Awesome Whiteboard

A curated list of infinite-canvas and whiteboard software — SDKs you can embed, apps you can use, and the primitives they're built from.

Whiteboards look simple and are not. A usable one needs camera math, hit-testing, selection, undo semantics, touch and stylus handling, serialization, and export — before you draw a single pixel. This list collects the libraries that solve those problems, the apps built on them, and the primitives underneath.

Licensing is the first thing to check. Several popular options are source-available rather than open source: you can read the code, but shipping to production carries terms. Each entry below states its license plainly.

Contents

• Embeddable SDKs and libraries
• Canvas primitives
• Whiteboard apps
• Self-hosted collaborative whiteboards
• Sync and collaboration
• File formats
• Reading

Embeddable SDKs and libraries

Drop a drawing surface into your own application.

• Excalidraw — MIT. The hand-drawn-style whiteboard, available as an embeddable React component (@excalidraw/excalidraw). Mature, enormously popular, battle-tested. React-only, and the embed brings Excalidraw's own look and UX.
• Quickdraw — MIT. Infinite-canvas whiteboard SDK for React, React Native, and plain JS. Pressure ink, palm rejection, hand-drawn shapes, per-gesture undo, PNG export, and a diff-emitting store for sync. Zero-dependency core, no build step.
• tldraw — Source-available under the tldraw license, not open source. An excellent, richly extensible React canvas SDK with the best-in-class shape and tool plugin system. Since SDK 4.0 (September 2025) production use requires a license key: a 100-day trial, a free non-commercial hobby license with a required watermark, or a commercial license via sales. v1 was MIT.
• React Flow — MIT. Node-based editors and diagrams for React (and Svelte, via Svelte Flow). Not freehand drawing, but the standard choice for node graphs on an infinite canvas.
• Konva — MIT. Declarative 2D canvas with React, Vue, and Svelte bindings. A canvas framework rather than a whiteboard — you build the tools, store, undo, and serialization yourself.
• Fabric.js — MIT. Long-standing canvas object model with selection, transformation, and SVG import/export. Same tradeoff as Konva: powerful primitives, whiteboard not included.
• Paper.js — MIT. Vector graphics scripting framework with an excellent geometry and path-boolean toolkit.
• Pixi.js — MIT. WebGL renderer. Reach for it when element counts get into the tens of thousands and 2D canvas stops keeping up.

Canvas primitives

The building blocks — useful when you're writing your own surface.

• perfect-freehand — MIT. Turns pointer input into pressure-sensitive stroke outlines. The reference implementation for good-feeling digital ink.
• Rough.js — MIT. Renders shapes with a hand-drawn, sketchy appearance. The look Excalidraw made famous.
• Yjs — MIT. CRDT framework; the most common way to add real-time collaboration to a canvas.
• react-native-skia — MIT. Skia bindings for React Native. A superb low-level GPU drawing API, several months of work short of a whiteboard.
• signature_pad — MIT. Smooth signature capture on a fixed canvas. No camera, no selection — exactly right when that's all you need.

Whiteboard apps

• Excalidraw — MIT. Free, no signup, end-to-end-encrypted collaboration, works offline.
• tldraw — the hosted app is free to use.
• Quickdraw — MIT. Free, no signup, saves locally.
• Obsidian Canvas — proprietary app; the .canvas file format it introduced is open (MIT).
• Miro, FigJam, Microsoft Whiteboard — proprietary, team-oriented, free tiers available. Google's Jamboard was discontinued on December 31, 2024.

Self-hosted collaborative whiteboards

Run your own server.

• Excalidraw + excalidraw-room — MIT. The collaboration backend for self-hosted Excalidraw.
• WBO — AGPL-3.0. Long-running open-source collaborative whiteboard, easy to self-host.
• Whitebird — open-source web-based collaborative whiteboard.
• Drawpile — GPL-3.0. Collaborative painting rather than diagramming, with a mature session server.
• OpenBoard — GPL-3.0. Interactive whiteboard for schools and universities.

Sync and collaboration

• Yjs — MIT. CRDTs with bindings for most editors and a healthy provider ecosystem.
• Automerge — MIT. CRDT library with a strong focus on local-first software.
• Liveblocks — proprietary, free tier. Hosted presence and storage; commonly paired with canvas SDKs.
• PartyKit — MIT. Edge-deployed WebSocket servers, a small amount of glue away from multiplayer canvas.

File formats

• JSON Canvas — MIT. An open file format for infinite-canvas data, originating in Obsidian Canvas.
• SVG — the lowest-common-denominator export target; every tool above writes it.

Reading

• Why is Excalidraw so good? — Hacker News discussion of what makes a whiteboard feel right.
• Reflections on Excalidraw — Christopher Chedeau on building and growing it.
• Perfect Freehand: the algorithm — how pressure-sensitive strokes are actually computed.
• Coordinate systems and camera math for infinite canvases — screen space, page space, and zoom-to-cursor.

Contributing

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The bar: the project should be maintained, genuinely useful, and its license stated accurately. Corrections to license descriptions are especially welcome; these change over time and this list should be right rather than convenient.

License

CC0 1.0 — public domain.