Real-Time Whiteboard - Archyl Docs

Collaborate on architecture diagrams in real-time with your team

Real-Time Whiteboard Collaboration

Work on architecture diagrams together with your team in real-time. See each other's cursors, watch changes appear instantly, and collaborate as if you were in the same room.

Starting a Collaboration Session

  1. Open any project and navigate to the diagram view
  2. Click the Collaborate button in the toolbar
  3. Share the session link with your teammates
  4. Team members with project access can join directly

When collaborators join, you'll see a notification and their presence in the collaborators list.

What You'll See

Collaborator Cursors

Each team member has a colored cursor that moves across the canvas in real-time. The cursor shows their name, so you always know who's working where.

Cursors are assigned colors automatically from a palette of ten distinct hues. The same person gets the same color throughout the session.

Element Focus Indicators

When someone selects an element, you'll see it highlighted with their assigned color and their name displayed above it. This prevents two people from accidentally editing the same element simultaneously.

Collaborators List

A list of active collaborators appears in the bottom-left corner, showing avatars in an overlapping stack. Hover over an avatar to see the full name. If more than five people join, you'll see a "+N more" indicator.

Synchronized Changes

Every action syncs across all participants:

  • Create elements: New systems, containers, components, and shapes appear on everyone's canvas
  • Move elements: Drag to reposition and everyone sees the movement
  • Edit properties: Update names, descriptions, and technologies in real-time
  • Add relationships: Draw connections and watch them appear for the whole team
  • Modify overlays: Create and adjust visual groupings together

Changes are optimistic—they appear instantly on your screen while syncing to others. The system reconciles concurrent edits automatically.

Architecture, Not Just Drawing

Unlike generic whiteboard tools, everything you create in Archyl is real architecture documentation.

When you sketch a system during a brainstorm, it becomes a first-class entity in your C4 model. The relationships you draw are tracked and validated. After the session ends, your architecture is documented—no cleanup required.

Session Behavior

Joining and Leaving

Sessions are project-based. Anyone with access to the project can join an active session. When you navigate away or close the browser, you automatically leave the session.

Session Cleanup

If no one has been active for 30 seconds, the session cleans up automatically. Old operation history is purged after 24 hours to keep the system efficient.

Reconnection

If your connection drops temporarily, you'll reconnect automatically and sync to the current state. No changes are lost.

Best Practices

Architecture Workshops

Use collaboration sessions for design discussions. Sketch the high-level systems while teammates fill in container details. Everyone contributes, and the documentation writes itself.

Onboarding

Walk new team members through the architecture in real-time. Point at systems, explain relationships, and let them ask questions while looking at the same canvas.

Architecture Reviews

Pull up an existing architecture for team review. Identify areas that need attention, propose changes, and implement them together. Everyone sees the before and after.

Incident Analysis

After an incident, trace the failure path through your architecture collaboratively. Mark affected systems, annotate what went wrong, and document the fix while the context is fresh.

Technical Notes

Collaboration uses a polling-based sync with one-second intervals. This provides acceptable latency for architecture work while being simple to operate and compatible with corporate proxies and load balancers.

The system handles concurrent edits gracefully. If two people modify the same element simultaneously, changes reconcile automatically using last-write-wins semantics. In practice, the cursor presence makes this rare—you naturally work on different parts of the diagram.

Next Steps