About tldraw
tldraw is an SDK for building infinite canvas applications in React. It supplies a complete canvas engine that serves as the foundation for whiteboards, diagramming tools, design editors and other canvas products, and it ships a default whiteboarding tool set that you can use as is or replace with your own primitives.
Out of the box it offers pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, rich text, arrows with snapping, image and video support and image export. Developers can extend it with their own shapes, tools, bindings, interface components, side effects and event hooks, and can drive the canvas at runtime through the Editor API. Multiplayer collaboration is available through a self-hostable sync package, there are canvas primitives for building with LLMs, and the DOM-based rendering can embed websites such as YouTube, Figma and GitHub. It works in desktop and touch browsers.
Starter kits provide the custom shapes, tools and interface for common application types, and each kit is MIT licensed. The SDK itself is under tldraw's own license rather than a standard open-source one, so review the terms before shipping it in a commercial product.
Key features
- Infinite canvas engine for React apps
- Custom shapes, tools and bindings
- Editor API for runtime control
- Self-hostable multiplayer sync
- AI integration primitives for LLMs
- Embeds web content on the canvas
- Starter kits for common app types
Good fit for
- →Adding a whiteboard to a SaaS product
- →Building custom diagramming or annotation tools
- →Prototyping collaborative canvas apps
- Tags
- whiteboard
- canvas
- sdk
- react
- diagramming
- collaboration
- typescript
- drawing
tldraw: questions and answers
- What is tldraw used for?
- tldraw is a React SDK for building infinite canvas apps, with drawing and diagramming tools, an extensible editor API, AI integrations and self-hostable multiplayer sync. It is a good fit for adding a whiteboard to a SaaS product, building custom diagramming or annotation tools and prototyping collaborative canvas apps.
- Is tldraw open source?
- Yes. tldraw is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at tldraw/tldraw and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is tldraw free?
- Yes. tldraw is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
- Can I self-host tldraw?
- Yes. tldraw can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is tldraw an alternative to?
- tldraw is an open-source alternative to Miro, FigJam, Mural and Microsoft Whiteboard. Other open-source alternatives to Miro include Excalidraw, Drawnix and WBO.
- Is tldraw actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to tldraw was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v5.5.1, published on 2 October 2026. The project has 51k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to tldraw
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MITvs Miro★ 133k
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InfiniPaint
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SaaS alternatives to tldraw
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Miro
Whiteboards
Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard where distributed teams brainstorm, map ideas, run workshops and plan projects on an infinite canvas.
SaaS
FigJam
Whiteboards
Online whiteboard from Figma for workshops and diagramming
SaaS
Mural
Whiteboards
Collaborative whiteboard with facilitation tools and templates
SaaS
Microsoft Whiteboard
Whiteboards
Free-form digital canvas for sketching, sticky notes and collaboration in Microsoft 365
SaaS
Apple Freeform
Whiteboards
Apple infinite-canvas whiteboard for sketching, notes and collaboration
SaaS
Conceptboard
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Visual collaboration whiteboard with enterprise security options
SaaS

