The canvas is open
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Sketch a system, map a flow, or think it through with your team — no signup, no setup, just a canvas and a link to share.
Start drawing — it’s freeComparison
These two look alike and aim at different people. tldraw is a canvas you build with; Drawdy is a canvas you draw on. The choice is mostly about which of those you actually need.
tldraw is one of the best-engineered canvases on the web, and its team has done more than anyone to make infinite-canvas UX feel obvious. The app at tldraw.com is free, needs no account, and the interaction polish is the reference other tools get measured against — including us.
Its real product, though, is the SDK. tldraw is built to be embedded: if you are putting a canvas inside your own app, tldraw hands you the whole thing with documentation, a sync service, and a downloadable offline app alongside it. Drawdy has no SDK and no plans to compete there.
Drawdy is the other shape: a finished whiteboard for people who just want to sketch and share. That is where our differences live — end-to-end encrypted share links, local-first boards, shape recognition, presentation mode, and history, all in the free app, with no license key to think about when you use it at work.
| Feature | tldraw | Drawdy |
|---|---|---|
| Infinite canvas with a hand-drawn style | Yes | Yes |
| Free to use as an app | Yes | Yes |
| No account needed to start | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Guests can edit from a link without an account | Yes | Yes |
| Export to PNG, SVG, and JSON | Yes | Yes |
| Embeddable SDK for your own producttldraw's main product; Drawdy does not offer one | Yes | No |
| Downloadable offline desktop app | Yes | No |
| End-to-end encrypted share linkstldraw does not advertise end-to-end encrypted sharing | No | Yes |
| Extensions run inside the apptldraw's extensibility is the SDK you build an app with, not extensions in the app | No | Yes |
| Sketched-shape recognitionRough rectangle in, clean rectangle out | No | Yes |
| Presentation mode | No | Yes |
| Version history | No | Yes |
The tldraw.com app is free to use. The SDK is free while you develop and comes with a free hobby licence, but shipping it in production needs a licence key — priced on request, with a 100-day trial and discounts for early-stage startups.
Free to start and free to keep using: unlimited boards on your device and one cloud board for syncing and sharing, with no card. Pro lifts the cloud-board limit and starts with three months free; the free tier itself does not expire.
FAQ
The app at tldraw.com is free to use. The SDK is free during development and for hobby projects, but putting it into a commercial product in production requires a paid licence key from tldraw, priced on request.
tldraw's product is an embeddable canvas SDK, with tldraw.com as its showcase app. Drawdy's product is the whiteboard itself. If you are building a canvas into software, use tldraw; if you want to draw on one, either works, and Drawdy adds encrypted sharing, local-first boards, shape recognition, and history for free.
No. Drawdy is an end-user whiteboard, not a toolkit. If embedding a canvas is your requirement, tldraw is the right answer.
Both are free canvases with different centres of gravity. tldraw is a developer SDK with a very polished demo app; Excalidraw is an open-source whiteboard with a large community-library ecosystem and a $6 per user per month Plus tier for cloud boards and teams. Pick tldraw to build with, Excalidraw to draw with and self-host.
Only if you ask for it. Boards live on your device by default and keep working offline; cloud sync is opt-in per board, and share links are encrypted in your browser before anything is uploaded.
The canvas is open
Sketch a system, map a flow, or think it through with your team — no signup, no setup, just a canvas and a link to share.
Start drawing — it’s free