Open-source alternatives to Excalidraw+ (self-hosted, 2026)

Excalidraw+ is the paid, hosted version of Excalidraw, from the team that makes the editor. It adds accounts, workspaces, collections, comments, presentations, and AI. It runs only in Excalidraw’s cloud. A self-hosted version is in development as part of a future Enterprise license, with a waitlist.

If you need the drawings on your own server today, these are the open-source options that use the Excalidraw editor. I maintain one of them, Excaliself, so read this with that in mind. I checked each feature in the project’s own repository or docs in November 2026, and I link the sources. Where another project does something better than Excaliself, I say so.

The comparison

Accounts and collaboration

	Accounts and SSO	Team space	Folders	Live collab	Comments
Excalidraw+ (hosted baseline)	Accounts. SSO is in the roadmap backlog	Workspace teams	Collections, no nesting yet	Yes, with voice and screen share	Yes
Excaliself	Accounts with invites. SSO: Google, Microsoft Entra ID, OIDC	Yes: Team and Private	Nested	Built in. Guest links	Yes, pinned to shapes
ExcaliDash	Accounts. OIDC	No. Share drawings or collections with accounts	Collections, flat	Built in. Link sharing with expiry	No
Nextcloud Whiteboard	Nextcloud users and its SSO apps	Through Nextcloud sharing	Nextcloud Files folders	Separate websocket server	Yes
Plain Excalidraw (official image)	None	No	No	Needs your own build, excalidraw-room, and Firebase	No

History, AI, storage, and license

	Version history	AI and MCP	Storage	License
Excalidraw+ (hosted baseline)	Not yet (roadmap: in progress)	Text to diagram, wireframe to code, MCP server (beta)	Excalidraw’s cloud	Hosted service. The editor is MIT
Excaliself	No	MCP server. Edits wait for Apply	Postgres	MIT
ExcaliDash	Yes, snapshots (kept 2 days by default)	No built-in MCP	SQLite or Postgres. Images optionally on S3	LGPL-3.0
Nextcloud Whiteboard	Nextcloud file versions	Prompt to diagram through Nextcloud Assistant. No MCP	.whiteboard files in Nextcloud	AGPL-3.0
Plain Excalidraw (official image)	No	AI calls excalidraw.com (set at build time)	Each user’s browser	MIT

Excalidraw+ costs $7 per user per month, or $6 paid yearly. The free plan needs no account and has no workspace.

Excalidraw+: the baseline

What it does well: nothing to run, a polished presentation mode, PDF and PPTX export, AI text to diagram and wireframe to code with 100 requests a day, and an MCP server and REST API in public beta.

What is still missing, from its own roadmap: SSO and nested folders are in the backlog, and version history is in progress. The data is in their cloud, which is the reason most people read a post like this one.

Excaliself

Excaliself is one app image next to Postgres. It embeds the official @excalidraw/excalidraw package unchanged.

• Accounts: the first visitor is the admin. Others join with a single-use invite link or with SSO: Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, or one OIDC provider. People from your email domains can join on their first SSO sign-in.
• Spaces: each member has a Private space, and the whole instance shares one Team space. Team drawings are always live.
• Organization: nested folders, stars, trash for 30 days, and search over titles and the text inside drawings.
• Collaboration: live cursors and follow mode. A share link can let guests without an account edit.
• Comments: threads pinned to a shape. They stay on the shape when it moves.
• Team library: one shape library for everyone, saved on the server.
• MCP: Claude and other MCP clients can search, read, create, and export drawings, and answer comments. A change to a drawing is a proposal until someone clicks Apply. The server needs no AI key.
• Import from Excalidraw+: paste an Excalidraw+ API key in Settings → Import to bring scenes, collections, and images. This is in beta.

Where it is behind:

• No version history. ExcaliDash and Nextcloud Whiteboard have it.
• Share links always allow editing. There is no view-only link and no expiry date. ExcaliDash has both.
• One replica. The live state of each open drawing is in the app’s memory. Nextcloud Whiteboard scales across nodes with Redis.
• No built-in AI and no presentation mode.

ExcaliDash

ExcaliDash (v0.6.7, LGPL-3.0) is the most popular project in this list, with about 1,800 GitHub stars.

• Accounts, OIDC, or both. AUTH_MODE chooses: local accounts, OIDC only, both, or no sign-in (authentication).
• You share a drawing or a collection with named accounts, with view or edit access. Links can be “anyone with the link” with an expiry (collaboration).
• Version history with preview and restore. Snapshots are kept for SNAPSHOT_RETENTION_DAYS, 2 days by default (storage and backups).
• SQLite by default with scheduled backups, or Postgres. Images can go to S3.
• Two containers: a backend and an nginx frontend.

No shared team space, collections do not nest, search matches titles only, and I found no comment feature or MCP server in the code. There is a third-party MCP server.

Nextcloud Whiteboard

Nextcloud Whiteboard (v2.1.2, AGPL-3.0) is the official whiteboard app for Nextcloud. If you already run Nextcloud, it is the natural choice.

• Users, groups, SSO, folders, and sharing all come from Nextcloud. A board is a .whiteboard file in Nextcloud Files.
• Comments, voting, a timer, presentation mode, and recording.
• Version history through Nextcloud file versions.
• An Assistant that turns a prompt into a Mermaid diagram, if Nextcloud has an AI provider set up.
• It scales across nodes with Redis.

Live collaboration needs a separate websocket server (ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/whiteboard) that shares a JWT secret with Nextcloud (README). If you do not run Nextcloud, you install all of Nextcloud to get it.

Plain self-hosted Excalidraw

The official excalidraw/excalidraw image is the editor in nginx. Drawings stay in each browser, and there are no accounts. Live collaboration is built to use excalidraw.com’s servers, and the URLs are fixed at build time. To move it to your server, you build the image yourself and run excalidraw-room. Rooms still save a copy to Firebase. The full details are in How to self-host Excalidraw.

One thing it does better than the others: rooms are end-to-end encrypted, with the key in the link.

Which one?

• You already run Nextcloud: Nextcloud Whiteboard.
• You need version history or view-only links today: ExcaliDash.
• You want a shared Team space, SSO, comments, an Excalidraw+ import, and MCP, in one app with Postgres: Excaliself. Try it with one command, as in the quick start.
• Only you, no collaboration: the official image.

Sources

• Excalidraw+: pricing, roadmap, MCP docs, self-hosting
• ExcaliDash: repository, docs, environment reference
• Nextcloud Whiteboard: repository, App Store
• Excalidraw: repository, self-hosting docs
• Excaliself: repository, docs