tldraw

Embed a full infinite-canvas engine and customize shapes, tools, bindings, and UI

The official README describes tldraw as a feature-complete infinite canvas engine for building canvas applications. Its default capabilities include pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, rich text, arrows, snapping, image and video support, and image export, while custom shapes, tools, bindings, UI components, side effects, and event hooks let a product replace or extend the default whiteboard behavior.

Sources: [1]

Use the Editor API and self-hostable multiplayer as application-state and collaboration infrastructure

tldraw exposes a runtime Editor API for driving the canvas programmatically and provides real-time collaboration through @tldraw/sync. The README explicitly describes multiplayer as self-hostable, making the SDK relevant not only to shared whiteboards and diagramming but also to products that connect canvas state to domain data and application workflows.

Sources: [1]

Start AI and visual-workflow products from Agent, Workflow, Chat, and other starter kits

The README documents canvas primitives for building with LLMs and starter kits for Multiplayer, Agent, Workflow, Chat, Image pipeline, Branching chat, and Shader use cases. The starter kits are MIT-licensed, providing reference code for agents that read and modify canvas content, node-based automation, visual AI conversations, and image-generation pipelines.

Sources: [1][2]

Best suited to teams embedding a canvas into a product rather than adopting a fixed whiteboard

tldraw is a strong fit for custom diagram editors, collaborative whiteboards, visual programming, workflow builders, AI chat canvases, and image pipelines built in React. Its value is highest when product-specific interactions need to combine custom shapes, tools, UI, sync, and runtime APIs rather than simply using a standard whiteboard unchanged.

The SDK uses a custom license, and production deployment requires an appropriate license key

The tldraw SDK itself is not MIT-licensed. Its custom license allows use in development, testing, and staging environments, but generally prohibits use in a Production Environment that provides functionality to end users or the public unless a trial or commercial agreement supplies the required License Key. The license also prohibits disabling or interfering with license-key enforcement.

The license states that technical enforcement may validate license keys and deployment environments and may transmit usage data to tldraw for license-compliance purposes. By contrast, the starter kits called out in the README are MIT-licensed. Teams should therefore distinguish starter-kit code from the SDK license and review the applicable terms before a production deployment.

Sources: [3][1]