Eigen: Vector
Published 14 Sep 2026
Eigen is a European Google Workspace alternative where you own your data. In the post from six months later I listed a drawing and diagramming app as a gap, with a question mark behind the name. Eigen now has eigen|vector>.
What it is
Vector is a whiteboard. You get an infinite canvas and draw on it: rectangles, diamonds and ellipses, lines, freehand strokes with a pen or your finger, text boxes and images. Everything looks a little sketchy by default, like it was drawn by hand. You can turn that off.
If this sounds like Excalidraw, that is no accident. Vector is heavily inspired by their work. It is not a fork. It is written from scratch on the same foundation as the other Eigen apps, so a drawing is a normal file in your drive, with sharing, version history, comments and search.
Arrows that stay attached
Start an arrow on one shape and end it on another, and the arrow docks to both. Move a shape, and the arrow follows. Resize or rotate it, and the arrow still points where you meant.
Arrows are curved by default. You can make them straight, or switch to elbow arrows that route around shapes with right angles and pin the segments where you want them. Arrows can have heads on either end and a label.
Working together
Like docs, sheets and slides, Vector is collaborative. Open the same drawing with someone else and you see their cursor and selection. There is an eraser, snap lines, and align and distribute buttons.
Every drawing has comments and an activity panel. Drawings export to SVG and PDF, show up as previews in drive, and you can copy a selection and paste it into a doc or a slide as an image.
It works on a tablet with a stylus, with pen pressure in the freehand tool. On a phone you can view drawings but not edit them.
One engine, two apps
The slides app now runs on the same canvas engine. A slide is a fixed frame on the same kind of canvas, with the same shapes, arrows, text and images. Every improvement to Vector is an improvement to slides too.
Try it
The demo has a hand-drawn site plan of the festival grounds in the vector app. Open it, move a stage, and watch the arrows follow. Enter the demo in two browser windows to see the live cursors.
As always: tell me what breaks and what is missing.