In the course of my day-to-day tinkerings, I’ve occasionally needed to whiteboard an idea with friends and family. Now, from my former professional life, tools like Figma, and Miro come to mind; except for a simple home user like myself – they’re paid platforms, or their free tier restrictions are too much.

I came across ExcaliDash by ZimengXiong – a free, self-hostable version of the very popular ExcaliDraw web app that offers a set of pretty awesome features:

• Drawings are stored on the server, making them easy to backup and export/import
• You can collaborate with as many people as you want
• User authentication and management is within the app
• Each person can see their own drawings or can be configured for sharing
• It has a dark mode ❤️

What about Obsidian’s Canvas feature?

Canvas is great – for mind mapping stuff, sure! But that’s about it — sadly, if I wanted more complex diagrams of things like server structure, etc. there’s issues with “Ordering” of entities on the screen, as in you can’t send things to the front, or back, or bring them up/down one layer. More complex editing features like grouping and ungrouping and even more are not in the Canvas feature. It wasn’t designed for this kind of diagramming, so it’s understandable!

What about draw.io?

A fantastic self hostable app too that actually works really well! But it doesn’t allow for collaboration, and I can’t add user authentication, control or sharing very easily either. On top of that, it doesn’t store the diagrams locally on my server, rather they become downloadable files that can I load in/out of the browser, or if I use local browser storage, the diagram isn’t as portable (I can’t work on it across networks or machines).

Done deal!

I’m happy with the setup, it’s not without it’s jank, but the project is active, and it works well for my very simple needs! So if anyone else is looking for a collaborative whiteboarding app, give ExcaliDash by ZimengXiong a look!