tldraw's whiteboard costs nothing, and the licence is where the catch lives

73 places tldraw in our Strong band, sixth in this category. Generosity is high at 88, which reflects a free app with no published board or collaborator limits and no paid tier to graduate onto.

The pillar pulling the total down is freedom at 66, which is unusual for a tool that asks nothing of you. The reason is licensing rather than behaviour: the code is source-available under a custom tldraw licence, not open source, so unlike Excalidraw you cannot freely self-host or embed it without a commercial agreement. There is a second, subtler point in that pillar. The free app exists to showcase the SDK, so its feature direction follows SDK customers rather than whiteboard users.

Sentiment sits at exactly 50 because we hold no G2, Trustpilot or Capterra score for tldraw and no free-user reports. With nothing on file, the middle is the only honest place for a pillar worth 20% of the total, and the real score of the free app is probably higher than 73 rather than lower.

Start with the careful wording, because it is doing work. tldraw publishes no board or collaborator limit on the free whiteboard (as of July 2026). No published limit is not the same as a documented guarantee, and we have not verified how the app behaves under heavy use, so treat the ceiling as unknown rather than as infinite.

The limits we can state are these:

• The licence is the big one. Source-available under a custom tldraw licence, not OSI-approved open source. Self-hosting or embedding tldraw in your own product needs a commercial agreement, and the free hobby licence for the SDK keeps a watermark.
• No offline or desktop app. It is a browser tab, and unlike Excalidraw we hold no note that it keeps working without a connection.
• It is a canvas, not a workshop platform. No sticky-note voting, no timers, no breakout frames. If you are running a facilitated retro, Miro does things tldraw does not attempt.
• The roadmap answers to somebody else. Because the app is the SDK's showcase, its direction follows the companies licensing the code rather than the people drawing on tldraw.com.

None of those is a quota, which is why this is a short list. The honest summary is that tldraw asks nothing of a whiteboard user and quite a lot of a developer.

There is nothing to buy on tldraw.com. No plans, no seats, no upgrade prompt, no free trial that ends.

The commercial product is the tldraw SDK, a canvas library other companies build on. It is free during development, a free hobby licence keeps a watermark in production, and real commercial licences are priced by quote rather than published. That is the entire business model, and it explains the free app better than any pricing page could: tldraw.com is the demo, so it is polished, actively developed, and not waiting to be monetised, because the money arrives from somewhere else.

That is worth weighing in both directions. It means nobody at tldraw is looking for ways to meter your whiteboard. It also means the free app's future depends on the SDK business staying healthy, and on SDK customers wanting the same features you do.

If you are the developer rather than the drawer, note that quote-based pricing is the only figure available. We hold no verified number for a commercial SDK licence, so we are not going to guess at one.

Yes, and that sits above where a score of 73 would usually land. The reason for the departure: there is no paid tier for the whiteboard at all, so there is no ceiling to grow into, and the score is held down by a licence question and by an empty sentiment pillar rather than by any limit on the app.

Who lives here for nothing, permanently: anyone wanting a fast, tidy whiteboard link during a call, teams who found Excalidraw's hand-drawn style too informal for a client, people who want a diagram in front of somebody without asking them to create an account. Who cannot: developers planning to embed a canvas in their own product, because that needs a commercial agreement, and facilitators who need voting, timers and structured workshop tooling.

For the same instant, no-account experience with an actual open source licence, Excalidraw's free plan is the direct swap. Free tldraw alternatives covers the rest, and best free design and whiteboarding tools ranks the category.