What's wrong with Excalidraw's own share link?

Nothing for collaborating — it opens a live room where anyone with the link can move your boxes. That is the opposite of what you want when the drawing is a decision record someone is approving.

How do I share an Excalidraw drawing read-only?

Export to SVG with the scene embedded, publish it as a page, and send that URL. The reader sees a fixed picture; you keep the editable scene.

Does exporting lose the ability to edit later?

Not if you tick the embed-scene option. The exported SVG or PNG carries the scene data, so Excalidraw can reopen it and you can keep drawing.

Excalidraw's hand-drawn strokes and text rasterize badly. SVG keeps the sketch crisp at any zoom and the labels selectable.

Can people comment on the drawing?

On a published page, yes — anchored to the drawing and the notes around it, and preserved across revisions.

Share an Excalidraw drawing

Excalidraw is where the system design actually happens: boxes, arrows, the hand-drawn look that signals this is a sketch, argue with it.

Then the sketch becomes the decision, and the way you share it matters more than it did an hour ago.

The share link is a room, not a document

Share → Live collaboration gives you a URL, and it is genuinely useful while three people are drawing together. It is the wrong thing to paste into an architecture decision record, because:

Anyone holding the link can move, delete or redraw anything.
The drawing keeps changing after the approval, silently.
There is no version of it that anyone agreed to.

A design that someone signs off on should stop being editable by everyone who saw it.

Export to SVG, with the scene embedded

File → Export image…, choose SVG, and tick Embed scene.

That gives you one file that is simultaneously a crisp read-only picture and a re-openable Excalidraw document. You keep the ability to edit; the reader gets something fixed.

Skip PNG. Excalidraw's whole aesthetic is strokes and hand-drawn text, and those are exactly what rasterization ruins — see stop screenshotting reports.

Publish the SVG as a page

Wrap it and publish:

<!doctype html>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Ingest pipeline — proposed</title>
<article>
  <h1>Ingest pipeline — proposed</h1>
  <p>Replaces the Kinesis hop with a direct write. Open questions marked in red.</p>
  <!-- exported SVG, inlined -->
</article>

The prose above the drawing is worth the thirty seconds. A sketch with no caption gets interpreted differently by every reader; a sketch with two sentences of intent gets argued with on the merits.

Review that survives the next edit

Feedback on a live Excalidraw room disappears into the room. Feedback on a published page is a thread anchored to the drawing, and it stays attached when you publish a revision to the same URL — so the reason the arrow moved is recorded next to the arrow. See commenting on HTML.

Worth knowing

Embed scene, always. An SVG without it is a dead end; the next change means redrawing from scratch.
Dark-mode exports look wrong on light pages. Export in the theme the reader will see, or set an explicit background.
Excalidraw+ and self-hosted rooms need accounts. A published page needs none, which matters when the reviewer is outside your org.
5 MB per report body.

Try it

Free — unlimited reports, commenters and revisions.

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