Box vs Excalidraw

Box (Box, Inc.) 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.

Box (rank #93) holds a narrow lead over Excalidraw (rank #103) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (56 vs 55). The gap of 1 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Box carries 14,074 GitHub stars across 84 public repos, with 18 repositories active in the last 90 days and 33 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 9.7x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Box is the stronger read for anyone weighting momentum. Excalidraw looks better where education 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.