under ten seconds without asking a colleague to sign up, teams who left Miro over the board cap and mostly needed freehand shapes. Who should pay: anyone treating Excalidraw as an archive, because one scene in browser storage is not an archive and losing a diagram to a cleared cache is a bad way to learn that.

For tidier, straighter output on the same terms, tldraw's free plan is the comparison worth reading, and free Miro alternatives covers the board-cap escape route more broadly. The full ranking sits at best free design and whiteboarding tools.