tldraw
Open-source infinite whiteboard with 37,000+ GitHub stars - Make Real AI converts hand-drawn sketches into working HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
tldraw is an open-source infinite canvas whiteboard that provides hand-drawn style shapes, freehand drawing, sticky notes, and real-time multiplayer collaboration, with a developer SDK for embedding the canvas in any React application. Founded in 2021 by Steve Ruiz in London, the project reached 37,000+ GitHub stars driven by the viral "Make Real" demo that converts a selected area of the canvas into a working HTML and CSS web component by sending the canvas screenshot to a vision model. The tldraw SDK allows engineering teams to embed collaborative canvas primitives into their own products without building WebSocket infrastructure, canvas rendering, or shape management from scratch. tldraw is free and open-source under the MIT license for personal and open-source use, with commercial licenses available for businesses embedding the SDK in commercial products.
Key Features
- Infinite canvas with hand-drawn style shapes, freehand drawing, sticky notes, arrows, and connectors that render crisply at any zoom level
- Make Real AI selects any region of the canvas and sends it to a vision model to generate a working HTML, CSS, and JavaScript implementation of the sketch
- Real-time multiplayer collaboration lets multiple users draw, annotate, and comment on the same canvas with live cursor presence indicators per participant
- tldraw SDK provides React components and hooks for embedding the full whiteboard or individual canvas primitives into any existing React application
- Export to SVG and PNG preserves vector quality for use in design tools, slide decks, or documentation without rasterization loss at any output resolution
- Shape library includes standard flowchart, network diagram, and wireframe shapes alongside core drawing primitives for structured diagramming needs
- Keyboard-first navigation with single-key shortcuts for shape creation, tool switching, and canvas manipulation keeps workflows fast without requiring mouse clicks
Use Cases
- Product designers sketching UI wireframes and immediately converting them to working HTML prototypes using Make Real to share functional concepts in minutes
- Engineering teams embedding tldraw SDK into their own SaaS product to add collaborative whiteboarding without building canvas infrastructure from scratch
- Design and product teams running async visual planning sessions where members annotate a shared canvas before or after a scheduled video meeting
- Developers rapidly prototyping interfaces by sketching layouts on the canvas and generating functional code from the sketch without writing HTML manually
Pros
- MIT-licensed open-source codebase means tldraw can be embedded, forked, and self-hosted with no vendor lock-in, runtime fees, or proprietary dependency
- Make Real produces runnable code from a sketch rather than just a visual representation - one of the few whiteboard features with real AI-to-code output
- tldraw SDK is the most developer-friendly canvas embedding option available - React integration is clean with a well-documented and stable API surface
Cons
- Make Real output quality varies with sketch clarity - complex or ambiguous wireframes produce inconsistent code that often needs significant manual editing
- tldraw lacks the structured template libraries, facilitation features, and voting tools that purpose-built collaboration platforms like Miro and FigJam provide
- Persistent multi-user storage and user authentication must be self-implemented when embedding the SDK - tldraw provides canvas only, not backend infrastructure
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