Get started with Excalidraw

What you get out of this

Excalidraw is an endless whiteboard in the browser. Everything you draw looks like it was drawn by hand with a marker, a little crooked and deliberately rough, and that is the whole point. A sketch that looks finished makes people comment on the colors. A sketch that looks sloppy makes them comment on the content.

For a company, it is the tool you bring out when five people need to think out loud at the same time: brainstorming before a launch, a quick picture of how the store should be laid out, an explanation of the product that goes into a presentation tomorrow. Several people can draw on the same surface at the same time and see each other's cursors.

The program is free and open source under the MIT license. There is a paid service called Excalidraw+, but the free version at excalidraw.com is more than enough for most companies.

There is no program to install, and that is on purpose

Excalidraw runs in the browser. There was once a desktop program built on Electron, but the project itself marked it as discontinued back in 2020 and it has not been updated since. Do not download it. Everything in it is in the browser version, and that is the one being developed.

That does not mean you need to be online. The page can be installed as an app on both Windows and Linux Mint, and it then works even without a network. Your drawings are saved automatically in the browser on that particular computer, not with Excalidraw.

Install as an app on Windows

Open excalidraw.com in Chrome or Edge. In the address bar, at the far right, a small icon appears that looks like a screen with an arrow. Click it and select Install. If the icon is not there, open the menu with three dots and look for Apps and then Install this site as an app.

Excalidraw then appears in the Start menu like any other program, opens in its own window without an address bar, and also starts when the internet is down.

Firefox on Windows can also install web pages as apps since version 143, via a small icon for adding the tab to the taskbar. If you have an older Firefox, or the Microsoft Store version that needs version 150, the page still works exactly as usual, you just do not get your own icon. If you want to be sure it works regardless of version, use Chrome or Edge for the installation.

Install as an app on Linux Mint

The same applies with Chrome, Chromium or Edge. Open excalidraw.com, click the install icon in the address bar and confirm. The app is added to the menu under Graphics.

If you use Mint's preinstalled Firefox, the same limitation applies as on Windows: the page works, but you cannot install it. In that case, Chromium is easiest to install from the Software Manager.

None of this requires the terminal. If you still want to check that you have a browser that can handle it, just look for the install icon in the address bar.

Draw something in five minutes

The toolbar is at the top. The numbers 1 to 9 on the keyboard select tools, and the two you will use most are 2 for rectangle and 5 for arrow.

1. Press 2 and drag out a box. Double-click inside it and type. The text sticks to the box and follows when you move it.
2. Press 5 and drag from the edge of one box to the edge of another. The arrow attaches to both and bends when the boxes are moved.
3. Select something and use the panel on the left for color, fill, line thickness and font.
4. Hold down the space bar and drag to move the whole canvas. The canvas is infinite, so it does not matter if it gets crowded.
5. Press Ctrl and Z when something goes wrong. It works all the way back.

Under the menu at the top left you find Canvas background, where you change the background color. At the top right there is a separate button, Library, with a library of ready-made figures that others have added. The library is worth five minutes before the trade show: there are ready-made phones, people, cloud symbols and arrows that make a sketch readable for someone who was not there when you drew it.

Draw together, and what is actually sent

Click Live collaboration at the top right and then Start session. You get a link to send to the rest of the company. Everyone who has the link sees the same canvas and can draw on it at the same time, and you see each other's cursors with names.

According to the project's own documentation, the collaboration mode is encrypted end to end. The key is in the part of the link that comes after the # character, and that part is never sent to the server. The server therefore forwards encrypted packets without being able to read them.

The practical thing to understand from this: the link is the password. Anyone who gets the link forwarded to them can enter the canvas. Do not post it in an open chat, and end the session when you are done. If you only need to share a snapshot without more people drawing in real time, use Shareable link instead. The recipient gets their own separate copy to look at and can edit it, but the changes are never shared back to your canvas.

Saving, and the trap that costs you an evening

Excalidraw saves automatically in the browser on the computer you are sitting at. That is enough from morning to afternoon. It is not enough in the long run, because it disappears when someone clears browser data, switches computers or uses a private window.

Do this instead, every time you have drawn something you want to keep: open the menu and choose Save to disk. You get a file with the extension .excalidraw, which is plain text in JSON format. Put it in the company's shared folder. The file is then opened with Open in any browser.

If the image is going into a document, choose Export image. PNG for presentations and reports, SVG when the image is to be printed large. Tick Embed scene when exporting, then the original is baked into the image file and it can be opened and edited again in Excalidraw. Without that checkbox you get an image and nothing more.

Running Excalidraw on your own server

This step is optional and only interesting if you are already working with Docker. There is a ready-made image, and you start it with one command:

docker run -d --name excalidraw -p 5001:80 excalidraw/excalidraw

Then you open http://localhost:5001. The command has been run and verified on a Linux machine with Docker installed, and the page responds immediately after startup.

One thing you should know before you think you have moved everything in-house: real-time collaboration is not included in this image. It requires a separate service called excalidraw-room, and without it your own installation works for drawing alone but not for drawing together. If you need the collaboration, excalidraw.com is the easier choice, and the encryption means the content is not readable to the server anyway.

Docker on your own computer is covered in the guide Install Docker.

How you know it worked

• Excalidraw starts in its own window from the Start menu or the program menu.
• The canvas works even with the network disconnected.
• An arrow you have drawn moves with the box when it is moved.
• You have an .excalidraw file saved in the company's shared folder, not just in the browser.
• An exported PNG with Embed scene can be opened in Excalidraw again.

If something goes wrong

The drawing is gone when you open it on another computer. That is expected. Excalidraw saves locally in the browser. Save to a file and put the file in the shared folder.

No install icon appears in the address bar. You are in Firefox, or in a private window. Switch to Chrome, Chromium or Edge in a regular window.

Someone in the company cannot see what you are drawing. Either you are in a regular canvas instead of in a session, or the person has opened a share link that is view only. Start Live collaboration and send the link from there.

The arrow does not attach to the box. Drag from the edge of the box, not from the middle, and release when the box becomes selected.

The text ends up next to the box instead of inside it. You created a standalone text box. Delete it, double-click inside the box instead and type there.

What you do next

Book half an hour with the whole company, start a session and sketch out the coming week. It clears up more misunderstandings than a meeting does.

If the picture instead needs to last a long time and be exact, for example a flowchart that will be used over and over again, draw.io is the right tool. And if you need to write down what you arrived at, rather than draw it, take a look at Joplin.