Excalidraw vs Penpot
Excalidraw and Penpot are both design and whiteboard software. Excalidraw is open source under MIT, with 135k GitHub stars. Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0, with 62k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Excalidraw when
- Teams want quick informal diagrams in meetings, docs or your own app without heavyweight diagram tools.
- Pick Penpot when
- Your team wants a Figma alternative it can self-host or use without per-editor lock-in.
Side by side
A browser whiteboard for hand-drawn style diagrams and wireframes with end-to-end encrypted live collaboration, also published as an embeddable React component.
A browser-based design and prototyping tool for product teams, using open standards such as SVG, CSS and HTML, with components and design tokens.
The free app is light on team features; persistent workspaces and libraries are in paid Excalidraw+.
Plugin ecosystem and performance on very large files still trail Figma.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, self-hosted server and library
Self-hosted server and cloud service
TypeScript, React and Vite
Clojure, ClojureScript, Rust and PostgreSQL
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
135k GitHub stars
62k GitHub stars
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release v0.18.1.
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release 2.18.5.
Other comparisons
More design and whiteboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.