# Excaliself vs Senlo: which to pick

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

Canonical: https://productsfarm.com/compare/excaliself-vs-senlo
Last updated: 2026-11-07

|  | [Excaliself](https://productsfarm.com/product/excaliself) | [Senlo](https://productsfarm.com/product/senlo) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | Self-hosted whiteboard for teams that keeps every drawing on your own server | Visual templates and automations for transactional email on your own provider |
| Pricing | Open source | Freemium |
| Platforms | API, CLI, Web | API, Web |
| Categories | Design, Developer tools, Communication | Developer tools, Communication, Marketing |
| Made for | development teams, self-hosting enthusiasts, small teams | product teams, developers, marketers |
| 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) | [Next.js](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/nextjs), [React](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/react), [Umami](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/umami), [Tailwind CSS](https://productsfarm.com/tech-stack/tailwind-css) |
| Upvotes | 0 | 0 |
| Website | [excaliself.com](https://excaliself.com/) | [senlo.io](https://senlo.io/) |

## 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 Senlo

Senlo is a layer on top of the email delivery provider a team already uses, such as Resend, Postmark or any SMTP server. It gives you a visual editor for transactional email templates, with rows, columns, merge tags and conditions, and versions you can roll back to. Templates can be sent through a single API request, and developers receive the same template through the API without writing MJML by hand.

Lifecycle automations start from events sent to the API, such as a new contact being added. An automation can send an email, wait, check your own API whether a user did something, and then take a different path. Each node shows how many contacts are in it. Sends, deliveries, bounces and engagement are shown per workspace, with a live feed of failures and a suppression list. Senlo renders, personalises, tracks and decides, then hands each message to the provider you chose, so switching providers does not require editing templates.

The product suits teams that send transactional email and onboarding sequences and want editors who do not write code to work on them. It can be self-hosted with Docker Compose under the AGPL-3.0 license, or used as a hosted service with a free plan for one person, and paid plans that add members, roles and audit logs.

## Related

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