I love diagramming, but I genuinely don't understand how people can use these wonky looking tools. It looks off, I had to make my own[1] to create something that's easy to use and looks good/normal.
I made a custom Payload CMS block that allows to create and update excalidraw diagrams within the CMS. It supports dark and light mode switching and rendering inline or as external SVG.
And last weekend I added MCP server with Oauth so I could generate and update those diagrams and add them to post drafts from Claude. I think it is more convenient since I don't have to use API billing model and don't need to build a custom UI.
Originally I wanted to sync posts from Obsidian but it doesn't have good enough image handling which I sometimes need and I needed extra metadata to unlist or password protect or noindex some posts.
I simply just draw in excalidraw and take a ss and past it in my obsidian note, I have a setup that automatically parses posts from my vault and then pushes them to my site
You can also bootstrap your initial schema with LLMs with the excalidraw MCP "app" [0]. But MCP "apps"[1] are quite new and not very well supported yet.
I didn't have good experience with excalidraw-mcp when it first came out a month ago; the Claude-generated diagrams were too raw/unpolished. I'm sticking to mermaid for now but I'm interested in hearing how people make exclidraw-mcp work for them
Everyone does that these days and they are becoming AI tells like the em-dash or the blue-glow of the early AI generated images that everyone added to their blog posts.
AI can generate mermaid diagrams, not excalidraw. If you use the mermaid to excalidraw, i guess it can be, but it just looks like a mermaid diagram then and not an excalidraw.
Same. I started using it for Gethly blog. It's not perfect, some things make me crazy but overall it is better than draw.io that I used to use before. Excalidraw also has these great styles that just feel right :)
I use Excalidraw extensively at work. For me, it's really close to perfection.
It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly.
The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.
Both Excalidraw and TLDraw are the two most popular apps of their kind, simplistic whiteboard tools, so I don't think it's that surprising and I don't see any reason why this post should be a "Show HN".
For me, draw.io is still the winner, and especially now that it runs locally also on Linux. As for works in progress, I hope this one succeeds (and would also run locally at some point):
I love excalidraw, but don't need the excalidraw+. But Excalidraw open source is the frontend only, which means I have to delete my drawings each time. So I built the backend so I can create many canvases.
Your site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage.
The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.
[1] https://grafly.io
I made a custom Payload CMS block that allows to create and update excalidraw diagrams within the CMS. It supports dark and light mode switching and rendering inline or as external SVG.
And last weekend I added MCP server with Oauth so I could generate and update those diagrams and add them to post drafts from Claude. I think it is more convenient since I don't have to use API billing model and don't need to build a custom UI.
Here is an example post: https://www.janhouse.lv/blog/network/self-hosting-tailscale-...
Originally I wanted to sync posts from Obsidian but it doesn't have good enough image handling which I sometimes need and I needed extra metadata to unlist or password protect or noindex some posts.
[1]: https://darshanmakwana412.github.io/2026/03/a-system-of-jour...
[0] -- https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-mcp
[1] -- https://modelcontextprotocol.io/extensions/apps/overview
Now it reads like an ad for some extension to a program I've never heard about.
https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw
It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly.
The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.
A self-hosted version with storage (multiplayer) plus any Claude access would be a killer setup for team planning etc and let us drop Miro.
TLDraw: https://www.tldraw.com/
Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/
TikzMaker: https://tikzmaker.com/
https://drawx.ossy.dev
The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.