# Excaliself vs Mailly: which to pick

> Excaliself vs Mailly: pricing, platforms, launches, upvotes and makers side by side on ProductsFarm, with notes on which to pick.

Canonical: https://productsfarm.com/compare/excaliself-vs-mailly
Last updated: 2026-11-05

|  | [Excaliself](https://productsfarm.com/product/excaliself) | [Mailly](https://productsfarm.com/product/mailly) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | Self-hosted whiteboard for teams that keeps every drawing on your own server | Two-way email inboxes for AI agents and applications, with a review step for you |
| Pricing | Open source | Freemium |
| Platforms | API, CLI, Web | Web, API, CLI |
| Categories | Design, Developer tools, Communication | Developer tools, Communication, AI |
| Made for | development teams, self-hosting enthusiasts, small teams | developers, support teams, product teams |
| Built with | [Astro](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/astro), [TanStack Start](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/tanstack-start), [Cloudflare](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/cloudflare), [PostgreSQL](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/postgresql), [Drizzle](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/drizzle), [Claude](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/claude), [Tailwind CSS](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/tailwind-css) | [Cloudflare](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/cloudflare), [Tailwind CSS](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/tailwind-css) |
| Upvotes | 0 | 0 |
| Website | [excaliself.com](https://excaliself.com/) | [mailly.site](https://mailly.site/) |

## About Excaliself

Excaliself is a self-hosted version of Excalidraw, the hand-drawn style whiteboard editor. It embeds the official Excalidraw canvas unchanged and adds the parts a team needs to keep drawings over time: accounts, a shared Team space, folders, search, a shared library and a trash can. Deleted drawings stay in the trash for 30 days. Every drawing, including pasted images, is stored in your own Postgres database.

Team members can open the same drawing and see each other's cursors and edits as they happen. A share link lets someone outside the team draw together without an account. Press ⌘K to search over drawings, folders and actions. Excalidraw+ users can import their scenes, collections and images with an API key, and .excalidraw files can be dropped into a sidebar folder.

The app runs from a Docker Compose file that starts the prebuilt app image and a Postgres container, on amd64 and arm64. The first visitor becomes the admin, and everyone else joins through a single use invite link. Optionally, members can connect an MCP client such as Claude Code or Claude Desktop with a personal access token to search, read and create drawings and manage folders, without an AI API key on the server. It is aimed at teams that want to run their own whiteboard server.

## About Mailly

Mailly is a two-way email service for AI agents and applications. Each inbox gets an address on mailly.site, or a custom domain on a paid plan, and incoming messages, outgoing messages and replies are kept together in one conversation thread. An agent can read the full thread, and a hosted agent can prepare reply drafts that you edit and approve before anything is sent.

The product can be connected through a remote MCP endpoint, an HTTP API, a CLI or SMTP. Inbound mail can be delivered to your own receiver with signed webhooks that are retried on failure. Campaigns handle audience outreach from synced contacts and static or dynamic lists, and Workflows handle lifecycle messages triggered by events, with wait steps. Delivery, bounce, complaint and unsubscribe events are recorded so you can inspect what happened to each message.

Mailly is aimed at developers and teams who want an agent or application to handle email without losing human oversight. Hosted agents currently draft only, so sending from an agent requires your own application to call the API or CLI and apply its own send controls.

## Related

- [Excaliself](https://productsfarm.com/product/excaliself)
- [Mailly](https://productsfarm.com/product/mailly)
- [More comparisons](https://productsfarm.com/compare)