Discourse vs Excalidraw

Discourse (The 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.) 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 narrow lead over Discourse (rank #189) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 50). The gap of 5 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Discourse carries 55,678 GitHub stars across 620 public repos, with 90 repositories active in the last 90 days and 44 external contributors on record. Excalidraw shows 136,744 stars across 25 public repos, 3 active in the last 90 days and 215 external contributors.

Discourse 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.