Mattermost
Mattermost ships v11.8 compliance controls amid heavy sovereign-defence content
Comparison · Collab
Excalidraw vs Anytype
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Excalidraw and Anytype — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Excalidraw vs Anytype: at a glance
What is Excalidraw?
Excalidraw library cadence is glacial — v0.18 in March 2025, then silence; feed is mostly GitHub-profile noise.
The captured changelog tracks the npm library at github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw, not the hosted app at excalidraw.com. The library has shipped four substantive releases over two-and-a-half years: v0.16.1 (Sep 2023), v0.17.0 (Nov 2023), v0.17.3 (Feb 2024), and v0.18.0 (March 2025). The latest entry is from April 2026 but is a GitHub-profile scraping artifact, not a release. Half the feed is GitHub user-profile pages ('Sorry, something went wrong') that landed instead of release content.
What is Anytype?
Anytype's 0.55 cycle is a steady grind on chat, with code blocks the headline
Anytype is iterating quickly through nightly and alpha builds on the 0.55 line. The visible theme is in-app chat reaching parity with the rest of the editor — multiline code blocks, code-fence rendering in the composer, and selection/menu fixes — alongside small UX touches and reproducible Windows build plumbing.
Excalidraw vs Anytype: editorial side-by-side
Excalidraw
1.3COLLAB
Excalidraw library cadence is glacial — v0.18 in March 2025, then silence; feed is mostly GitHub-profile noise.
◆ Current state
The captured changelog tracks the npm library at github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw, not the hosted app at excalidraw.com. The library has shipped four substantive releases over two-and-a-half years: v0.16.1 (Sep 2023), v0.17.0 (Nov 2023), v0.17.3 (Feb 2024), and v0.18.0 (March 2025). The latest entry is from April 2026 but is a GitHub-profile scraping artifact, not a release. Half the feed is GitHub user-profile pages ('Sorry, something went wrong') that landed instead of release content.
◆ Where it's heading
v0.18.0 was the high-water release — command palette, multiplayer undo/redo, editable element stats, text wrapping, and laser pointer. Since then the library has been quiet for over a year while the hosted app at excalidraw.com presumably continued to evolve through unversioned deploys. This pattern suggests the team has shifted investment toward the SaaS product and integrations, with the open-source library treated as a stable embedding target rather than the frontier of feature work.
◆ Prediction
The library will likely see another minor release rather than going dormant — there is too much downstream embedding (Notion, Obsidian, etc.) for it to fully fall behind the SaaS app — but expect months between releases, not weeks. The feed-source issue is fixable: the crawler should target the GitHub Releases API or RSS, not the HTML release pages and contributor profiles that produce the current noise.
Anytype
5.0COLLAB
Anytype's 0.55 cycle is a steady grind on chat, with code blocks the headline
◆ Current state
Anytype is iterating quickly through nightly and alpha builds on the 0.55 line. The visible theme is in-app chat reaching parity with the rest of the editor — multiline code blocks, code-fence rendering in the composer, and selection/menu fixes — alongside small UX touches and reproducible Windows build plumbing.
◆ Where it's heading
The chat surface is being hardened into a first-class part of the workspace rather than a bolt-on, with code-block support and context-menu polish closing gaps against the document editor. Startup performance and CI signing work suggest parallel attention to reliability as the alpha stabilizes.
◆ Prediction
Expect the chat feature set to keep filling in toward stable-release readiness and the nightly/alpha cadence to continue, with the 0.55 line consolidating these fixes. The entries don't show a larger directional shift beyond chat maturation.
Alternatives to Excalidraw and Anytype
Other Collab products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Excalidraw or Anytype.
SiYuan
SiYuan's 3.7.0 turns the note-taker into a scriptable, extensible platform
Rocket.Chat
Rocket.Chat is methodically migrating off Meteor DDP toward a REST core
Front
Front is rebuilding the shared inbox around AI agents and omnichannel reach.
Claromentis
Claromentis's feed is secure-AI and compliance thought-leadership, not a release log.
Powell Software
Powell Software's feed is digital-workplace marketing and PR, not release notes.
See all Excalidraw alternatives → · See all Anytype alternatives →
Recent activity from Excalidraw and Anytype
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2d agoAnytypeAdd 'Show as' toggle for the My Favorites sidebar section
- 4d agoAnytype0.55.16-alpha: chat multiline code blocks, space-switch stale-object fix
- 5d agoAnytypeNightly: chat double-click selection fix (pre-alpha build)
- 8d agoAnytype0.55.15-alpha: chat file-download and copy-link menu fixes
- 9d agoAnytypeNightly: split comment menu into 'Copy message link' / 'Copy link'
- 12d agoAnytypeNightly: pin AzureSignTool for reproducible Windows builds
- 2mo agoExcalidrawGitHub profile scrape (feed artifact, not a release)
- 1y agoExcalidrawv0.18.0 (2025-03-11) ⚡
- 1y agoExcalidrawGitHub profile error page (feed artifact)
- 1y agoExcalidrawv0.18.0 (duplicate feed entry)
- 2y agoExcalidrawv0.17.3 (2024-02-09)
- 2y agoExcalidrawv0.17.3 (2024-02-09)
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Excalidraw and Anytype?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Anytype is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 1.3), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Excalidraw better than Anytype?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Anytype is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 1.3), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Collab products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Excalidraw?
Top Excalidraw alternatives in Collab are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Excalidraw alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/excalidraw for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Anytype?
Top Anytype alternatives in Collab are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Anytype alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/anytype for the full list with editorial commentary on each.