tldraw vs Excalidraw — and the third option
You need a whiteboard in your product and the shortlist writes itself: tldraw or Excalidraw. They're both good. They also make different trade-offs — and depending on your stack, the right answer might be neither.
The short version
- Pick tldraw if you want the deepest SDK on the market, you're in React, and the custom license (with its paid business tier) works for your budget.
- Pick Excalidraw if you want MIT-licensed software with a big community, you're in React, and its hand-drawn style plus element set covers your needs.
- Pick Quickdraw if you want MIT licensing and need to run outside React — a plain web page, a custom framework, or React Native — or you want sync primitives without a dedicated server product.
Feature by feature
| Quickdraw | tldraw SDK | Excalidraw | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | Custom | MIT |
| Free for commercial use, no paid tiers | paid business license tier | ||
| React component | |||
| Works without React | |||
| React Native package | |||
| Zero-dependency core | |||
| Pressure ink + palm rejection | pressure only | ||
| Diff-based sync primitive | via excalidraw-room |
Reflects public docs as of August 2026 — see tldraw's license and Excalidraw's repo. Spot an error? Tell us and we'll fix it.
Licensing, in plain words
tldraw moved from MIT to a custom license in 2024. You can build and ship with it, but production use without its attribution requires a paid business license. That's a reasonable way to fund an excellent SDK — just budget for it.
Excalidraw is MIT. No fees at any scale. The constraint is technical rather than legal: the embeddable package is built for React, and collaboration runs through its room server.
Quickdraw is MIT too, packages for React, React Native, and the bare web, and keeps sync in the data model — every change is a JSON diff you can ship over any transport. It's the youngest of the three; what it has is complete, and it's built in the open.
Questions that decide it
- Are you in React? No → tldraw and Excalidraw are out; Quickdraw's core is framework-free.
- Do you need mobile-native? Only Quickdraw ships a React Native package.
- Is the budget zero? Excalidraw and Quickdraw are MIT; tldraw has a paid tier you may eventually need.
- Do you need advanced canvas features today (frames, plugins, hosted sync)? tldraw is furthest ahead.
More: tldraw alternative · Excalidraw alternative · the long-form comparison · Quickdraw docs