As a heavy Obsidian user, I’ve come to rely on for it many of my day to day tasks. As a security engineer, I’m regularly having to create diagrams for all kinds of purposes; system diagrams, process flowcharts, incident response playbooks, or architectural designs. Obsidian luckily has the perfect tool for the job: Excalidraw.
Excalidraw is a drawing plugin that integrates neatly within Obsidian and lets you freely mock-up charts and diagrams of all kinds without the burdens of grids or snapped grids. Aiming to provide a whiteboard-esque experience, Excalidraw embraces the messy and chaotic nature of brainstorming ideas and doesn’t lock you into a right and wrong way of doing things. It hands you some shapes and arrows, and lets you have at it.
If you want to use it in a standalone web application, you have that option. But as I mentioned earlier, if you’re big on Obsidian, you gain the ability to do a whole lot more. Features like linking pages within drawings, embedding images, videos and even entire web pages, unlocks a canvas, almost ‘Miro’ way of working.
I’ve field-tested Excalidraw heavily, and even shared preliminary designs/mock-ups with customers straight from it, often with a good response to the gritty, hand-written aesthetic. It’s truly one of the most versatile drawing applications I’ve ever used (better than Draw.io for whiteboarding, IMO) and I just wanted to share that.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend watching Zsolt’s series about Excalidraw called ‘Visual Thinking’. Excalidraw can be installed as an Obsidian plugin straight from the app if you’d like to give it a spin.
