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 | Excalidraw | Quickdraw | |
|---|---|---|---|
| React | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Plain JS / other frameworks | No | No | Yes |
| React Native | No | No | Yes |
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
- tldraw: a full editor framework — powerful, correspondingly large, with a substantial dependency tree.
- Excalidraw: also big; you’re embedding the Excalidraw app experience, assets and all.
- Quickdraw: the core is ~46 kB unpacked with zero runtime dependencies, no build step required. It’s a whiteboard, not a platform.
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/reactand 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.