Developer ecosystem comparison
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Ahrefs vs Excalidraw

Developer ecosystem comparison across GitHub activity, SDKs, documentation, community, reach and momentum.

Ahrefs (BTW we use OCaml) 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 modest lead over Ahrefs (rank #401) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 41). The gap of 14 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 Ahrefs. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Excalidraw is ahead of Ahrefs. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is ahead of Ahrefs. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Excalidraw is clearly ahead of Ahrefs. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Ahrefs is clearly ahead of Excalidraw.

Ahrefs carries 1,303 GitHub stars across 171 public repos, with 28 repositories active in the last 90 days and 7 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 104.9x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Ahrefs 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.

Side-by-side metrics

MetricAhrefsExcalidraw
Ranking
Overall rank#401#103
Pillars
Overall4155
Code4259
Education5768
Community3752
Reach2145
Momentum656
Builder experience00
Signals
Stars1,303136,744
Forks26115,937
Public repos17125
Active repos (90d)283
External contributors7215
Avg polish4056
Avg AI-readiness3537

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