← Blog · August 1, 2026

tldraw vs Excalidraw vs Quickdraw: choosing a whiteboard library

If you’re embedding a whiteboard in 2026, three names keep coming up: tldraw, Excalidraw, and Quickdraw. All three will put a competent infinite canvas in your app. They differ on licensing, weight, and which stacks they serve. (Disclosure: this is Quickdraw’s blog — so we source our claims and link both competitors throughout.)

Licensing — the fork in the road

tldraw is source-available, not open source. Since SDK 4.0 (September 2025), production use requires a license key: a 100-day free trial, a free hobby license (non-commercial only, watermark required), or a commercial license arranged through sales — there is no public price list, though users on Hacker News have reported quotes around $6k/year for small teams. For a funded product that’s often fine. For a side project or a startup counting dollars, it’s a real cost.

Excalidraw is MIT. Free for anything, forever.

Quickdraw is MIT too. It shows a small “Made with Quickdraw” badge in the corner by default, but removal is a free, documented option (watermark: false) — no license key, no signup, no phone-home.

If your legal or budget situation rules out a paid SDK license, the rest of the comparison is between Excalidraw and Quickdraw.

Framework support

tldraw and Excalidraw are React components at their core. Quickdraw’s engine is framework-free ESM (the React wrapper is a thin binding), which is what makes Vue, Svelte, and vanilla embeds — and the React Native package — possible.

Weight and dependencies

Every figure below is minified and gzipped — what a browser actually downloads, not the unpacked size npm shows on a package page. Competitor numbers come from Bundlephobia; Quickdraw is measured the same way.

So the Quickdraw core is roughly 20× lighter than tldraw and 14× lighter than Excalidraw. For scale in the other direction: the entire Quickdraw editor is about half the size of Konva (53 kB), and Konva is a canvas scene graph — not a whiteboard. You’d still have to build selection, undo, and tools on top of it.

Add ~2 kB gzipped for quickdraw.css if you ship the default styling, and note that the React Native package lands at 28 kB because it inlines the board for the WebView.

The flip side of weight is capability: tldraw’s shape and tool plugin system is the richest of the three, and Excalidraw ships years of accumulated features (component libraries, rich export options, localization). Quickdraw ships a complete but focused whiteboard; its roadmap is public.

Look and feel

Excalidraw has its signature hand-drawn aesthetic — instantly recognizable and hard to restyle away. tldraw looks like a polished design tool. Quickdraw sits between: crisp UI chrome, hand-drawn wobble in the shapes, pressure-tapered ink, and twelve named colors that re-resolve when the board switches between light and dark themes.

Collaboration

• tldraw offers first-party sync as a paid product, and it’s excellent.
• Excalidraw supports collaboration via the separate excalidraw-room server.
• Quickdraw builds sync into the data model — every change emits a JSON-safe diff you ship over any transport, with source-tagged undo that stays correct in multiplayer. There’s no first-party server yet; the relay is ~15 lines of WebSocket code.

Maturity

Be honest about this one: tldraw and Excalidraw have big communities, years of production hardening, and large test surfaces. Quickdraw is new — smaller API surface, ~120 tests, one engine shared across three packages, and an open issue tracker you can actually influence. Young projects earn trust in public; that’s why everything is MIT on GitHub.

Recommendations

• Funded product, budget for the license, want the richest editor framework: tldraw.
• Want maximum battle-testing with MIT, React-only is fine, the Excalidraw aesthetic fits: Excalidraw.
• Want MIT + a lightweight embed, plain-JS/Vue/Svelte support, or React Native: Quickdraw — npm install @quickdrawjs/react and you’ll know in five minutes.

Corrections welcome — licensing and features change, and we’d rather this page be right than flattering: open an issue.