A free Canva that runs on your own computer: designing with Excalidraw locally

Canva changed graphic design because it removed a real barrier: making a decent cover no longer required knowing Illustrator. In exchange it put up another, quieter one: the work lives on their server and the good pieces sit behind a subscription.

This article is about what you can do without that subscription, on your own computer, and about why the detail that matters most is not the price but the output format.

The problem of the file you cannot reopen

When you ask a generative AI for a design, what you normally get back is a PNG or a JPG. That is fine until a word has to change.

A PNG is a photograph of the design, not the design. If the price goes from 19 to 29, you do not edit it: you regenerate the whole thing, and with luck it comes out similar. That is the real reason many teams go back to Canva even though they pay for it: there, the piece is still a document with layers.

What is needed, then, is not "generating nice images." It is generating documents you can keep editing.

Excalidraw as the foundation

Excalidraw is an open-source drawing tool, MIT licensed, best known for its sketch aesthetic. What makes it interesting here is not the look, but how it stores things.

An Excalidraw file is JSON: a list of elements with their position, their text, their colour and their size. That has three practical consequences:

• An agent can write it directly. It does not have to "draw" an image: it writes the document's structure, the same way it would write code.
• It stays editable afterwards. You move a box, change some text, adjust a colour. Nothing has to be regenerated.
• It is an open format. The document is yours and it opens in any Excalidraw, including the official one.

In Polimake Desktop this runs locally: you ask for a piece in plain language, the document is built on your machine, and it opens in an editor where you can keep working on it. From there it goes out to PNG, SVG or PDF once it is ready.

What it does well

This foundation works particularly well for:

• Social pieces with large text, shapes and a logo.
• Covers and thumbnails, including variations on a single idea.
• Decks with a clear structure and no odd dependencies.
• Diagrams and schematics, which is where Excalidraw is flatly better than Canva.
• Single-page PDFs: one-pagers, summaries, proposals.

And all of it with an advantage you notice on the second job: because the source material is on your own disk, you can ask it to use your photos and your logo, not a generic stock library.

The downsides, in detail

This is where this article parts ways with most others, because there are downsides and they matter.

There is no template library. Canva has hundreds of thousands of templates made by designers. This does not. If your way of working is to find a template and change the text, you are going to miss it badly. It is the biggest difference of all.

There is no image or video library. No stock included. You work with what you have. For an agency with its own archive that is actually better; for someone starting from scratch, it is a real problem.

Excalidraw's aesthetic leans sketchy. It can be configured to come out clean and geometric, but its natural character is the hand-drawn line. For a diagram that is a win; for a luxury campaign, it is not the right register.

It does not do fine typography. Kerning, ligatures, serious typesetting: that is InDesign or Illustrator. Here the typography is correct, not exquisite.

There is no real-time collaboration on the local document. Two people do not edit the same file at once the way they do in Canva. What you can do is save the piece to a shared archive once it is ready.

The ecosystem is missing. Canva prints, schedules posts, holds team brand kits. It is a complete platform; this is a tool.

When it is worth it and when it is not

It is worth it if: you produce similar pieces every week, you have your own material, you resent paying a subscription for something you use twice a month, or you need the material never to leave your computer.

It is not worth it if: you live off templates, you need stock included, or your team works simultaneously on the same documents.

To put it plainly: this is not a Canva replacement for everyone. It is an alternative for one specific case — producing quickly with your own material, without a subscription and locally — and in that case it is better. In the others, it is not.

The detail that makes it useful long term

There is something you only appreciate after a few months: if every piece you produce stays in an open format and in your own archive, last year's work is still a starting point.

In a closed service, old work is a link that may still work. In an open format saved on your own disk, it is a document you open and reuse.

That is the underlying reason to work this way, more than saving twelve euros a month.