Excalidesk The open-source Excalidraw desktop app

Excalidesk is a free, open-source desktop app built on the Excalidraw canvas. Every drawing is stored locally on your own machine. The hosted version of Excalidraw charges for cloud storage and sync; Excalidesk gives you the same canvas with all of your data kept on your own disk, no account required.

Features

• Excalidraw canvas - the full Excalidraw drawing editor, embedded natively
• Local gallery - organize drawings into folders, with trash and archive
• Revisions - point-in-time snapshots of a drawing you can browse and restore
• Crash recovery - in-progress work is recovered automatically after an unexpected exit
• Backup & restore - export your entire library to a single ZIP and restore it on any machine
• Icon picker - search and insert icons from Lucide, HugeIcons, and Fluent
• Logo picker - search and insert brand logos from SVGL
• Auto-updates - the app updates itself via the Tauri updater

Everything runs on your machine. Nothing is sent to a server.

Tech Stack

• Tauri - native desktop shell (Rust)
• React - UI
• @excalidraw/excalidraw - the drawing canvas
• SQLite - local gallery database

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Bun
• Rust

Install

bun install

Develop

bun dev:desktop

Build

bun -F desktop desktop:build

Releases

Prebuilt installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux are published at github.com/amajorai/excalidesk/releases. The app auto-updates from the same source.

Credits

Excalidesk is built on Excalidraw, which is licensed under the MIT License. Huge thanks to the Excalidraw team and contributors.

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Jia Wei Ng.

Excalidesk is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

The bundled Excalidraw canvas is also MIT-licensed; see Credits.

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