Excaliself turns the Excalidraw canvas into your team's own whiteboard server, where every sketch, diagram, and flowchart lives in your database instead of a vendor's cloud. The home screen works like a file cabinet for drawings: nest them in folders, star the keepers, drag files between spaces, and find anything again by title or by the text inside the drawing. Share a link and teammates edit together in real time with live cursors and follow mode; links can stay members-only or open to guests who have no account at all. A shared Team space sits next to everyone's private space, and one team library holds the shapes and icons the whole group reuses. AI clients can join with a personal access token: Claude Code or Claude Desktop can search your drawings, read what a diagram says, and create new ones from shapes or a Mermaid flowchart. Accounts are invite-only, single sign-on covers Google, Microsoft, and any OIDC provider, and admins manage members, roles, and password resets from Settings. Deleted drawings rest in a trash folder for thirty days before they are purged, and everything auto-saves as you draw. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

ExcaliDash adds persistent storage, access control, version history, and real-time collaboration to Excalidraw, transforming ephemeral whiteboarding sessions into a managed drawing library your team can rely on. The Node.js/Express backend with React/TypeScript frontend deploys via Docker Compose on port 6767, using Prisma ORM on SQLite for all drawings, users, and metadata. WebSocket-powered collaboration lets multiple users edit the same canvas simultaneously with live cursor presence. Drawing snapshots preserve every revision with visual preview and one-click restore to any previous state. Three authentication modes handle different deployment needs: local email/password for personal use, hybrid mode mixing native credentials with OIDC for gradual enterprise adoption, and enforced OIDC-only for organizations requiring SSO through providers like Authentik or Keycloak. Scoped sharing controls determine whether drawings stay private, shared internally with team members, or accessible via external links without authentication. Collections organize drawings through drag-and-drop grouping, full-text search locates any diagram instantly, and exports use the non-proprietary .excalidraw format ensuring complete data portability. 1,350+ stars since November 2025. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Half the architecture sketches on the internet trace back to Excalidraw - the MIT-licensed virtual whiteboard whose hand-drawn aesthetic made technical diagramming feel approachable, at roughly 85,000 GitHub stars. The infinite canvas offers rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows with smart binding and labels, free-draw, text, images, and an eraser, with full undo/redo, zoom, dark mode, and keyboard-first ergonomics. Community shape libraries add thousands of pre-built elements - AWS architecture icons, flowchart stencils, UI wireframe kits - and everything exports to PNG, SVG, the clipboard, or the open .excalidraw JSON format that keeps drawings diffable and portable. Live collaboration works on a share-a-link model with live cursors and a laser pointer for presenting, and it is end-to-end encrypted by design: the room key travels in the URL hash, which never reaches the server, so the WebSocket relay only ever sees ciphertext. The architecture is remarkably light - the app is a static bundle served by Nginx, drawings persist locally in the browser, and the stateless excalidraw-room relay handles multiplayer - so a self-hosted deployment gives unlimited boards and collaborators with near-zero resource cost, replacing per-editor whiteboard subscriptions.

Gaining over 71,000 GitHub stars as one of the fastest-rising knowledge management platforms, AFFiNE merges the document editing capabilities of Notion, the infinite canvas of Miro, and the structured data of Airtable into a single cohesive workspace. The block-based editor built on the custom BlockSuite framework supports rich text, code blocks, embeds, tables, kanban boards, and database views with drag-and-drop composition. The whiteboard mode provides an infinite canvas where users can freely mix documents, sticky notes, shapes, connectors, and hand-drawn elements, enabling visual thinking alongside structured note-taking. Real-time collaboration allows multiple users to edit documents and whiteboards simultaneously with cursor presence, comment threads, and version history. The local-first architecture stores all data on your device by default using CRDT-based synchronization, ensuring offline access and data sovereignty, with optional cloud sync for cross-device availability. Workspaces organize content into hierarchical page trees with full-text search, favorites, tags, and trash management. The platform supports Markdown import and export, PDF export, and HTML export for interoperability. AI features powered by configurable LLM providers enable writing assistance, summarization, translation, and content generation directly within documents. The theming system supports light and dark modes with customizable accent colors. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Licensed under MIT with an open-source self-hosted edition.

Flowplan puts your team's documents, databases, whiteboards, handwriting notebooks, and daily journal into one self-hosted page tree, so the work lives in a single place you control instead of five subscriptions. Write in a block editor that stays out of the way, and when a number appears mid-sentence, type the calculation and press Tab to drop in the result, or graph functions and vectors in 2D and 3D without leaving the page. The same records can be viewed as a table, board, calendar, timeline, gallery, list, feed, chart, form, or sprint board, with relations, rollups, and formulas tying them together, and projects get ticket numbers, sprints with burndown, and automations on top. Brainstorm on whiteboards with sticky notes, mind maps, and voting; keep a journal page per day with templates and an optional PIN lock; and write by hand in notebooks with lined, grid, or Cornell paper, annotate PDFs, and sketch inside documents with a pressure-sensitive pen. Teammates edit together with live cursors, comment in inline threads, and share single pages with guests through password-protected, expiring links, while permissions reach down to a single record. AI is off until an admin enables it, per feature and per person, and it can run entirely on your own hardware or answer questions about the workspace with links to its sources. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Turning chaotic group brainstorming sessions into structured visual diagrams, TeamMapper provides a real-time collaborative mind mapping workspace that teams and classrooms can join instantly without creating user accounts. Workshop facilitators, teachers, and product squads start from a central root topic and branch outward into hierarchical radial trees, using keyboard shortcuts and full undo-redo history to capture ideas at the speed of conversation. Every node can be styled with custom branch and background colors, adjustable font weights and sizes, external reference links, uploaded raster images, and visual pictograms from the ARASAAC library to reinforce memory and visual association. Sharing a live session takes a single click: hosts distribute either a view-only link, a full modification invite URL, or a scannable QR code so remote colleagues and students in the same room can edit branches simultaneously. When enabled by the administrator, an integrated AI assistant can automatically generate initial mind map branches and subtopics from a text prompt to jump-start planning sessions. Completed maps export cleanly to JSON, Mermaid diagram syntax, scalable SVG vectors, high-resolution PNG images, or printable PDF documents, and existing JSON maps can be re-imported at any time for follow-up workshops. Built-in privacy controls automatically purge inactive mind maps and orphaned image attachments after a configurable retention window, simplifying GDPR compliance for schools and enterprises. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

A Node.js server, a large shared canvas, and a URL - WBO (Whiteboard Ophir) is collaborative whiteboarding reduced to its essence. There are no accounts and no setup - to collaborate, you send someone the board's link, and every stroke appears for all connected users in real time over WebSockets, with cursor positions shared so you can see where collaborators are working. Board state persists automatically and continuously, so a diagram drawn in today's lesson is still there next week at the same URL. Boards come in three flavors: a public free-for-all, private boards with random unguessable names, and named boards with custom URLs shared by anyone who knows the name. The tools cover teaching and brainstorming needs - pencil, straight lines, rectangles, ellipses, text annotations, eraser, a full color palette with brush sizes - and boards export as SVG or PNG. Despite the simplicity, the server is production-minded: JWT authentication gates board access with granular capabilities (open, edit, and clear as separate permissions), rate limiting caps per-client message volume, reverse-proxy and subpath deployment are supported, and OpenTelemetry provides metrics, logs, and traces. It works on tablets and touch devices, speaks multiple languages, and consumes minimal resources. AGPL-licensed.

The drawing surface inside WebRTC conference tools like Meetzi and the LAMS online-learning platform is Whiteboard (by cracker0dks) - a lightweight Node.js collaborative sketchboard built to be embedded and customized, which also slots into Nextcloud via the External Sites app. Everyone opening the same whiteboardid URL parameter draws on the same board, with remote user cursors visible live, per-user undo/redo, and an indicator showing the smallest participating screen so nobody draws outside a colleague's view. Content handling goes beyond pen strokes: drag-and-drop or paste images and PDFs from any PC or browser, then resize, rotate, and draw over them on canvas or background; add text and sticky notes; hold Shift for angle-snapped lines and perfect squares. Every function has a keybinding - deliberately friendly to pen displays like Wacom and XP-Pen whose hardware buttons map to shortcuts. Boards save to image or JSON (with reload), export directly to Nextcloud via WebDAV, and persist across restarts with the file-database option. A REST API with bundled interactive docs allows full programmatic control, an optional access token locks down uploads, and YAML configuration tunes behavior and performance. MIT-licensed and reverse-proxy friendly.

Scattered browser tabs, buried wiki folders, and disconnected issue trackers fragment engineering context across too many tools, which is why Ideon unifies your repositories, notes, and tasks on a shared infinite canvas. Rather than forcing projects into rigid folder hierarchies, you arrange interactive blocks spatially on a two-dimensional map where related documents, checklists, calendar schedules, and code references sit right beside one another. Teams can embed live repository cards and open issue streams directly from GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Forgejo onto the workspace, keeping code status visible alongside architecture documentation. Rich content blocks render Markdown notes with threaded comments, Mermaid flowcharts, uploaded files, images, and bookmarked links on the same board. Real-time multiplayer collaboration lets teammates edit blocks simultaneously, follow live cursors across the canvas, and map system designs together without edit conflicts. Built-in Time Travel snapshots capture historical states of the workspace so you can scrub backward to review how a project evolved or trace past design decisions. You can even synchronize an entire project canvas directly to a Git repository, storing notes and spatial block layouts as versioned files. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

ThoughtDAG turns a long AI conversation from a scroll you cannot rearrange into a map you can edit, branch, and reconnect. Every question and answer becomes a node on an infinite canvas, and the wires between nodes are not decoration: they decide exactly what context the model sees next. Follow a promising thread, park a side question on its own branch, or cut a wire when an early assumption starts poisoning later answers, all without deleting the work that led there. Zoom out to read the shape of an investigation, then zoom back in to full answers, attachments, and highlighted passages. Drop in documents and files as material nodes, ask questions from them, and preview precisely what will be sent before a model runs. Past coding agent sessions can be opened as read-only graph mirrors, so a discussion that started in a terminal can be inspected, cited, and continued on the canvas. Memory lives in readable dossiers that collect decisions and open questions per topic, with sources attached, and relevant dossiers join new questions when you ask. Export a backup, a Markdown context chain, or a thought map that shares the structure of your thinking without dumping the whole transcript. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

HyCanvas folds graphics, presentations, videos, whiteboards, documents, and spreadsheets into one self-hosted browser editor, covering work that usually takes several separate design subscriptions. Start from one of 140 templates across social, print, events, business, and presentations, or import a PowerPoint file and keep editing it. The canvas carries shapes, frames, tables, nine chart types, QR codes, image filters, crop and masks, background removal, and Magic Resize for one-click reformatting. Video projects get a multi-track timeline with trims, transitions, keyframes, styled captions, green-screen keying, and screen or webcam recording. Whiteboards add sticky notes, connectors, a shared timer, and dot voting, and a finished board converts straight into a slide deck. Teammates co-edit in realtime with presence cursors, comments with mentions, version history, and approvals, while share links open view-only, comment, or edit access. Brand kits hold your colors, fonts, and logos, and a brand lock warns or blocks off-brand edits before they ship. Connect your own AI provider key to generate decks, documents, images, and charts from a prompt, then export PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, PPTX, MP4, or GIF with no watermark. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Type a sentence like 'draw a seaside lighthouse under moonlight, with a small sailboat and stars' and Draw Agent Studio sketches it on a live canvas you can then keep editing by chat. Follow-up messages move objects, change colors, delete elements, and undo or redo steps, so refining a diagram becomes a conversation instead of a wrestling match with shape handles. The same canvas accepts direct manual work: select and drag shapes, draw freehand with the pen, or drop text onto the page to finish details the model missed. Researchers and writers use it to build flowcharts from a paragraph of method notes, grouping stages, adding quality checks and feedback loops, and restructuring sections on request. Canvases save automatically as you work, and finished pieces export as PNG, JPG, WebP, or SVG images, or as editable Excalidraw files for further hand editing elsewhere. You bring your own model connection, choosing OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Ark, DeepSeek, Kimi, Groq, OpenRouter, Bedrock, Vertex AI, or a local Ollama or OpenAI-compatible endpoint. A built-in connection test sends a real image and verifies recognition and tool calling before you save, and your API keys stay encrypted on the server rather than in the browser. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Instead of juggling a chat window, a folder of reference images, and a notebook of half-remembered prompts, Infinite Canvas puts the whole image-making process on one zoomable board. Drop in text, image, video, and generation-settings nodes, then wire them together so every result stays connected to the prompt and references behind it. Add one or several OpenAI-compatible endpoints, choose default text, image, and video models, and set image count, aspect ratio, quality, and transparent backgrounds per node. Batch results arrive as linked nodes that remember their prompt, model, and dimensions, so any of them can be retried later with the same settings. A prompt library searches seven built-in sources plus your own JSON sources and inserts the winner straight onto the board. An asset shelf keeps reusable images, clips, and audio within reach. Projects can be duplicated, exported, and synced between devices over WebDAV. Want a helper? A local Canvas Agent lets Codex read the active board and edit it through MCP, with approvals and permissions shown in a side panel. Plugins add node types, inspectors, and toolbar actions. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

With over 75,000 GitHub stars and native apps across macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, AppFlowy is the most widely adopted open-source alternative to Notion — delivering the same block-based workspace model with full data sovereignty. The Flutter frontend renders natively on every platform while a Rust backend powered by Actix-web and Tokio handles CRDT-based real-time collaboration, ensuring sub-second sync across devices with conflict-free concurrent editing. Relational databases support grid, board, kanban, calendar, and gallery views over the same dataset, with two-way relations, rollups, advanced filters, sorts, and formula calculations that cover the majority of Notion's database workflows. The block editor supports 40+ content types including nested pages, toggles, callouts, code blocks with syntax highlighting, embeds, and slash-command insertion. AI integration connects to OpenAI, Anthropic, or local models via Ollama for writing assistance, summarization, and translation — all without sending data off-premises when using on-prem LLMs. Team spaces with workspace-level and per-page permissions, OAuth and SSO authentication through GoTrue, and S3-compatible object storage via MinIO provide enterprise-grade access control and file management. The self-hosted stack deploys through Docker Compose with PostgreSQL for metadata, Redis for caching and pub/sub, and a dedicated background worker for imports and email notifications. Offline-first architecture ensures the desktop app functions without connectivity, syncing changes when the connection resumes. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Doca puts rich text, Markdown, spreadsheets, slides, and an infinite canvas under one login and one permission model, giving individuals and small teams a self-hosted workspace for writing together. Every format supports real-time co-editing with presence, comments, saved history, and manual snapshots, and rich text and Markdown documents can be restored to an earlier version. Documents live in knowledge libraries with tree navigation, invitations, inherited permissions, share links, and trash, while personal files and shared folders sit on local disk or S3-compatible storage. Knowledge books go further: they subscribe to sources, run an editable workflow, keep source evidence, and route results through human review. A personal AI assistant, powered by whichever model you configure, searches authorized documents, reads PDF and Office attachments, edits images, and prepares browser drafts. MCP services let external AI clients such as Codex use those tools under your permissions. Sign in with a password, OIDC, Google, GitHub, WeChat, or QQ, review registrations before they go live, and send webhooks to other systems. A plugin SDK and marketplace add business modules, and a browser extension clips pages into documents. The interface ships in Chinese and English. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Your team's knowledge already lives in a folder of Markdown files, and CollabMD turns that exact folder into a shared workspace everyone can edit together in the browser, with nothing to migrate and no database swallowing your notes. Point it at an Obsidian vault, a plain docs directory, or a git-backed repository and the filesystem stays the source of truth: files are never moved, renamed, or deleted unless someone does it deliberately in the app. Several people can type in the same document at once with live cursors and presence indicators, follow a collaborator's view while they present, and drop comments anchored to a specific line or text selection instead of scattering feedback across chat threads. Edits made outside the browser, in Obsidian or any text editor, sync back into open documents automatically, so local and remote work never fork. Diagrams are first-class citizens: Mermaid, PlantUML, Structurizr C4 models, Excalidraw canvases, and draw.io files all open and render beside your prose, and a git panel lets you review changes and commit with a message without leaving the tab. Global full-text search, wiki-links with backlinks, team chat, file uploads, and optional password or Google sign-in round out a workspace that respects how your files already live. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Real-time collaborative Markdown behind your own firewall: HedgeDoc (formerly CodiMD, descended from HackMD's open-source edition) keeps team notes on team infrastructure. Share a note's URL and collaborators are editing together instantly - live cursors, changes appearing keystroke by keystroke - in a three-mode interface that toggles between raw Markdown, rendered preview, and side-by-side split. The Markdown dialect is extended where engineers need it: Mermaid, Graphviz, and Vega-Lite diagrams, MathJax for equations, syntax-highlighted code blocks, embedded content, and a presentation mode that turns a note into reveal.js slides with a single YAML header. A dropdown permission system controls each note - freely editable, limited to signed-in users, or locked read-only - and published notes become clean read-only pages for wider distribution. Revisions track every change with the ability to revert to any earlier version. The AGPL-3.0 codebase is light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi and deploys via Docker with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite. Authentication covers LDAP, SAML, OAuth2, and email. It deliberately stays a focused document editor - no page trees or kanban - and does that one job with excellent keyboard-first ergonomics for meeting notes, RFCs, runbooks, and shared scratchpads.

Open-source alternative to OpenAI's Canvas — a collaborative writing and coding environment where AI agents help you draft, edit, and refine documents through an agentic architecture built on LangGraph. The dual-mode editor combines a BlockNote rich text editor for live-rendered markdown with a CodeMirror-based code editor supporting syntax highlighting across multiple programming languages, letting you switch between prose and code artifacts within the same session. The built-in reflection agent automatically generates style rules and user insights from your chat history, storing them in a shared LangGraph memory store that persists across sessions for increasingly personalized assistance. Pre-built quick actions provide one-click access to common writing transformations including summarize, expand, simplify, and translate, while coding actions offer explain, refactor, add comments, and convert between languages. The monorepo architecture separates the Next.js 14 frontend from the LangGraph agent backend, connecting via HTTP and WebSocket protocols through the @langchain/langgraph-sdk client. Seven LLM providers are supported out of the box — OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Fireworks AI, Groq, Azure OpenAI, and local Ollama models — with Supabase handling authentication and data persistence. Deploy via Docker or build from source. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

With 6,800 GitHub stars and over a decade of development since its 2014 release, ONLYOFFICE Docs delivers a self-hosted Microsoft Office replacement with pixel-perfect OOXML rendering and real-time collaborative editing supporting both Fast (character-by-character) and Strict (manual save) co-authoring modes. The suite encompasses five full-featured editors — Document Editor for DOCX/ODT/EPUB/HTML, Spreadsheet Editor with 500+ functions and pivot tables, Presentation Editor with animations and transitions, Form Creator for fillable PDF forms with field validation, and PDF Editor for annotation and conversion — all operating within a unified web interface. Format support spans 50+ types including DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS, ODP, PDF, CSV, RTF, TXT, and Markdown with server-side conversion between any supported pair. The JavaScript plugin API enables extending editor functionality through a marketplace of ready-made plugins for ChatGPT integration, speech-to-text, OCR, Zotero citations, and Thesaurus. Ready-to-use connectors integrate with Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Moodle, Odoo, Confluence, SharePoint, Alfresco, Liferay, and Chamilo, while WOPI protocol compliance enables integration with any WOPI-compatible platform. JWT authentication secures all API communications between host applications and the document server. Deploy via Docker with a single command or DEB/RPM packages on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, or RHEL. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GNU AGPL v3 licensed.

Papyra gives you a calm, private home for notes that stays as easy as sticky notes while quietly linking everything together like a wiki. Cards pin, colour, and drag into place on your desk, and opening one drops you into an editor where slash commands insert headings, checklists, tables, or maps without leaving the keyboard. Type two brackets to link another note, and backlinks gather the other direction automatically, following the note even if you rename it. Notes save themselves, and every earlier version is kept, so you can scrub back through history and restore the draft you actually wanted. Sharing a note lets several people type in it together with visible cursors, comments in threads, and mentions that bring the right person in. Private notes lock behind a PIN or your fingerprint and sit encrypted on disk, while a daily journal page collects the day with a mood and a calendar to browse the year. Search covers notes, to-dos, and attachments with highlighted matches, and image text and audio transcripts can join the index. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.