Quickdraw 0.1 is out — an MIT-licensed whiteboard SDK for React, React Native, and plain JS

[nmndwivedi]

Quickdraw is public. It's an MIT-licensed infinite-canvas whiteboard SDK for React, React Native, and plain JavaScript.

Try it with no signup: https://app.tryquickdraw.com
Docs: https://tryquickdraw.com

Why this exists

I was building an app that needed a drawing feature, and the two obvious options both fell through:

• tldraw is beautifully engineered but no longer open source. Since SDK 4.0 (September 2025), production use requires a license key — a 100-day trial, a free hobby license that is non-commercial and requires the watermark, or a commercial license arranged through sales.
• Excalidraw is genuinely MIT and a fantastic app, but it's app-first as an SDK: React-only (#1404 has been open since 2020), customizing the UI means fragile CSS overrides (#3012), and the maintainers have said React Native is "likely not [possible] without further tweaks, if even possible" (#8664).

So I extracted the canvas engine I'd built into a standalone SDK and MIT-licensed all of it. No license keys, no fees, commercial use included.

What you get

Pressure-sensitive ink that tapers like a real pen, a highlighter, shapes with a seeded hand-drawn wobble, arrows and bendable lines, text, sticky notes, images, a laser pointer, marquee selection with move/resize/rotate, infinite canvas with pan/zoom/pinch, palm rejection, per-gesture undo/redo, light and dark themes, grid backdrops, and PNG export.

The core is plain ESM with zero runtime dependencies and no build step.

npm install @quickdrawjs/react

import { Quickdraw } from '@quickdrawjs/react'
import '@quickdrawjs/core/quickdraw.css'

<Quickdraw theme="light" grid="lines" watermark={false} />

The data model

Every mutation runs in a transaction and emits a JSON-safe diff:

{ added: { [id]: record }, removed: { [id]: record }, updated: { [id]: [from, to] } }

That one shape powers persistence, undo (entries are composed diffs, one per gesture), and sync — remote diffs applied with source: 'remote' never pollute local undo history, so collaborative undo behaves correctly. Real-time sync becomes a transport problem rather than an architecture problem.

What's honestly missing

No first-party multiplayer server (the store is sync-ready; you bring the transport), no layers, no frames, no rich text. The roadmap is issue #1 — comment there if the feature that sent you back to a paid SDK is on it, or isn't.

About the badge

There's a small "Made with Quickdraw" badge on the canvas by default. watermark: false turns it off — free, no license key, no signup, no phone-home. It's MIT, so that's a preference, not a license term.

Contributing

There are good first issues open. Bug reports, features, docs, and examples are all welcome — especially reports from people who've embedded tldraw or Excalidraw in production and hit things I should handle better.