excalidrawvstldraw

what you're actually comparing

Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard with a deliberately hand-drawn aesthetic. It starts instantly, needs no account for basic use, autosaves locally, and encrypts scenes end-to-end in the browser. It's MIT-licensed, which means you can self-host it, modify it, and embed it inside a commercial product without a licence key, a watermark, or a conversation with sales.

tldraw is two things wearing one name. tldraw.com is a free online whiteboard with a cleaner, more precise canvas. The tldraw SDK is a React library for building infinite-canvas products, and it's the part that actually matters — it's the best available foundation if you're putting a canvas inside your own application.

The catch is that tldraw changed its licence with version 4.0 in late 2025. The SDK is now source-available rather than open source: you can read it, but production use requires a paid commercial licence or accepts a watermark.

pricing, honestly

Using them costs nothing either way. Both sites are free in a browser.

Excalidraw's free tier covers the full editor, one infinite scene, unlimited collaborators, PNG/SVG and file export, local end-to-end encryption, and Notion and Obsidian integrations — all without an account. The one-scene limit on free is the genuine constraint: it's built for "open it, sketch, export, close," not for maintaining a library of boards. Self-hosting is free with no watermark and no licence key.

tldraw's SDK is where money appears. After a 100-day free trial, commercial production use runs around $6,000/year; the alternative is a watermarked hobby licence. That's not unreasonable for a company shipping a canvas product — it's roughly one week of engineering time against a component that would take months to build — but it does make this a budget conversation rather than a technical one.

edge: excalidraw, decisively, for anyone who isn't building a canvas product. tldraw is worth the licence if you are.

where excalidraw wins

The MIT licence. Free to embed, free to self-host, free to modify, commercially and forever. This single fact resolves most versions of this comparison.

Zero friction. No account, no sign-up, no onboarding. Open the tab and draw. For a tool you reach for mid-meeting, that's most of the value.

The open file format. .excalidraw is JSON — plain text, readable without the app, diffable in a repo. A diagram in an open format will outlive one locked in a proprietary store.

The rough style is a feature. Hand-drawn output signals "this is a sketch, tell me it's wrong." Polished diagrams get argued with less, which is usually the opposite of what you want early.

End-to-end encryption by default. Scenes are encrypted in the browser, which makes it defensible for diagrams that describe your actual infrastructure.

where tldraw wins

The SDK is the real product. If you're building an infinite canvas into your own application, tldraw gives you a foundation that is genuinely years of work to replicate. Nothing in the Excalidraw ecosystem matches it for extensibility.

A cleaner canvas. More precise, less stylised. For diagrams that need to look finished rather than provisional, it's the better-looking of the two.

Deeper extensibility. Custom shapes, custom tools, custom behaviour — it's designed to be built on, where Excalidraw is designed to be used.

The licence is at least clear now. Source-available with a price attached is more honest than ambiguity, even if it's less generous than MIT.

things to know before you pick

Check the licence before you build, not after. The most expensive version of this decision is discovering tldraw's commercial licensing requirement after you've shipped a product on it. The 100-day trial is long enough to build something real and get attached.

Excalidraw's free tier is one scene. Fine for sketch-and-export. If you want a persistent library of boards, that's the limit you'll hit first.

Advice written before late 2025 is wrong about tldraw's licence. A lot of comparisons still describe it as straightforwardly open source. It isn't, for production SDK use.

Neither is Miro. If you want sticky-note workshops, voting, timers and templates for facilitated sessions, both of these will feel thin. They're drawing tools, not workshop platforms.