And just like that, we’re wrapping up the end of the year. It always seems to come up so fast, doesn’t it?

2023 was especially busy at Whimsical. We released 50 new features and updates, fixed 487 bugs, and shipped lots of delightful details along the way. It was 365 days spent totally dialed in to making Whimsical intuitive, performant, and delightful for our users.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look back at this year’s biggest product highlights—the updates that truly made Whimsical more whimsical.

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Whimsical’s top 5 product updates of 2023

1. We expanded into AI

2023 was the year we launched Whimsical AI✨.

We started with Whimsical AI for mind maps, then launched Whimsical AI: Text-to-flowchart (landed us #3 on Product Hunt 😎), and continued to expand our generative AI support for for sequence diagrams and sticky notes.

But of course, we didn’t stop there! We also built an AI diagrams plugin for ChatGPT and released our own custom Whimsical GPT so that users could create flowcharts, mind maps, and sequence diagrams right in ChatGPT.

2. We partnered with Reforge

We teamed up with Reforge to make their top artifacts for product teams more accessible and easier to edit by recreating them as fully editable Whimsical templates. We build Whimsical in Whimsical, and this set of templates provides a helpful guide for other product teams building their products in Whimsical too. You can browse the full collection here, but a few of our favorites are the Product Review Process Doc, the Monthly Company Update, and the Feature Development Process Doc.

3. We released tooling for sequence diagrams

In November, we expanded our diagramming functionality to include sequence diagrams. In addition to supporting sequence diagrams with Whimsical AI, we also released a native Sequence diagram actor tool located in the diagram shapes menu. Now you can create any technical process diagram in seconds. Hit ‘play’ on Daniel’s sequence diagram demo above to learn more.

4. We improved the writing experience across boards and docs

Improving our text editing experience across boards and docs was one of the longest running projects of 2023—and it was worth the investment.

We made it easy to add formatting like headers and lists to board objects like mind maps and flowchart shapes, and we revisited special characters to improve the typing experience in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. This was quite the feat for our engineering team, and even included some self-guided learning on how to type in new languages! Check out this blog post by Amy to learn more about how we’ve evolved the writing experience in Whimsical.

5. We made working with tables delightful

We also spent a lot of time refining the details of Whimsical, and this was especially true for tables. In case you missed it, you can now drag any cell in a table to instantly add or remove multiple rows and columns. It’s so smooth.

You can learn how we evolved this experience step-by-step in Kaspars’ Twitter thread.

For a complete list of all the product updates, bug fixes, and delightful details that shipped in 2023, visit our Product Updates page. Want to share feedback with our team about how we can make Whimsical more whimsical? We’d love to hear from you.