Blackbird vs Excalidraw

Blackbird 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 Blackbird (rank #728) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 30). The gap of 25 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Blackbird carries 16 GitHub stars across 165 public repos, with 77 repositories active in the last 90 days and 6 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 8546.5x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Blackbird is the stronger read for anyone weighting momentum. Excalidraw looks better where code quality 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.