Live collaboration with draw.io: Work on the same diagram at the same time

October 13, 2026 • 5 min read • diagramHub Team

Diagrams are rarely the work of one person. An architecture review, a workshop on a new process or an incident post-mortem all have one thing in common: several people look at the same diagram and want to change it now, not after the next email round.

Yet in many teams, collaborating on a draw.io diagram still looks like this: one person shares their screen and draws, everybody else dictates. Or the file is passed around and someone overwrites somebody else's changes.

This article shows what good live collaboration on diagrams looks like and how diagramHub makes it work for draw.io and Excalidraw.

What live collaboration needs

Real-time editing is more than "two people can open the same file". For a session to feel natural, you need:

1. Changes appear instantly for everyone, without reloading or saving manually.
2. You see who is there and where they are working, so you don't edit the same shape at the same time.
3. Everyone can join, including colleagues from other teams and external partners.
4. Nothing gets lost. If a change was a mistake, you can go back.
5. No extra setup. Nobody wants to configure storage providers or install plugins before a meeting.

Collaboration with plain draw.io

draw.io itself is an editor and doesn't store your diagrams. Whether real-time collaboration works depends on where the file is saved: some cloud storages support it, a local file or a Git repository doesn't. Everyone needs access to that storage, and external participants usually don't have it.

That's fine for occasional use. For teams that work on diagrams together every day, it is a lot of friction.

Live collaboration in diagramHub

diagramHub has real-time collaboration built in, for every diagram, with no setup.

Changes appear for everyone

Open a diagram and start drawing. diagramHub saves your changes automatically and sends them to everyone who has the same diagram open. Their editor merges the changes in place, while they keep working. No reload, no "file was changed by someone else" dialog.

This works the same way for draw.io diagrams and for Excalidraw sketches.

Live cursors

Every participant gets their own color, and you see their cursor moving across the canvas in real time, labeled with their name. In draw.io, cursors are shown per page, so you only see the people working on the page you are looking at.

Live cursors make a remote session feel like standing at the same whiteboard: you can point at a component ("this one here"), see where a colleague is about to make changes, and avoid editing the same area at the same time.

See who is online

The diagram header shows the avatars of everyone who currently has the diagram open. Before you start a larger refactoring of a diagram, you know whether someone else is working on it right now.

Invite anyone, even without an account

Collaborators in your organization get access through the diagram's collection. People outside your organization, like a customer, a consultant or a partner, can join with a guest editor link:

• Click "Share" and create an edit link.
• Send it to your guest.
• They open the link in the browser and draw along, with live changes and live cursors, without creating an account.

Guest editor links are temporary, so access ends when the collaboration ends.

Version history as a safety net

Collaborative editing means more people can make mistakes. Every diagram in diagramHub has a version history: open any earlier state and restore it if a change went wrong. Changes are recorded in the audit log, so you can always see what happened.

AI as a collaborator

diagramHub's MCP server lets AI assistants like Claude or GitHub Copilot work on your diagrams with your permissions. Their changes show up in the open editor just like a colleague's, and a version is saved before every AI edit, so you can undo it with one click.

draw.io or Excalidraw?

Both editors support live collaboration in diagramHub. Pick the one that fits the session:

A common pattern: sketch the idea together in Excalidraw during the workshop, then turn the result into a clean draw.io diagram that becomes part of your documentation.

Typical use cases

• Architecture reviews: the architect walks through the diagram, reviewers point at components with their cursors and fix details on the spot.
• Workshops and remote meetings: instead of one person drawing on a shared screen, everybody draws.
• Incident analysis: several engineers map the affected systems at the same time while the incident is fresh.
• Working with customers and partners: share a guest editor link and design the integration together, without giving them an account.
• Onboarding: a new team member and a mentor go through the system landscape together, live.

Tips for a good collaboration session

1. Agree on areas. On large diagrams, split the work by page or region. Live cursors show you where everyone is.
2. Use pages in draw.io for different views (context, containers, deployment), so people don't get in each other's way.
3. Add documentation. Write decisions and open questions into the diagram's documentation while everyone is still in the session.
4. Check the history afterwards. If something looks off after the session, compare with an earlier version and restore what you need.

Conclusion

Diagrams become better when the people who know the system draw them together. diagramHub gives draw.io and Excalidraw everything a real-time session needs: changes that appear instantly, live cursors, presence, guest editors without accounts and a version history that keeps everything safe. All of it works out of the box, in the browser.

Want to compare diagramHub with other ways to manage your diagrams? Read diagramHub vs draw.io and diagramHub vs Confluence.

Try the live demo or start a free trial and invite your team to your first diagram.