Visual Collaboration Without a Frontend: Excalidraw + Xano

There’s a huge variety of collaborative whiteboarding tools out there. Some, like Figma or Miro, are household names. But open-source options exist too, which offer surprisingly flexible solutions.

Excalidraw is an excellent example for such an open source alternative. While you can use its official SaaS product (Excalidraw+), its open-source core lets you embed a fully functional whiteboard into almost any website.

This opens up a new way to build:
You can drop Excalidraw right into a Xano-powered template engine, with pure in-browser based react.

Embedded Whiteboard

The above whiteboard has been fully set up on Xano:

Xano handles all backend logic and storage.
Excalidraw provides the interactive canvas.
Everything syncs seamlessly, on demand.

Why does this matter?
You get realtime, collaborative whiteboarding without the overhead of a traditional frontend stack, I mean there's no need for build steps, Github Actions, serverless edge deployments etc.

Flowchart: How Excalidraw Integrates with Xano

flowchart TD A[User Opens Webpage] --> B[Excalidraw Canvas Loads] B --> C[User Draws/Edits Elements] C --> D[Elements Sent to Xano via websocket] D --> E[Xano Stores Elements in Database] E --> F[Other Users Request Board] F --> G[Xano Delivers Latest Elements] G --> B E --> G

Combining Excalidraw’s open-source frontend with Xano’s backend makes it possible to deliver collaborative whiteboarding experiences, essentially without a frontend codebase. If you’re looking to add visual collaboration to your app, this approach is both lightweight and powerful.

@calycode, we build open, reliable, and automated workflows for Xano that empower teams with clarity, transparency, and control. Our mission: make backend development safe, collaborative, and future-ready, so every team can ship confidently and trust the process.

We have a Chrome Browser Extension for Xano to get you rolling much faster and more reliable Xano systems. If you're curious how @calycode/cli works with Xano features, check out our repo, docs or drop us a message on Discord!

You can also get started with Xano right now, here.