The best Excalidraw alternatives for Mac

Koi 2.0 has an endless board that works as Excalidraw does and is laid out the same way, drawn by the app itself rather than a web page. The tools along the top take Excalidraw's letters: hand, select, rectangle, diamond, ellipse, arrow, line, pen, text, eraser, plus sticky notes, a laser pointer, a lasso and a bucket. Arrows hold on to shapes and follow them. Sloppiness has architect, artist and cartoonist, and Excalifont is one of its fonts. Frames, groups, a right-click menu, find on canvas, draw to shape and Mermaid to diagram are there too.

What Excalidraw doesn't do: the board lives on your wallpaper as a widget, under every window and on every Space. Click it and it grows into a big window; Esc or ⌘W folds it back. It also has photo frames, stickers and paper backgrounds like kraft and notebook paper. Each board is a file on your Mac, never uploaded. Like any window, Koi's AI sees a board on screen when your screen goes with a question. Its chat bar asks Koi to draw, change or explain the board, and Koi draws on it itself; that, Text to diagram and Wireframe to code use Koi's AI only when you ask, and count against your plan's Koi usage. It also has tables and ten templates.

Where Excalidraw is better: live collaboration, any browser on any computer, a free version, and many scenes with Excalidraw+. Koi's boards are on one Mac, in English. It isn't sold on its own: Koi is $20 a month or $7 for a first week, or Lifetime, paid once, with dictation, call recording and an assistant in the same app.

tldraw is another simple whiteboard, free at tldraw.com. Since July 16, 2026, tldraw offline is a free desktop app for macOS (one download for Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux. It needs no account and no server, and saves your boards as .tldraw files where you pick, which fixes the browser-storage worry. It isn't open source, and it has a local API that AI agents can draw with.

Freeform is free and built by Apple, on macOS 13.1 or later. Boards sync through iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, and others can work on them with you in real time. It exports a board as a PDF.

Canvas comes free with Obsidian, and each canvas is a file in your vault in the open JSON Canvas format. If you want Excalidraw itself, a community plugin runs it inside Obsidian, so your drawings are files in the vault too.

Miro is the big team whiteboard, in the cloud. On the free plan only your 3 most recently edited boards stay editable. Starter is $8 and Business $20 per member a month, billed yearly. More in our Miro alternatives.