Excalidraw vs Zeplin

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

Excalidraw (rank #103) holds a modest lead over Zeplin (rank #430) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 40). The gap of 15 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), Excalidraw is ahead of Zeplin. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Zeplin is ahead of Excalidraw. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Excalidraw is clearly ahead of Zeplin. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Excalidraw is clearly ahead of Zeplin. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Zeplin is 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. Zeplin shows 1,460 stars across 57 public repos, 8 active in the last 90 days and 4 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Excalidraw's footprint is roughly 93.7x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

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