tldraw

tldraw is both a free in-browser whiteboard at tldraw.com and a commercial infinite-canvas SDK at tldraw.dev that companies like ClickUp, Padlet and Jam embed to build their own canvas products. We rate it 78/100 — the most polished open-source canvas engine on the market and an obvious pick for the free browser whiteboard, but the new $6,000-a-year production license from SDK 4.0 makes it a harder sell for small teams that used to ship it for free.

What is tldraw?

tldraw was created by Steve Ruiz and first launched in 2021 as a tiny open-source whiteboard toy. It has grown into a full product: the free whiteboard at tldraw.com, the SDK at tldraw.dev, an AI experiment called Make Real that turns sketches into working HTML, and a newer AI-native canvas at computer.tldraw.com. The GitHub repo at github.com/tldraw/tldraw has 46,400+ stars, 3,150 forks and shipped release v4.5.9 on April 14, 2026. The company raised a $10M Series A from Lux Capital and Definition in April 2025, bringing total funding to $12M.

The pitch is specific: a feature-complete infinite canvas — multiplayer, selection geometry, snapping, image and video embeds, shape bindings, a record store, and an OpenGL mini-map — that you either use as a ready-made whiteboard in the browser or drop into your own React app in a few lines. Steve Ruiz claims the team has spent "three years and five million dollars building thousands of table-stakes features, from rotating cursors to handling pasted images," which is the part most teams underestimate when they try to build a canvas themselves.

Key features of tldraw

• Real-time multiplayer with live cursors: simultaneous editing with instant updates, viewport following, cursor chat and user presence powered by a custom sync engine — no login required on the free web app.
• Feature-complete canvas primitives: pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, arrows, rich text, snapping to shapes, edge scrolling, image and video embeds, bindings between shapes, and full PNG/SVG export.
• React SDK you can fully customize: you control shapes, tools, bindings, UI components and the theme system, with a runtime API that lets you read and write canvas state programmatically.
• Make Real AI prototyping: select any sketch, hit Make Real, and tldraw sends it to GPT-4o, Claude or Gemini (bring your own key) and draws a working HTML prototype as a new shape on the canvas.
• 5 starter kits in SDK 4.0: the April 2026 line ships pre-built starters for whiteboards, diagramming apps, presentation tools, slide decks and agent-style AI canvases, which dramatically shortens time-to-first-ship.
• Accessibility and export: dark mode, screen-reader support, full keyboard navigation, and OpenGL rendering for performance on canvases with thousands of shapes.

What users say about tldraw

The reaction on Hacker News to the SDK 4.0 launch is lopsided — almost everyone agrees the product is exceptional ("incredibly intuitive," "the best canvas engine on the web," "BigBlueButton moved to it and called it an excellent upgrade") and the complaints are almost entirely about the new licensing. The top-voted concern is that a $6,000 minimum with a manual sales process is "huge friction" that pushes indie developers to Excalidraw or roll-your-own, with one commenter summarising the feeling as "this is a great library and I will never be able to justify paying for it."

On Reddit's r/webdev and r/reactjs, reviewers praise the cleanliness of the API and the fact that the free whiteboard requires no signup, but a recurring complaint is that some previously-free features — multi-page canvases and link sharing — now require a tldraw account. On Product Hunt, earlier launches regularly cleared 500+ upvotes; the team has a reputation for shipping fast and answering support in public.

tldraw pricing

The free browser whiteboard at tldraw.com is free forever with no account needed. The SDK is free in development and localhost; production use requires a commercial license. Pricing (2026):

Plan	Price	Who it's for
Free browser app	$0 forever	Anyone drawing on tldraw.com
SDK — dev only	$0	Localhost and non-production use
100-day Trial License	$0	Teams evaluating the SDK in a live environment
Startup License	$6,000 / year	Up to 10 users, <$5M ARR
Business / Enterprise	Contact sales	Larger teams, custom terms

Who should use tldraw?

Best for: product teams that need to ship a real canvas feature — ClickUp, Padlet, Mobbin and Jam all quietly replaced their own whiteboards with tldraw — and for anyone who just wants a clean, login-free browser whiteboard for an ad-hoc meeting.

Not ideal for: solo developers, open-source side projects, bootstrapped indie SaaS at <$5M ARR who can't justify $6,000/year, and organizations that need the canvas to remain under a permissive open-source license — tldraw's source is readable but the production license is commercial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• The most feature-complete canvas engine available — you genuinely save the "3 years and $5M" the tldraw team spent.
• Free, login-free browser whiteboard that is excellent for ad-hoc meetings and teaching.
• First-class React SDK with 5 starter kits in 4.0, real multiplayer, and a clean theming system.
• Make Real is the cleanest implementation of "sketch → working UI" we have seen.

Cons:

• $6,000/year Startup License with a manual sales process is a real barrier for bootstrapped teams.
• Some previously-free features on tldraw.com now require a login.
• License is not OSI-approved open source despite the repo being on GitHub — existing downstream open-source projects like BigBlueButton have been forced to rethink integration.

Alternatives to tldraw

Excalidraw is the obvious free, MIT-licensed alternative with a hand-drawn aesthetic; it has a smaller feature set but no licensing friction. Miro is the commercial all-in-one whiteboard that sits one layer higher — a finished SaaS rather than a component. Eraser.io and FigJam are strong team-facing whiteboards but neither ships a customizable SDK.

Verdict: is tldraw worth it?

Yes — with caveats. For product teams building a canvas feature, tldraw is the fastest path to a production-grade infinite canvas and $6,000 a year is cheap compared to the engineering cost of building this yourself; ClickUp, Padlet and Mobbin all made that tradeoff. For indie developers and open-source projects it is harder to recommend — Excalidraw exists, it's MIT-licensed, and that matters. The free browser whiteboard at tldraw.com, meanwhile, is a 90/100 product we recommend to anyone. We rate the overall package 78/100.

Frequently asked questions

Is tldraw free?

The browser whiteboard at tldraw.com is free forever with no account required. The SDK is free in development and on localhost. Production use of the SDK requires a commercial license starting at $6,000/year, with a 100-day free trial.

Is tldraw open source?

The source code is public on GitHub and has 46,400+ stars, but the license is not OSI-approved open source. Since tldraw SDK 4.0 (September 2025), production commercial use requires a paid license.

What platforms does tldraw support?

Anywhere a modern browser runs — the whiteboard works on Web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. The SDK is React-based and runs on any device with WebGL support.

How does tldraw compare to Excalidraw?

tldraw has a larger feature set, real multiplayer, a proper SDK and better performance at scale. Excalidraw is MIT-licensed, truly open source, free for commercial use and has a more distinctive sketchy look. Choose tldraw for features; choose Excalidraw for licensing freedom.

What is Make Real?

Make Real is a tldraw experiment at makereal.tldraw.com that uses an LLM (bring your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google API key) to turn a selected sketch into working HTML and draw the result back onto the canvas as a new shape.