50.2k stars · tldraw licence — free in development, PAID LICENCE KEY REQUIRED IN PRODUCTION · v5.4.0 (2026-09-02) · Track this in Scout
The best infinite-canvas SDK for React, and superficially perfect for Grasppy's map.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
tldraw is a software development kit for building infinite-canvas applications in React. It supplies a complete canvas: freehand drawing, shapes, arrows with bindings, text, selection, camera and undo history, plus a separate package that adds several people editing at once.
What it is good for. A product team that needs a whiteboard, a diagram editor or a spatial workflow screen inside their own application. Writing that yourself is months of work in hit-testing, camera maths and conflict handling, and most of that work is invisible when it is done well. Here it is a dependency. Custom shapes and tools are first-class, so it can be shaped into something specific rather than only a generic whiteboard.
The licence, read from the file, because this is the finding of the edition. It is not open source. The terms say licensees agree "Not to use the Software in Production Environments", where production means any deployment that provides functionality to end users. Production use requires a licence key issued under a separate commercial agreement. Without one, the canvas shows a watermark, and the terms say "Not to disable, hide, remove, or alter the Watermark." Enforcement is built into the code: "The Software includes technical measures to verify License Key validity, detect deployment environments, enforce usage restrictions based on license type, and ensure proper watermark display." And the terms state that "The Software may collect and transmit usage data to tldraw for license compliance purposes." This report prints licences as warnings and never as a reason to leave a project out — but this one is worth reading before, not after.
- The editor is complete straight away. Camera, snapping, grouping, undo, redo and export all work with no configuration, which is far beyond most canvas libraries.
npm create tldraw@latestoffers ready-made starter projects, including a multiplayer one, so a working collaborative canvas exists in minutes.- Unambiguously alive and fast-moving: version 5.4.2 was released on 10 September 2026, on a project that started in May 2021.
- Not open source, and production costs money. See the paragraph above. Anyone assuming a permissive licence from the star count is wrong.
- The licence-compliance telemetry means it may send usage data back. That is a hard stop for an air-gapped deployment or one with strict privacy rules.
- It is a kit for programmers, not an application. There is no end-user product and no path that avoids React and a build pipeline, and the several-people-at-once feature additionally needs a synchronisation server you run.
excalidraw/excalidraw132,988 stars, covered in Edition 25; MIT, with no key and no watermark, and the closest like-for-like if the licence matters to you.
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xyflow/xyflow38,410 stars, for node-and-edge diagrams rather than free drawing; MIT, and narrower on purpose.
Track this in Scout- konvajs/konva
14,723 stars, a lower-level 2D canvas library; you build the editor yourself, and everything above it is your work.
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npm create tldraw@latest # a ready-made starter project # or, into an existing React application: npm install tldraw npm install @tldraw/sync # only for several people editing at once
