Excalidraw vs ReadMe

Excalidraw (Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.) and ReadMe (Interactive developer hubs that help users succeed with your APIs 🦉) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Excalidraw (rank #103) holds a narrow lead over ReadMe (rank #257) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 47). The gap of 8 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), ReadMe is ahead of Excalidraw. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), ReadMe is ahead of Excalidraw. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is ahead of ReadMe. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Excalidraw is ahead of ReadMe. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), ReadMe 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. ReadMe shows 1,824 stars across 106 public repos, 26 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 75.0x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Excalidraw is the stronger read for anyone weighting reach. ReadMe 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.