Online whiteboards
2020-08-26 — 2023-02-27
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Online collaborative drawing for doing mathematics online or general diagrams. Many tools claim to do this, but I haven’t had a truly satisfactory experience yet, although I haven’t committed much time to it. I was hoping for an obvious best option. I suspect most will need some kind of stylus input to be any use, at least for the writing-heavy workflows I care about.
Here are some candidates.
1 Excalidraw
An open-source option that promises collaboration and end-to-end encryption is Excalidraw (source).
Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn-like diagrams. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted.
This has little specific math support, but lots of virtual whiteboard features — we can draw freehand lines, shapes, text, and so on. Others can simultaneously draw on the same board.
I think it is the only open-source option here (node+typescript). Cool feature: it can be embedded in a React component or in a third-party app.
Because this is free, done well, and doesn’t require arsing around with a credit card, Excalidraw is my go-to option.
There’s also a version with extra work team features called Excalidraw+ (USD7/person/month).
2 Freeform
If my collaborators are in the Apple system, Freeform is pretty good. See Apple launches Freeform: a powerful new app designed for creative collaboration.
3 FigJam
FigJam is made by Figma, who have a very profitable business based on being pretty good at real-time collaboration, so maybe that is worth trying. Point of differentiation with Excalidraw is EVEN MORE STUFF. Virtual sticky notes, virtual stickers, plugins. USD3/editor/month for the FigJam-only plan (USD12/editor/month for the Figma plan which includes FigJam).
4 Mathcha
Mathcha is not quite a whiteboard but more of a prototyping-style app aimed at mathematics online. This is the option that benefits from stylus input least. It’s not a whiteboard in the classic sense, as we don’t draw lines. Equations are entered by markup with a smart UI to make it fast. It’s not particularly real-time collaborative, but more of an old-school share-a-link-to-see-my-work kind of thing. Nonetheless, they have worked so hard on that UI that it feels useful.
The online version is free; the offline desktop app is USD30/year.
5 Miscellaneous options
There are many others.
Interactive scratchpad Collusion (USD20/user/month), Bitpaper (approx USD1/page) is a collective sketch page. Desmos is an online collaborative graphing calculator. Mural (USD20/user/month). Scribble Together seems to have the most powerful free plan of these.
There are other options which are offered only on asinine enterprise pricing (e.g. Blackboard Collaborate) which I will not trouble with here.
6 Point a camera at a physical whiteboard
Not very collaborative but satisfyingly tactile. What is the best possible solution for whiteboards for video transmission?
Candidate: Cristovao Cordeiro and Elisa Valkyria’s $100 Lightboard.
7 Other deliberation tools
Sometimes we want something that is a little more structured than just a diagram editor, incorporating brainstorming or voting tools.
8 Incoming
- OpenBoard, the best interactive whiteboard for schools and universities (Is this actually networked?)