# Excaliself vs xfiles: which to pick

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

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

|  | [Excaliself](https://productsfarm.com/product/excaliself) | [xfiles](https://productsfarm.com/product/xfiles) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | Self-hosted whiteboard for teams that keeps every drawing on your own server | Free browser tools for working with PDFs, images, audio and video files |
| Pricing | Open source | - |
| Platforms | API, CLI, Web | Web |
| Categories | Design, Developer tools, Communication | Productivity, Design, Developer tools |
| Made for | development teams, self-hosting enthusiasts, small teams | students, office workers, designers |
| 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/) | [xfiles.tech](https://xfiles.tech/) |

## 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 xfiles

xfiles is a collection of file tools that run in the browser. The site lists 174 tools across PDF, image, file and audio categories, and states that files are processed on the user's device rather than uploaded. Examples include merging PDFs, splitting PDFs, compressing and resizing images, converting text to speech, and creating a ZIP archive from several files.

The PDF tools cover a wide range of tasks, from rotating, reordering and removing pages to adding page numbers, watermarks and passwords, redacting content, and inspecting a file's structure and metadata. The image tools include compression, resizing, cropping, format conversion, background removal, filters, favicon generation and GIF creation. The file tools include a ZIP extractor, hashing and checksum calculation, file encryption and a hex viewer.

The site is aimed at people who need quick file tasks without installing software or creating an account. Its stated benefits are that no account is needed and that no watermarks are added to output. Documents, photos and audio recordings can be handled in one place.

## Related

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