If you've ever drawn an architecture diagram on a whiteboard, snapped a photo, and dropped it in Slack — you know the pain.
The photo is blurry. Nobody can edit it. It lives in a thread that gets buried by Thursday. When the architecture changes (it always does), the diagram is already stale.
We built a better way.
The Problem with Existing Tools
Most teams reach for one of three options when they need an architecture diagram:
1. Full-featured tools (Lucidchart, draw.io, Miro)
These are powerful, but they're overkill for 80% of architecture sketches. You don't need pixel-perfect alignment when you're sketching an RFC in the first 5 minutes of a design review. The setup cost is high, the learning curve is real, and half your team doesn't have a license.
2. AI generators (including ours)
SketchMyInfra already lets you describe infrastructure in plain English and get a polished PlantUML diagram in under 5 seconds. That works great for well-defined architectures — AWS VPCs, CI/CD pipelines, microservice flows. But sometimes your idea isn't that concrete yet. Sometimes you need to think with your hands.
3. Physical whiteboards / pen and paper
Zero friction, maximum speed. But zero persistence, zero shareability. The drawing lives and dies in that room.
None of these cover the middle ground: fast, freehand, persistent, and shareable.
What We Built
SketchMyInfra now has a freehand drawing mode at sketchmyinfra.com/draw. Here's the stack:
The Canvas
A full-featured whiteboard powered by Excalidraw — the same engine used by teams at Meta, Notion, and Vercel. You get:
- Shapes (rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows)
- Freehand drawing
- Text labels
- Connectors with automatic routing
- Color coding
- Dark and light themes
Persistence
This is where it gets useful. Every drawing auto-saves with a 3-second debounce:
- Logged-in users — drawings save to the cloud (PostgreSQL + JSONB). Come back tomorrow, next week, from a different device. Your drawings are there.
- Anonymous users — drawings save to browser localStorage. No signup required. You can still create, edit, and manage multiple drawings.
- Migration path — when an anonymous user signs in, they get a one-click "Save All to Cloud" option to migrate their local drawings.
Sharing
Every cloud-saved drawing gets a unique share link. When someone opens your link:
- They see the drawing in read-only mode — full zoom, pan, no accidental edits
- They can fork it with one click — creates their own editable copy
- No login required to view. Login required to fork to cloud (or they can fork to localStorage)
The share URL looks like: sketchmyinfra.com/draw/s/a1b2c3d4e5f6
Gallery
All your drawings live in a gallery at /draw/:
- Visual preview thumbnails of each drawing
- Click-to-zoom lightbox for quick preview
- Create, rename, delete, share — all from one place
- Cloud drawings and local drawings shown separately
Why This Beats Alternatives for Quick Architecture Sketches
| Scenario | Lucidchart | draw.io | Slack screenshot | SketchMyInfra Draw |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first stroke | 30+ sec (login, create, template) | 10+ sec (load, new file) | Instant (but no editing) | 2 clicks from homepage |
| Sharing with team | Share link (needs account) | Export + upload | Already in chat (low quality) | Share link (no account needed to view) |
| Persistence | Cloud (paid tier) | Local file / Google Drive | None | Cloud (free) or localStorage |
| Forking/copying | Manual duplicate | Copy file | Screenshot again | One-click fork |
| Works alongside AI generation | No | No | No | Yes — same platform |
The key differentiator: SketchMyInfra Draw exists in the same ecosystem as the AI diagram generator. You can use AI for polished PlantUML output and the whiteboard for early-stage sketching — all under one URL, one account, one workflow.
Try It
Open sketchmyinfra.com/draw and start drawing. No signup. No install. No credit card.
If you want persistence and sharing, sign in with Google or GitHub. Your first 50 drawings are free.
SketchMyInfra is a free, open-source tool for generating and sketching infrastructure diagrams. AI-powered PlantUML generation + freehand whiteboard, all in the browser.
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