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tldraw

Infinite canvas SDK

About tldraw

tldraw is a TypeScript SDK for building infinite-canvas apps in React, and the engine behind the free whiteboard at tldraw.com. It's developed by tldraw, Inc. As of 2026-10-25: 51,074 GitHub stars, latest release v5.5.2 (2026-10-02), 381,844 npm downloads in the week of Oct 16–22. The source is public but not open source: development is free, production needs a license key. Commercial licenses are annual and priced via sales; non-commercial projects can get a free, watermarked hobby license.

EditorialUpdated 12 min read

What it is

tldraw is developed and maintained by tldraw, Inc. Its COMPANY.md describes a Series A startup: the parent is tldraw, Inc. and the operating subsidiary is tldraw GB Ltd. The README copyright line reads "Copyright (c) 2024-present tldraw Inc."

Background. In the Series A post, founder Steve Ruiz says tldraw began in 2021 as an open-source side project that grew out of his work on digital ink. The GitHub repo was created on 2021-05-09. A $2.7M seed round led by Lux Capital was announced on 2022-11-30, alongside a ground-up rewrite that made tldraw both an app and a library with its own real-time collaboration engine. The rewrite wasn't public yet: the post says “we haven’t open-sourced the new tldraw yet” and asks for design partners. On 2025-04-09 the company announced a $10M Series A led by Lux Capital and Definition, saying its first year of sales brought in just under $1M in license deals with customers such as ClickUp, Padlet, Craft and Jam, and that the team was nearly twenty people (company claims).

What ships.

  • The SDK: the tldraw npm package, centred on a React component. This is what the company sells.
  • tldraw.com: a free online whiteboard built on the SDK.
  • tldraw offline: a free desktop app launched 2026-07-16. No accounts, no server, files on disk, and local agents like Claude Code or Codex can read, edit and script the canvas.
  • AI integrations: a tldraw MCP App for Cursor (2026-03-03) and a ChatGPT/Codex plugin (2026-09-29) whose boards are regular tldraw.com files and need a tldraw.com account.

Release cadence. Dates are from GitHub Releases. v5.0.0 shipped on 2026-05-07, followed by roughly monthly minors: v5.4.0 on 09-02, v5.5.0 on 09-30, and v5.5.1 and v5.5.2 both on 10-02. RELEASES.md says tldraw doesn't follow semver: minor releases come monthly and may contain breaking changes, which tldraw tries to flag several releases ahead and back with migration tooling. As of 2026-10-25 the last push was on 2026-10-24, the latest commit on the default branch was on 2026-10-23, and there were 564 open issues and PRs combined. The main language is TypeScript. The tldraw npm package was downloaded 381,844 times in the week of Oct 16–22.

Fate and capital both demand that tldraw be sustainable.

tldraw v4.0.0 release notes (as of 2026-10-25)

Core capabilities

Drawn from the README, docs and release notes; feature descriptions are the vendor's own.

Canvas engine. Pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, rich text, arrows, snapping, images and video, and image export. Use the default whiteboard toolset as-is, or build new shapes and interactions from the primitives.

Extensibility. Custom shapes, tools, bindings, UI components, side effects and event hooks, with the Editor API for driving the canvas at runtime.

DOM rendering. Anything a browser can render can live on the canvas, including embeds from YouTube, Figma and GitHub.

Multiplayer. @tldraw/sync is the real-time sync library that runs tldraw.com. The hosted demo is for prototyping only; production requires self-hosting. The recommended path is the official Cloudflare template: one Durable Object per room serving WebSockets, room state in its built-in SQLite, and large assets in R2. Auth, rate and size limits on uploads, long-term history and room search are left for the developer to add.

New in 5.0. A theme system with display values for restyling default shapes; OverlayUtil for canvas overlays; APIs for custom record types, asset types and geo shapes. Two new packages: @tldraw/driver for imperative editor control and @tldraw/mermaid for turning Mermaid diagrams into native shapes. Plus shape attribution via TLUserStore, WebSocket hibernation in the sync server, and right-to-left language support.

New in 5.5. The v5.5.0 notes call it a broad reliability pass. Shapes now keep changes made by other commands, including remote sync updates, while they're being dragged, resized, rotated or cropped; touch gestures no longer stick when the browser cancels a pointer; rich text gains smart typography and selection wrapping; and a batch of layout fixes lands for Mermaid sequence diagrams. v5.5.2 fixed license-domain validation for pages loaded from blob: URLs.

Starter kits. npx create-tldraw@latest scaffolds a project. The kits are MIT-licensed: multiplayer, agent, workflow (nodes and wires), chat, image pipeline, branching chat and shader.

AI track record. In November 2023 Figma engineer Sawyer Hood used the tldraw component to send a sketch of a UI to GPT-4V and get back a working web page. The tldraw team followed with makereal.tldraw.com, which runs on the user's own OpenAI key. The agent starter kit, the MCP App and agent scripting in the desktop app continue that line.

How it compares

Two alternatives, figures as of 2026-10-25.

Excalidraw. A hand-drawn-style whiteboard that developers can also embed as a React component. MIT-licensed, 134,510 GitHub stars (about 2.6× tldraw). The latest release, v0.18.1, dates from 2026-04-21, so it ships far less often. The hosted Excalidraw+ has a free-forever Free plan; the Plus plan is $6 per user per month billed yearly or $7 billed monthly, with a 14-day trial. Its big advantage is the permissive license: it can ship commercially for free. tldraw treats the SDK as its core business, with extension APIs, an official multiplayer backend and starter kits built for developers, and a faster release pace.

React Flow (xyflow). A library for node-and-edge UIs in React, with a Svelte sibling. MIT-licensed, 38,769 GitHub stars. Revenue comes from an optional React Flow Pro subscription: Starter at $169/month and Professional at $289/month on monthly billing, Enterprise on request, in exchange for Pro examples, prioritised issues and direct support. The maintainers say the subscription is how the library stays MIT. It's a node-graph editor rather than a freeform canvas; tldraw's workflow starter kit targets the same use case.

How to choose. The license is the deciding factor. Both alternatives are MIT and free to ship; tldraw needs a key in production and a negotiated price for commercial use. By need: freeform drawing, multiplayer and deep customisation are tldraw's focus, at the cost of a license fee; for a whiteboard that ships commercially for free there is Excalidraw, whose MIT license carries no such cost; for nodes and edges only there is React Flow, which is built for exactly that.

Who it's for / Not for

Who it's for

Commercial teams building a whiteboard, canvas or diagram editor into their product who have budget for a license and want to skip writing canvas internals. Listed customers include ClickUp, Padlet and Autodesk (company claims).

Early-stage startups: the pricing page offers startup pricing on application; the discount isn't published.

Non-commercial and personal projects: a free hobby license is available on application, keeps the "made with tldraw" watermark, and is reviewed case by case.

People who just want a whiteboard: tldraw.com and the tldraw offline desktop app are free.

Developers prototyping AI canvases or agent visualisations: development needs no key, and the agent starter kit is ready to hack on.

Not for

Organisations whose legal team requires an OSI open-source license. The official license page says outright that tldraw is not open source by any definition.

Teams that need to ship a commercial product with no license fee: without a valid key, the production editor stops rendering after five seconds.

Would-be contributors: the README and CONTRIBUTING.md say outside contributions aren't being accepted and pull requests are turned off; issues only.

Projects that can't absorb breaking changes in monthly minor releases.

Front ends that don't use React: the SDK's entry point is a React component.

Getting started

Just the whiteboard. Open tldraw.com; it's free. Sharing and the ChatGPT/Codex plugin need a tldraw.com account. For local files and local agents, get the desktop app from offline.tldraw.com.

Development. Run npm i tldraw, render the Tldraw component in React and import tldraw/tldraw.css, or scaffold with npx create-tldraw@latest. Working on the repo itself needs Node.js 22.12 or later (the README says ^20; package.json takes precedence).

Know what counts as production. Two different things are in play. Legally, LICENSE.md defines a production environment as any deployment that provides functionality to end users, customers or the public; a development environment is internal hosting for development, testing or staging that end users and the public can't reach. If outsiders can use it, a license is required. Technically, the license-key docs describe how the SDK guesses: if the page isn't on HTTPS, the host is localhost or a loopback address, or NODE_ENV isn't production, the SDK assumes development and skips the key check. That's detection, not permission. Serving the public over plain HTTP or from a non-production build is still production use under LICENSE.md.

Before launch. Request the 100-day free trial (one per company or project); the key arrives by email right away. Pass it via the licenseKey prop or an environment variable such as TLDRAW_LICENSE_KEY, VITE_TLDRAW_LICENSE_KEY or NEXT_PUBLIC_TLDRAW_LICENSE_KEY. Key signatures are validated locally without a network call and can sit in front-end code. Each key lists its allowed domains; deploying anywhere else counts as unlicensed.

Multiplayer requires deploying the official Cloudflare template from the sync docs, then adding auth, limits and backups separately.

Upgrades. Read the release notes every month. Since 5.0 there's an experimental migration skill that can be handed to a coding agent, though tldraw itself says to check the agent's work.

Pricing & license

The following is as of 2026-10-25, from tldraw.dev/pricing, the license-key docs and LICENSE.md.

  • Trial: 100 days free, no credit card, no watermark. It stops working the moment it expires; there's no grace period.
  • Commercial: annual. The pricing page says "value-based pricing" and refers buyers to sales; prices aren't published. Removes the watermark and is required for commercial production use. Annual licenses get a 30-day grace period after expiry.
  • Startup pricing: early-stage startups can apply; the discount isn't published.
  • Hobby: free for non-commercial projects, watermark stays, reviewed case by case.
  • The pricing page says premium modules are "in development"; multiplayer sync is included.
  • Perpetual, version-bound licenses were sold in the early days. They're no longer offered except in exceptional cases, though existing ones are still supported.

The license text. LICENSE.md is tldraw's own license, granted by tldraw, Inc. and governed by Delaware law. It permits use, modification and bundling in development environments. It forbids unlicensed production use, interfering with license-key enforcement, and distributing the software as a standalone product. It also says the software may collect usage data to check compliance. The license terminates automatically if the licensee breaches it, or brings a copyright, trade-secret or patent claim against tldraw, its affiliates or any user of the software. GitHub can't match it to a standard license, and npm lists it as "SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md".

What gets sent home. The license-key docs (edited 2026-01-31) say commercial licenses send nothing. Hobby and trial licenses send the license ID, license type, SDK version and page URL to tldraw for analytics; the prose on the same page adds the build environment. Unlicensed production deployments send the SDK version and page URL, and development environments send nothing. tldraw says no user data or canvas content is collected.

How the license changed. Per the commit histories of the root LICENSE and LICENSE.md, the license field of each @tldraw/tldraw version on npm, and the release notes:

  • 2021 to early 2023 (v1): MIT. The LICENSE in the 2021-05-09 initial commit names Steve Ruiz; later versions name Stephen Ruiz Ltd and then tldraw GB Ltd. The last 1.x release, 1.29.2 (2023-04-01), is still MIT.
  • March to December 2023 (the v2 rewrite's alpha period): Apache 2.0. On npm, 2.0.0-alpha.9 (2023-03-22) through alpha.19 (2023-12-12) are all Apache-2.0, and the repo's root LICENSE switched to Apache 2.0 on 2023-04-25.
  • 2023-12-19: the commit "Change licenses to tldraw" removed the Apache license in favour of a tldraw-specific license allowing non-commercial use only, with commercial licenses sold separately, and added a contributor license agreement (CLA.md). From 2.0.0-beta.1 (2023-12-20) npm lists "SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md"; v2.0.0 (2024-02-29) shipped under it.
  • v3.0.0 (2024-09-13) loosened things: commercial and non-commercial use allowed as long as the "Made with tldraw" watermark is visible, with a paid Business License to remove it.
  • v4.0.0 (2025-09-18) tightened them: development use only by default, with a trial, commercial or hobby key required in production. In the release notes' words, "Fate and capital both demand that tldraw be sustainable."
  • The v5.0.0 release notes don't mention a license change.

Risks & limits

Not open source. The code can be read and modified, but whether it runs in production depends on a key. tldraw's own license page says it isn't open source by any definition. Building on it means part of a product's ability to ship rests on the vendor renewing the license.

A license that keeps moving. It has changed four times since 2023: from MIT to Apache 2.0 during the v2 alpha, from Apache 2.0 to non-commercial only at the end of 2023, loosened in 3.0 to commercial use with a watermark, then tightened in 4.0 to require a key in production. tldraw, Inc. writes the license, and contributors sign CLA.md (version 1.0, June 8, 2023), which grants tldraw, Inc. an irrevocable, sublicensable copyright and patent license to their contributions. Future versions may change again.

License failures stop the editor. With no valid key, an expired one, or a domain the key doesn't cover, the production editor stops rendering after five seconds. Trials have no grace period; annual licenses have 30 days. Renewals and domain changes belong in the ops runbook.

Upgrades can break things. No semver, monthly minors, and breaking changes allowed; tldraw recommends upgrading at the same pace.

Two official docs disagree. The license overview page (tldraw.dev/community/license) says commercial and hobby licenses send nothing and only trials send a hash of the key. Its footer reads 2023-09-13, yet it describes trial, commercial and hobby keys, and hobby licenses only arrived with v4.0.0 in September 2025, so the footer date can't be trusted. The license-key docs (footer 2026-01-31) say hobby licenses also send the license ID, SDK version and page URL, and that unlicensed production deployments send the SDK version and page URL.

Stale security policy. SECURITY.md's supported-versions table still lists only 3.x.x, while current releases are 5.x. Vulnerabilities go to hello@tldraw.com. As of 2026-10-25 the repo's security page listed no published advisories.

No outside code. CONTRIBUTING.md says pull requests are turned off. In issue #7695 (2026-01-16), tldraw explained that a surge of AI-generated pull requests led it to start closing PRs from external contributors automatically. It calls this a temporary policy until GitHub offers better tools, and still welcomes issues, bug reports and discussion.

Multiplayer must be self-operated. The hosted sync service is a demo. In production the operator deploys it and owns auth, upload rate and size limits, and history.

Customer logos are vendor claims. The README's list (Google, Shopify, BlackRock, Autodesk and more) comes from tldraw itself, which doesn't say which products use it or how extensively.

Our verdict

tldraw turns the infinite canvas into a component that can be bought off the shelf. The canvas feels good, the extension APIs go deep, releases are frequent, and tldraw's own whiteboard, desktop app and AI plugins show the SDK can carry a real product. The catch is the license: free in development, keyed in production, priced by negotiation, and changed four times since 2023.

Adopting tldraw involves three sets of conditions:

  • Licensing: the trial lasts 100 days with no grace period; annual commercial licenses are priced through sales, tied to licensed domains, and get a 30-day grace period after expiry.
  • Legal: the terms are not an open-source license, some license types send usage data back, and the license has changed four times since 2023.
  • Upgrades: minor versions ship monthly and may include breaking changes.

Excalidraw covers a whiteboard that ships commercially for free, and React Flow covers nodes and edges; a deeply customised multiplayer canvas is tldraw's niche, and commercial production use requires a paid license.

Why it stands out

tldraw began as Steve Ruiz's personal drawing app and became an infinite-canvas SDK used to build design tools, whiteboards, and make real, the canvas the tldraw team built on Sawyer Hood's sketch-to-HTML demo, which turned drawings into working interfaces and briefly took over the internet.

The engineering underneath is serious: a reactive state library, a custom shape system, multiplayer sync, and a canvas that stays smooth with thousands of objects. All of it is readable on GitHub.

It is an infinite-canvas SDK with a reactive state library, custom shapes and multiplayer sync, readable on GitHub; make real was built on it.

Sources

Official

  1. GitHub - tldraw/tldraw: Build infinite canvas apps in React with the tldraw SDK.GitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  2. tldraw/LICENSE.md at main · tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  3. History for LICENSE.md - tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  4. History for LICENSE - tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  5. tldraw/CLA.md at main · tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  6. tldraw/CONTRIBUTING.md at main · tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  7. Contributions policy · Issue #7695 · tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026
  8. tldraw/COMPANY.md at main · tldraw/tldrawGitHub · Accessed Oct 25, 2026

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