Canva vs Excalidraw
Canva and Excalidraw are both design and whiteboard software. Canva is a commercial product from Canva. Excalidraw is open source under MIT, with 135k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Canva when
- Non-designers in a small business or marketing team need to produce on-brand graphics quickly.
- Pick Excalidraw when
- Teams want quick informal diagrams in meetings, docs or your own app without heavyweight diagram tools.
Side by side
Template-based design for social posts, presentations, documents, print and video, with brand kits and AI image tools.
A browser whiteboard for hand-drawn style diagrams and wireframes with end-to-end encrypted live collaboration, also published as an embeddable React component.
Designs are hard to move out of Canva in editable form, and team pricing has risen sharply.
The free app is light on team features; persistent workspaces and libraries are in paid Excalidraw+.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Cloud service, self-hosted server and library
Not published
TypeScript, React and Vite
Closed source, sold by Canva
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
18k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
135k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release v0.18.1.
Other comparisons
More design and whiteboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.