Excalidraw vs Heap

Excalidraw (Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.) and Heap (Product Insights) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Excalidraw (rank #103) holds a modest lead over Heap (rank #569) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 35). The gap of 20 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 Heap. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Heap is slightly ahead of Excalidraw. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is clearly ahead of Heap. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Excalidraw is ahead of Heap. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Heap is slightly ahead of Excalidraw.

Excalidraw carries 136,744 GitHub stars across 25 public repos, with 3 repositories active in the last 90 days and 215 external contributors on record. Heap shows 215 stars across 65 public repos, 6 active in the last 90 days and 1 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Excalidraw's footprint is roughly 636.0x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Excalidraw is the stronger read for anyone weighting community. Heap looks better where momentum 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.