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I have tried quite a few online whiteboards during the pandemic WFH. IMHO nothing comes close to https://excalidraw.com

No signup needed, clean interface, fast load times and an option to self host makes it an excellent product.




I like Excalidraw too, but in my opinion OurBoard has a different focus.

- Excalidraw is superb if you want to draw something freestyle.

- Ourboard seems to focus more on creating boxes (notes) which you can group and connect. If I understand it correctly, you can even load Github issues into your board.

At the start of the pandemic, I searched for Whiteboards where I could draw things freestyle (installed MS Whiteboard), but over time I noticed, that I used MS Powerpoint most of the time, because it was so much better at handling boxes in collaborative environments. I think OurBoard could be even better at this job.


Iirc Excalidraw is built on top of Google Firebase. That doesn't make it less nice, but imo it shouldn't count as open source or self hostable.


That looks really sharp! I’ve been very pleased with Miro for corporate use though.


Miro has an interesting learning curve (at least for me). I absolutely hated it for the first couple dozen times I used it.

Then, there was one meeting where it was particularly effective in running a “sticky note” exercise and my opinion on it flipped that day from around -7 to +3 [on a -10 to +10 scale]. It’s grown slightly on me since then as well; I might be a +5 on it right now.


We used it to run remote PI Planning and it was very effective for that.


Excalidraw is pleasant indeed! Thanks for the introduction :-)




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