Managed Excalidraw Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Collaborative virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn diagrams. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Excalidraw, no lock-in.
Excalidraw is an open-source virtual whiteboard that lets teams sketch diagrams, wireframes, and flowcharts with a distinctive hand-drawn aesthetic. ManageStacks deploys Excalidraw with real-time collaboration, persistent storage, and managed SSL.
What does Excalidraw do, and why do teams deploy it?
Excalidraw is a browser-based whiteboarding tool loved by developers, designers, and product teams for its clean, hand-drawn visual style. It supports freeform drawing, shapes, arrows, text, embedded images, and a growing library of community-contributed component libraries — making it ideal for architecture diagrams, wireframes, user flows, and brainstorming sessions.
Real-time collaboration is built in: multiple users can draw on the same canvas simultaneously with live cursors, and canvases can be shared via links with optional end-to-end encryption. Excalidraw also supports dark mode, extensive keyboard shortcuts, and export to PNG, SVG, and its native .excalidraw format for lossless re-editing.
ManageStacks deploys the self-hosted Excalidraw instance with the collaboration server (excalidraw-room) for WebSocket-based real-time editing, persistent storage for saved drawings, and managed TLS. Keep your diagrams and design artifacts in your own cloud instead of on third-party servers.
- Hand-drawn aesthetic for diagrams, wireframes, and flowcharts
- Real-time multiplayer collaboration with live cursors
- Extensive shape, arrow, and connector library
- Community component libraries for common diagram patterns
- Export to PNG, SVG, and native .excalidraw format
- End-to-end encryption for shared canvases
Collaborative virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn diagrams
Excalidraw as a self-hosted alternative to Miro, FigJam and Lucidchart
Instead of paying per-seat fees to a SaaS vendor, teams self-host Excalidraw to keep full control of their data and infrastructure. ManageStacks removes the operational overhead — you get the cost and privacy benefits of open source with the reliability of a managed platform.
What does managed Excalidraw hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
When is self-hosting Excalidraw the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Excalidraw at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Excalidraw run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Excalidraw in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Excalidraw on ManageStacks
Can Excalidraw on ManageStacks replace Miro or FigJam?
For diagram-focused work — architecture sketches, wireframes, flowcharts, and technical illustrations — yes. Excalidraw excels at quick, informal visual communication. For sticky-note-heavy workshops or complex project management boards, Miro may still have an edge.
Does the self-hosted Excalidraw support real-time collaboration?
Yes. ManageStacks deploys the excalidraw-room WebSocket server alongside the main application, enabling real-time multiplayer editing with live cursors — the same experience as excalidraw.com but on your infrastructure.
Can I use Excalidraw component libraries on ManageStacks?
Yes. Excalidraw supports importing community-built component libraries (AWS architecture icons, UML shapes, UI kit components, etc.) via JSON files. These work identically on the self-hosted version.
Is Excalidraw data encrypted on ManageStacks?
Excalidraw supports optional end-to-end encryption for shared sessions where the decryption key stays in the URL fragment (never sent to the server). ManageStacks adds TLS for all connections and encrypted backups for persisted drawings.
Other devtools tools on ManageStacks
Run Excalidraw without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.