15Five vs Excalidraw

15Five and Excalidraw (Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Excalidraw (rank #103) holds a meaningful lead over 15Five (rank #693) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 31). The gap of 24 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), Excalidraw is ahead of 15Five. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Excalidraw is ahead of 15Five. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is ahead of 15Five. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Excalidraw is clearly ahead of 15Five. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), 15Five is clearly ahead of Excalidraw.

15Five carries 141 GitHub stars across 29 public repos, with 2 repositories active in the last 90 days and 5 external contributors on record. Excalidraw shows 136,744 stars across 25 public repos, 3 active in the last 90 days and 215 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Excalidraw's footprint is roughly 969.8x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

15Five is the stronger read for anyone weighting momentum. Excalidraw looks better where reach is the deciding factor. The table below breaks the scores down pillar by pillar; the linked profiles cover the underlying repos, docs and community signals in full.