LoginSign Up
← Back to all sparks
Excalidraw logo

Excalidraw

COLLAB
Velocity1.3

Open-source virtual whiteboard for sketching

excalidraw.com ↗

Excalidraw library cadence is glacial — v0.18 in March 2025, then silence; feed is mostly GitHub-profile noise.

whiteboardopen-sourcediagrammingreact-componentcollaborationfeed-quality
◆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.

◆Recent moves

  1. 2mo ago

    GitHub profile scrape (feed artifact, not a release)

    Scraped HTML of co-founder David Luzar's GitHub profile, not a release. The crawler followed an author link instead of a tag — pure feed noise.

    View source ↗
  2. 1y ago

    v0.18.0 (2025-03-11)

    ⚡ SPARK

    v0.18.0 is the substantive release of the period: command palette, multiplayer undo/redo, editable element stats, text wrapping, and laser pointer. It's the first time the library exposes the collaboration primitives needed to build serious multi-user whiteboarding on top of it, rather than treating Excalidraw as a single-user canvas with a sync layer bolted on.

    View source ↗
  3. 1y ago

    GitHub profile error page (feed artifact)

    GitHub profile error page for the v0.18.0 release author. Not a product release — a feed-source artifact.

    View source ↗
  4. 1y ago

    v0.18.0 (duplicate feed entry)

    Duplicate of the v0.18.0 release entry from a second crawl source (the GitHub release page HTML rather than the changelog). Same release, no additional information.

  5. 2y ago

    v0.17.3 (2024-02-09)

    v0.17.3 is a small fix release: preserves customData when converting to ExcalidrawElement, restores the UMD browser build that broke in v0.17.0, and addresses Vite's process.env handling. Important for embedders — the UMD regression had been blocking script-tag adoption.

    View source ↗
  6. 2y ago

    v0.17.3 (2024-02-09)