Excalidraw vs Linear

Excalidraw (Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.) and Linear (A purpose-built tool for planning and building products) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Excalidraw and Linear 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 ahead of Linear. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Excalidraw is ahead of Linear. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is ahead of Linear. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Linear is clearly ahead of Excalidraw. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Linear is clearly 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. Linear shows 1,971 stars across 22 public repos, 5 active in the last 90 days and 21 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Excalidraw's footprint is roughly 69.4x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Excalidraw is the stronger read for anyone weighting community. Linear 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.