What is Paint Board used for?

Paint Board is an open-source web drawing board with many creative brushes, shapes, selection tools and multi-canvas files, available in several languages and deployable with Docker. It is a good fit for quick sketches and whiteboard-style drawing, and creative brush experiments in the browser.

Is Paint Board open source?

Yes. Paint Board is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at LHRUN/paint-board and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Paint Board is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Paint Board?

Yes. Paint Board can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Paint Board an alternative to?

Paint Board is an open-source alternative to Procreate, Sketchbook, Adobe Fresco and ibis Paint. Other open-source alternatives to Procreate include Krita.

Is Paint Board actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Paint Board was on 13 October 2025, and the latest release is 2.0.0, published on 13 October 2025. The project has 2.6k stars on GitHub.

Paint Board: open-source alternative to Procreate

About Paint Board

Paint Board is a web-based creative canvas with a focus on expressive brushes. It runs in the browser, supports several interface languages and can also be built into a Docker image and served locally, so you can host your own copy.

Free drawing offers 12 brush styles, including rainbow, pixel, text, mesh, wave and thorn brushes, alongside shape drawing with built-in shapes and Lucide icons, configurable line width, line style, fill color and fill style. Other modes cover a line eraser, selection by click or box with drag, scale and rotate handles, and a canvas mode for background and custom size. An action bar provides undo, redo, copy, delete, text, image upload, clearing and saving as an image.

Several canvases can be kept as separate files with titles, ordering, and upload and download. The interface is available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, and the project recommends a recent version of Chrome. It is written in TypeScript and licensed under MIT.

Key features

12 creative brush styles
Shapes and icon drawing
Selection with drag, scale and rotate
Undo, redo and save as image
Multiple canvas files with sorting
Interface in five languages

Good fit for

→Quick sketches and whiteboard-style drawing
→Creative brush experiments in the browser

Built with: TypeScript; JavaScript
Tags: drawing; whiteboard; canvas; brushes; sketch; typescript; docker; i18n

Paint Board: questions and answers

What is Paint Board used for?: Paint Board is an open-source web drawing board with many creative brushes, shapes, selection tools and multi-canvas files, available in several languages and deployable with Docker. It is a good fit for quick sketches and whiteboard-style drawing, and creative brush experiments in the browser.
Is Paint Board open source?: Yes. Paint Board is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at LHRUN/paint-board and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Paint Board free?: Yes. Paint Board is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Paint Board?: Yes. Paint Board can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Paint Board an alternative to?: Paint Board is an open-source alternative to Procreate, Sketchbook, Adobe Fresco and ibis Paint. Other open-source alternatives to Procreate include Krita.
Is Paint Board actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Paint Board was on 13 October 2025, and the latest release is 2.0.0, published on 13 October 2025. The project has 2.6k stars on GitHub.