Excalidraw vs Penpot

Excalidraw leads in popularity with 130,027 stars vs 58,893 stars for Penpot. The 121% higher star count indicates stronger community adoption. In terms of developer contributions, Excalidraw has 14,919 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Penpot is growing faster, adding 1,896 stars in the last 30 days (+3.3%) against adding 2,087 stars for Excalidraw (+1.6%). Penpot is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.

Both projects show recent activity, with Excalidraw last updated 3 days ago and Penpot 8 hours ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, JSX, SCSS. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Excalidraw uses Next.js while Penpot leverages Bash, Python, Rust, Java, Lua, Clojure.

Penpot has been in development longer, starting 11 years ago, compared to Excalidraw which began 7 years ago. This 4.1-year head start suggests Penpot may have more mature features and established processes.

Excalidraw uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than Penpot's MPL-2.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Online Design. However, they also have distinct specializations: Excalidraw also focuses on Collaborative Workspaces, Whiteboarding while Penpot extends into UI/UX Design.

Both Excalidraw and Penpot offer self-hosting capabilities, giving you full control over your data and infrastructure.