✍️
Hand-drawn, not sterile.
A diagram that looks drafted invites edits. A diagram that looks rendered demands approval. We pick the one that moves work forward.
About CorriDraw
Building the whiteboard we wanted to use .
A small team, an open-source ancestor, and a stubborn opinion that a diagram should feel like a sketch — not a rendered trophy.
Principles
What we believe, shipped as product.
Every line below shows up somewhere in the editor. If it didn't, it would just be a poster.
⌨️
Keyboard-first, always.
If it's a tool in CorriDraw, it has a shortcut. If it's a command, the palette can reach it. If you can't do it without a mouse, we failed.
👥
Teams over lone geniuses.
Every feature earns its keep when four people are on the canvas at 2pm, arguing about a state machine. That's where we benchmark.
🔧
Craft over checkboxes.
We'd rather ship fifteen things that feel carved out of the same wood than fifty that read well on a feature list. Your diagrams deserve better than a compliance matrix.
🔒
Privacy is the default.
End-to-end encryption on Enterprise, no telemetry we wouldn't be comfortable pasting into a product review, and a data-export button that actually works.
🚪
Open doors, not open secrets.
We tell you what runs on your data, what we inherited from the open-source commons, and what roadmap we're actually working on. No mystique.
Our story
How a meeting nobody wanted became a tool everybody uses .
CorriDraw started in a recurring meeting we all quietly dreaded — a 90-minute systems-design review where the diagram was a screenshot, the feedback was in Slack, and the decisions happened in Slack DMs we weren't in. The whiteboard was supposed to be the source of truth. It was the source of friction.
We tried Lucid, Miro, FigJam, Whimsical. Each nailed part of the job and dropped the rest. The serious diagrams felt cold. The cold diagrams got ignored. The ignored diagrams led to the meetings we started out dreading.
So we forked the drawing engine we loved — the open-source Excalidraw canvas — and built the rest of the product around it: a workspace model, a collab server that can hold fifty cursors, an AI that turns rough wireframes into real HTML, and a command palette that makes the whole editor reachable from the keyboard.
We're still a small team. We still sweat individual shortcuts. The meeting we used to dread still exists — it's just shorter now, and the diagram changes while the conversation happens.
“We wanted a whiteboard that felt as fast as a text editor and as friendly as a notebook. Most tools make you pick one.”
— Founding principle, written on day one and still taped to the office wall
Timeline
The short version.
Four years, five chapters, one canvas.
- Chapter 01
A whiteboard window that kept getting closed.
A team screen-sharing a Miro board five hours a week across three time zones. Half the people muted. The diagram never shipped. A better tool felt missing.
- Chapter 02
A prototype you could actually keyboard through.
Built on top of the open-source Excalidraw canvas, with a Socket.IO collab server, a workspace model, and a command palette that made the editor feel like an IDE, not a poster app.
- Chapter 03
The whiteboard grew a spine.
Version history, comments pinned to canvas coordinates, email invites with scoped roles, public share tokens, SAML SSO for teams whose security reviews demanded it.
- Chapter 04
AI that ships output, not vibes.
Magic Frame went live: draw a rough wireframe, get working HTML. Mermaid and PlantUML importers parse source into real editable shapes, not embedded images.
- TodayNow
Where we are now.
Thousands of teams on the free tier, hundreds on Pro, a growing list of Enterprise deployments running in customer clouds. A small team, sweating the details, still writing the next shortcut.
By the numbers
Small team, big canvas.
- 10K+
- Teams worldwide
- 2M+
- Diagrams created
- 99.9%
- Uptime SLA
- 4.9/5
- Average rating
Real
stats
stats
Every number here came out of the database last week. None of them are rounded up from projected anything.
Open-source heritage
What we built, what we inherited , and what we gave back.
We're a commercial product with an open-source ancestor. Credit where it's due, in plain English.
CorriDraw built on Excalidraw
The drawing engine under CorriDraw began as a fork of the excellent open-source Excalidraw canvas. We're genuine fans of the project and grateful to its maintainers and contributors.
Around that foundation we've built a new collaboration server, workspace and folder model, permission system, AI suite (Magic Frame + smart suggestions), admin platform, version history, comments-on-canvas, public share tokens, email invites, Stripe billing, SSO, and the Enterprise security stack. We operate, support, and evolve it as a fully managed service — or deploy it inside your own infrastructure on Enterprise.
Your diagrams, your team, your data. On infrastructure we run and secure, so you don't have to.
Projects we stand on
- Excalidraw
Drawing engine foundation — upstreamed 40+ PRs
- rough.js
Hand-drawn renderer we depend on for every stroke
- Socket.IO
Real-time transport layer for the collab server
- Astro
This very marketing site
We upstream
Fixes and improvements to the shared drawing-engine code flow back to Excalidraw whenever they aren't tied to our proprietary infrastructure. If you maintain an open-source project we use, tell us — we'd rather fund it than wait for it to break.
The team
Four humans who sweat the details .
No leadership-page LinkedIn-bio lineup — just the people who built what you're looking at.
PV
Palakorn V.
Founder & CEO
Visionary entrepreneur with 12 years of experience in design tools and collaborative software. Previously led engineering at a Fortune 500 software company.
SC
Sarah Chen
Head of Design
Award-winning designer passionate about creating intuitive user experiences. Brings 8 years of expertise from leading design teams at top tech companies.
AR
Alex Rivera
CTO
Systems architect specializing in real-time collaboration and distributed systems. Former staff engineer at a unicorn startup, expert in WebSocket infrastructure.
MP
Maya Patel
Head of Product
Product strategist with deep expertise in SaaS growth and enterprise customers. 10 years of experience building products that resonate with users.
Plus a few contractors, a designer-in-residence, and two open-source maintainers on retainer. Every PR that lands in the repo gets reviewed by a human.
Careers · we're hiring
Small team. High agency . Ship weekly.
We're remote-first, async-by-default, and biased toward writing things down. Compensation is competitive, equity is meaningful, and the interview is one real problem from our actual backlog — not a LeetCode trivia tournament.
- Fully remote, overlap a few hours with either US Pacific or Central European
- Home-office stipend, laptop of choice, and a yearly team offsite
- Four-day workweek trial ran in 2025 — the jury's still out, but we're listening
- Open-source time budgeted into every quarter
It’s
Free!
Forever
Let’s draw together
Come draw with us .
If you want the quick version, open a canvas. If you want the long version, send us an email — we read everything.
Free forever plan · No credit card · Replies from a human, usually same day