See how tldraw's infinite canvas whiteboard and React SDK work, what it costs, and how it compares for developers building drawing tools.
tldraw is an infinite canvas whiteboard and SDK made by tldraw Inc, a London startup founded by Steve Ruiz in 2022 that grew out of an open source side project Ruiz began building in 2021. The company offers two things under one brand: a free consumer-facing whiteboard app at tldraw.com used by individuals and small teams for sketching, wireframing, and visual brainstorming, and the tldraw SDK, a React library that gives developers a production-ready infinite canvas editor they can embed directly into their own products.
The SDK is what sets tldraw apart from most whiteboard tools. Instead of only offering a hosted app, tldraw packages the same rendering engine, shape system, and multiplayer sync layer that power tldraw.com into a library other companies can drop into their own interfaces. This has made it the underlying canvas technology behind features like ClickUp Whiteboards, Padlet Sandboxes, and Jam's screenshot annotation tool, as well as countless internal tools and AI demo projects such as the viral make-real experiment that turns hand-drawn wireframes into working code.
tldraw raised a 10 million dollar Series A in April 2025 led by Lux Capital and Definition Capital, with Amplify Partners also participating, bringing total funding to roughly 12 million dollars. The company has said it closed just under 1 million dollars in SDK license deals in its first year of commercial operation, and it continues to develop both the free whiteboard app and the licensed SDK in parallel.
The core of tldraw is its infinite, zoomable canvas with a full shape library, including sticky notes, arrows, geometric shapes, freehand drawing, text, images, embeds, and frames, all rendered with the same tldraw shape engine whether you're using the hosted app or a custom embed built on the SDK. Multiplayer collaboration is built in, letting multiple people draw on the same canvas in real time with visible cursors and presence, and the app supports exporting boards as SVG, PNG, or JSON.
For developers, the SDK exposes a full API for defining custom shapes, tools, and UI, along with a pluggable multiplayer backend so teams can wire tldraw into their own auth and storage systems rather than depending on tldraw's hosted infrastructure. This customizability is why product teams choose it over building a canvas from scratch or licensing a closed source whiteboard engine.
tldraw also powers a set of experimental and AI-connected micro-products, including tools that convert freehand sketches into working UI code, which showcase how the canvas can serve as an input surface for AI agents and generative design workflows, not just static diagramming.
The tldraw.com whiteboard app is free to use with no paid consumer tier. For commercial use of the tldraw SDK in a shipped product, companies need a license: development and hobby projects can use the SDK for free, and there is a 100-day free trial for evaluating commercial use, after which a paid commercial license is required. The standard commercial license is priced at 6,000 dollars per year (roughly 500 dollars a month) per team, a flat fee introduced with SDK version 4.0 that sparked debate in the developer community over affordability for small startups.
tldraw has indicated it is open to extended trials and different terms for pre-revenue startups and companies working with incubators, and larger organizations with custom deployment or support needs can contact tldraw directly for enterprise terms. There is no self-serve tiered pricing beyond the flat commercial license at this time.
The tldraw.com whiteboard app is free for anyone to use. The tldraw SDK is free for development, hobby projects, and a 100-day trial, but commercial production use requires a paid license.
The standard commercial license for the tldraw SDK costs 6,000 dollars per year, or about 500 dollars per month, per team.
tldraw is made by tldraw Inc, a London-based company founded by Steve Ruiz in 2022, building on an open source project Ruiz started in 2021.
The SDK lets developers embed a full infinite canvas editor, including shapes, tools, and multiplayer sync, directly into their own web applications rather than building a canvas engine from scratch.
Known adopters include ClickUp Whiteboards, Padlet Sandboxes, and Jam's screenshot annotation feature, along with many smaller tools and internal products.
Yes, both the hosted app and SDK support real-time multiplayer editing with live cursors and shared presence.
tldraw's core began as an open source project, and parts of the codebase remain publicly viewable, but commercial production use of the SDK now requires a paid license under its source-available terms.
Unlike Miro or Figma, which are primarily hosted apps, tldraw's main differentiator is its embeddable SDK, letting other companies build their own branded whiteboard features on top of tldraw's canvas engine.