Our take
Pick Excalidraw if engineers and PMs who will stay on the forever-free OSS editor at $0 (excalidraw.com; no account) while they open a first playground, then Plus at $7/user/month monthly ($6/user/month billed annually) when they need comments, cloud scenes, and presentations — not a $20 chat seat. Pick tldraw AI if react developers who want an agent on a whiteboard and will paste their own API key. Skip tldraw AI
the Agent starter kit on the tldraw canvas
Best for
Excalidraw A whiteboard you start at a public $
tldraw AI An agent that reads and edits shapes
Free plan
Excalidraw $0 · , Free forever (priceMonthly / priceAnnually: “Free forever”). Infinite canvas. Full editor. Invite collaborators by link. PNG / SVG / JSON save-to-file. Personal library stored in the browser. Image uploads: compressed. AI requests: 10 a day. Mermaid to Excalidraw: unlimited. No account on excalidraw.com
tldraw AI $0 · mIT. You pay Anthropic / Google / OpenAI for tokens
Lowest paid
Excalidraw Plus $7/user/mo
tldraw AI Not published by the vendor
Coding agent
Excalidraw
tldraw AI Agent chat on the canvas
Watch out
Excalidraw Comments, cloud scenes, and presentations print on Plus
tldraw AI MIT $0 is the starter
Last checked
Excalidraw 2026-10-23 · plus.excalidraw.com/pricing
tldraw AI 2026-10-21 · tldraw.dev/pricing
engineers and PMs who will stay on the forever-free OSS editor at $0 (excalidraw.com; no account) while they open a first playground, then Plus at $7/user/month monthly ($6/user/month billed annually) when they need comments, cloud scenes, and presentations — not a $20 chat seat.
Read the Excalidraw pagereact developers who want an agent on a whiteboard and will paste their own API key.
Read the tldraw AI page