Discord vs Excalidraw

Discord (A new way to chat with your communities and friends. Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text.) 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.

Discord and Excalidraw sit at essentially the same overall ecosystem score (55), which is unusual and worth reading through the pillars below.

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

Discord carries 28,570 GitHub stars across 327 public repos, with 36 repositories active in the last 90 days and 41 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 4.8x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Discord 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.