Excalidraw's sketchy rendering is not decoration. Diagrams that look provisional invite comment, where a crisp vector diagram signals a decision already made, so it is unusually good at the early part of a design conversation.
File sync, sharing, and a suite of apps on your own server
Stars30.1K
Commit8h ago
LicenseAGPL-3.0
Nextcloud started as file sync and grew into a full collaboration suite: documents, calendar, contacts, chat, and an application ecosystem on top of the same account system.
Collaborative wiki with real-time editing and diagrams
Stars15.4K
Commit2d ago
LicenseAGPL-3.0
Docmost is a documentation workspace with real-time collaborative editing, nested spaces, and diagram support built in rather than embedded from elsewhere.
Work management for teams that are not only engineers
CompanyAsana
Since2012
PricingFreemium
Asana is aimed at the coordination work around delivery rather than at engineering tickets: campaigns, launches, onboarding, and the dependencies between them. Timeline and workload views are the parts teams adopt first.
Dropbox made file sync boring in the best sense: a folder that is the same everywhere, with conflict handling that mostly does the right thing. Two decades on, the sync engine is still the part competitors struggle to match.
Figma moved interface design out of single-user desktop files and into a shared document, and the industry reorganised around it. Multiplayer editing, comments in context, and a link that always shows the current state changed how design and engineering hand work to each other.
Storage and document collaboration inside Workspace
CompanyGoogle
Since2012
PricingPaid
Google Drive is storage with an office suite attached, and the suite is the reason most organisations are on it. Docs, Sheets, and Slides collaborate in real time well enough that the underlying file storage barely gets thought about.
Asynchronous screen and camera recording shared by link
CompanyAtlassian
Since2016
PricingFreemium
Loom's contribution was the workflow, not the recording. Stop the recording and the link is already on your clipboard, which is what made replacing a meeting with a three minute video actually happen.
Miro is the canvas most distributed teams reach for when the work is thinking rather than producing: retrospectives, service maps, story mapping, and anything else that used to need a wall and sticky notes.
Documents, databases, and project tracking in one workspace
CompanyNotion Labs
Since2016
PricingFreemium
Notion's insight was that a document and a database can be the same object. A page can be prose, a table, a board, or all three, and the same records can be viewed differently by different teams without duplication.
Channel based team messaging with a large integration ecosystem
CompanySalesforce
Since2013
PricingFreemium
Slack replaced internal email for a generation of companies by making conversation searchable and public by default. Channels, threads, and a very large app directory are the shape most team chat now copies.