I use Excalidraw extensively at work. For me, it's really close to perfection.
It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly.
The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.
Yeah, Excalidraw is really nice diagramming tools that I frequently used as well on my day-to-day works.
For the self-host, finally I build the solution myself so I can self-host Excalidraw and several other plaintext diagramming format while still able to working with my peers using realtime collaboration.
The company where I'm contracted retired Excalidraw in favor of Lucid and, while I understand that big companies are going to go with big, enterprise-y solutions, what went from a weekly "sketch something out to help with communicating my ideas" turned into "once every few months I begrudgingly document something".
Excalidraw is excellent for low-friction sketches.
Both Excalidraw and TLDraw are the two most popular apps of their kind, simplistic whiteboard tools, so I don't think it's that surprising and I don't see any reason why this post should be a "Show HN".
For me, draw.io is still the winner, and especially now that it runs locally also on Linux. As for works in progress, I hope this one succeeds (and would also run locally at some point):
I love excalidraw, but don't need the excalidraw+. But Excalidraw open source is the frontend only, which means I have to delete my drawings each time. So I built the backend so I can create many canvases.
Your site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage.
The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.
https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw