Free collaborative whiteboard

The free collaborative whiteboard that just works.

Open a canvas, share the link, draw and write together in real time. No signup, no accounts, no teams to set up. Just a URL and an infinite sheet of paper in the browser.

Start a new canvas How it compares →
Free forever No signup No ads, no tracking Open web stack

01 — Why cnvs.app

Why cnvs.app — zero friction by design.

Most whiteboarding tools either want you to sign up, onboard a team and pick a template — or they require you to self-host. cnvs.app sits in the gap: a hosted, zero-friction canvas you can share with a link in under two seconds.

Zero-friction sharing
Visit the site, get a unique board URL, send it. Anyone with the link sees the same canvas live — no invites, domains, workspaces or roles to configure.
Real-time by default
Strokes, text and pasted images sync instantly over WebSockets through a single Cloudflare Durable Object per board, so there's no lag between collaborators.
Minimalist UX
One canvas, a named ink palette (auto/red/blue/green on keys 1–4 plus a desktop 5th multicolor slot), text, eraser and undo. No template picker, no sidebar of widgets — the interface disappears so the idea doesn't.
Paste anything
Clipboard images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, SVG) drop straight in — automatically downscaled in the browser before upload and re-encoded to WebP where supported, so big phone photos don't burn through the per-board byte quota. Paste a plain URL and it renders as a clickable capsule you can edit later.
Flowcharts, sequence, ER, Gantt & more
Type a diagram, get a diagram. Flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, state machines, ER diagrams, Gantt charts, mindmaps and git graphs — all render live from Mermaid source in a text node. No plugin, no add-on.
Whiteboard or kanban
The same shareable board does double duty. Keep it as a free drawing canvas, or switch it to todo mode and it becomes a real kanban task board — columns and cards you drag between lanes. One link, two ways to think: sketch the idea, then track the work.
Task tracking without the setup
No projects to create, no team to invite, no per-seat plan. Cards carry a description, due date, priority and assignee; group them into custom columns and multi-row lanes. Seeded with To do · In progress · Done so you're moving cards in seconds — and the whole board syncs live to everyone with the URL.
Touch-first
On phones and tablets the toolbar collapses into a single bottom pill with dedicated undo and hold-to-delete — usable with one thumb, no keyboard required.
Print & PDF export
One click rasterises the whole board with a light watermark of the share URL and hands you a PDF — great for meeting notes, lesson plans or design review leave-behinds.

02 — Two modes, one link

Two modes, one link.

Every board starts as a blank canvas. Keep it freeform for sketching and diagrams, or flip it to a kanban task board while it's still empty — same URL, same real-time sync, same zero signup. Here's what each mode gives you.

Draw & Diagram
The infinite freeform canvas
Sketch, write, diagram — anything, anywhere on the sheet.
  • Freehand ink — auto, red, blue, green on 1–4, plus a desktop-only 5th "multicolor" slot (5) opening the extended palette: orange, yellow, mint, teal, cyan, indigo, purple, violet, pink, rose, brown, gray.
  • Straight lines (hold Ctrl/⌘) and rectangles (hold Alt) without leaving the pen.
  • Smart connectors — line ends snap to nearby text and images, then follow them when you move things.
  • Text nodes with Markdown — headings, bold, italic, links, code blocks; bare URLs auto-link.
  • Sticky notes & diagram boxes — turn any text into a post-it or a framed box with Y or right-click.
  • Live Mermaid diagrams — flowcharts, sequence, class, ER, state, Gantt, mindmaps and more, rendered from plain text.
  • Paste & drop media — clipboard images, dropped files, and URL capsules land right where you need them.
  • Marquee select & group edit — rubber-band multiple items, move, recolour or delete them in one go.
  • Infinite pan & zoom — cursor-anchored zoom, arrow-key panning, reset with 0.
  • Eraser & one-step undo, plus one-click print / PDF export.
Todo & Kanban
The shared task board
Columns, cards and lanes — track the work the same link sketched.
  • One-tap switch — flip any empty board into a kanban board, seeded with To do · In progress · Done.
  • Columns you own — add, rename inline, recolour and drag to reorder.
  • Multi-row lanes — name each row and drag columns between lanes to group work your way.
  • Rich cards — name, multi-line description, due date, priority and assignee on every task.
  • Drag & drop cards within a column or across columns, with a live drop placeholder.
  • Done & overdue at a glance — tick a card complete; past-due dates flag themselves red.
  • Hover hotkeys — Space to complete, Shift to cycle priority, 1–4 to colour a card.
  • Auto-linked URLs in descriptions and per-card title colours.
  • Clash-free editing — live edit locks and typing indicators show who's on which card.
  • Gentle auto-save — wander off mid-edit and changes save themselves, never lost.
Shared by both

Real-time WebSocket sync, live cursors, no signup, installable PWA, light / dark / system themes, and full read/write access for AI assistants over MCP and the REST API.

03 — Pricing

Free, forever.

No trials, no tiers, no credit card. Everything cnvs.app does today is free for everyone, with no usage caps.

$0/ forever

Everything below — included

  • Unlimited boards, unlimited collaborators
  • Real-time sync, infinite canvas, pan & zoom
  • Drawing, text, image and URL paste
  • Eraser, undo, PDF export, light / dark theme
  • 30-day inactivity retention per board
  • No signup, no credit card, no ads, no tracking
Start a new canvas →

04 — Roadmap

Roadmap — ideas we're exploring next.

Nothing here blocks what you can do today.

More access control
Boards can already be locked with a short access key (PIN) — write-lock or full read + write lock. Next up: domain-lock, magic-link and one-time-code access, plus SSO for recurring teams.
Long-term retention
Keep boards alive beyond the 30-day inactivity window for archives, course materials and long-running projects.
AI co-pilot
Summarise a board, cluster sticky-style notes, turn rough sketches into cleaner diagrams — opt-in, never trained on your content.
Workspaces
A shared home for named boards with a member list, so recurring teams don't have to bookmark URLs by hand.
Larger media
Higher per-image and per-board size limits for richer reference material and denser canvases.
EU-resident storage
An EU-only storage option for organisations with data-residency requirements.

05 — Comparison

How cnvs.app compares.

Where cnvs.app sits against the most common whiteboarding tools. “Free tier” here means a tier you can actually use without a credit card and without hitting paywalls for basic collaboration.

Capability CNVS Miro FigJam MURAL Excalidraw tldraw
No signup required ✓ No No No Yes For sharing
Share by URL instantly ✓ After setup After setup After setup Yes Yes
Real-time multi-user sync ✓ Yes Yes Yes Plus / self-host Yes
Unlimited free collaboration ✓unlimited No public sharing 3 files, no public sharing Read only 1 scene¹ Demo²
Focused on drawing & writing ✓minimal UI Feature-heavy Feature-heavy Feature-heavy Yes Yes
Clipboard image & URL paste ✓both Both Both Images Images Both
Flowcharts, sequence, ER, Gantt (Mermaid) ✓built in Plugin Plugin No Import only Via AI
Built-in kanban / todo board ✓todo mode Template Template Template No No
Enterprise templates & voting Out of scope Yes Some Yes No Via SDK
Price for core collaboration ✓$0 forever $8+/user/mo $3+/user/mo $10+/user/mo $0 hosted¹$7/mo Plus $0 hosted²paid SDK

Common to all: infinite canvas with pan & zoom, print / PDF export, hosted in the browser with no install.

¹ Excalidraw at excalidraw.com is free without an account but the free tier is limited to a single scene — switching scenes overwrites the current one unless you export to a file first. Excalidraw+ (from $7/user/mo) adds a logged-in workspace with multiple saved scenes, private folders, shape libraries, version history, AI, SSO and custom fonts.

² tldraw.com is described by its makers as “our flagship demo of the tldraw SDK, designed to be a very good free whiteboard.” It is free for end users — draw, share rooms, export — but the product they sell is the tldraw SDK commercial licence, required if you embed tldraw inside your own commercial app.

Competitor data based on publicly-listed plans as of 2026. “Partial” means the capability exists but is limited, behind a signup wall, or requires self-hosting.

So which one should you pick?

If you need a full-blown workspace — templates, voting, sticky-note workflows, enterprise SSO, Jira integrations — Miro, FigJam or MURAL are the grown-up tools. Expect a paywall the moment you want to collaborate with a team on more than a handful of boards.

Excalidraw and tldraw are beautiful, minimal alternatives. Excalidraw's free tier caps at one scene; tldraw.com is a demo of their SDK and every participant has to sign in before they can join a shared room — fine for power users, friction for a quick meeting.

If you just want to open a URL, draw on a shared canvas with whoever is on the call, and move on — that's CNVS. No signup for anyone, no board limit, no paywall when the team grows. Built for drawing and thinking together, not for running a workflow.

“Cnvs.app is the cleanest pick for instant, no-signup, free real-time whiteboarding — open a board and drop a shareable link straight into a call.”
— Best Free Online Whiteboards in 2026, innvesti.com, where cnvs.app is ranked #2.

06 — Use cases

What people use cnvs.app for.

Because the tool has no opinion on what it's for, it shows up in very different places.

Remote whiteboarding
Pair programming, architecture sketches, API design — open a link, draw boxes, screenshare is optional.
1:1 tutoring & teaching
Maths workings, handwriting practice, language drills. Works on iPad with a pencil; students join from a phone. Teaching use case →
Brainstorming & mind maps
Rapid idea dumps without fighting template pickers. Paste reference images, cluster, screenshot. Brainstorming use case →
Quick meeting notes
A shared scratchpad for the call. Export to PDF when the call ends and drop it into the meeting notes. Remote meetings →
Interview & whiteboard rounds
Share one URL, both candidate and interviewer draw on the same surface. No account, no install. Interviews use case →
Sprint & task boards
Flip a board to todo mode and run a lightweight kanban stand-up — columns, cards, drag-and-drop, live sync. Sprint planning →
Family & friends
Plan a trip on a shared map, sketch a wedding seating chart, doodle with kids across two phones.

07 — Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts.

Most keys do different things depending on the board's mode — Space, the number row and ⌫ all shift meaning. Pick a mode:

Works in both modes

08 — Privacy

Privacy & security is the product.

The simplest thing we can promise about your board is: almost nothing happens to it.

No AI training. Ever.
We do not use the contents of your boards — drawings, text, pasted images — to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. Your canvas is never handed to a third party for that purpose.
We don't log your activity
No analytics on what you draw, no content logging, no tracking cookies, no fingerprinting. The service only keeps what it needs to deliver the board to the people you share the link with.
Delete is permanent
When you hold-to-delete a board, or when it expires after 30 days of inactivity, the content is irreversibly destroyed. There is no backup to restore from and no “recycle bin”.
Unlisted by design
Boards are reachable only via their short URL. No public gallery, no search index, no “explore” feed. If you don't share the link, nobody else can find the board.
Lock a board with a PIN
Need more than “unlisted”? Set a short access key from the padlock in the toolbar — a write-lock (anyone can view, only key-holders edit) or a full read + write lock. The key is required to unlock, and isn't stored in plain text.
Built on Cloudflare
Infrastructure runs on Cloudflare — the same edge network trusted by millions of sites for DDoS protection and low-latency delivery. Traffic is TLS-encrypted end-to-end.
No public source code
cnvs.app is not open source and we don't offer self-hosting. We run the service ourselves so we can make privacy guarantees we can actually enforce.

09 — FAQ

Frequently asked questions.

Is cnvs.app really free?

Yes. cnvs.app is free forever, with no signup and no credit card. Everything you see today — unlimited boards, unlimited collaborators, real-time sync, image and URL paste, PDF export, light and dark themes — is included at no cost.

Do I need to create an account or log in?

No. You open cnvs.app, a new board is created instantly, and you can share the URL with anyone. There is no login, no email, no profile, no cookie consent banner, no paywall.

How long are boards kept?

Boards are retained for up to 30 days of inactivity. After that the contents are purged from the database and the short board ID is returned to the pool. “Inactivity” means nobody has opened the board in a browser or fetched its snapshot programmatically for 30 days — writes alone, unfurl previews and thumbnail fetches do not reset the clock. If you delete a board yourself, the ID stays reserved for 30 days so stale links show an “erased” overlay instead of silently creating a new board. Longer retention is on the roadmap.

How is this different from Miro, FigJam, MURAL?

Miro, FigJam and MURAL are full enterprise suites — templates, voting, facilitation timers, hundreds of integrations. That is powerful for organised workshops but heavy for a five-minute sketch. cnvs.app is intentionally the opposite: open URL, draw, share. If you need templates, voting and Jira integration, pick Miro. If you just want a shared sheet of paper in the browser, pick cnvs.app.

How is this different from Excalidraw and tldraw?

Excalidraw and tldraw are the closest tools in spirit and both are excellent. The main practical differences: cnvs.app is hosted with zero install, ships real-time multi-user sync on the free tier by default, adds pasted-URL capsules and print-to-PDF with a share-URL watermark, and leans harder on privacy — no AI training on your content, no activity logging, permanent destruction after delete.

Is my data private?

Yes. Boards are reachable only by people you share the URL with — no public gallery, no search index. We do not use your content to train AI models. We don't log your activity, don't track you, and don't profile what you draw. Need more than “share by link”? Any board can be locked with a short access key (PIN) — either a write-lock (public view, key-holders edit) or a full read + write lock — from the padlock in the toolbar. Finer-grained options (domain-lock, magic-link, one-time code) are on the roadmap.

What happens to a board after I delete it or it expires?

It is irreversibly destroyed. Hold-to-delete wipes the contents immediately and broadcasts the erasure to anyone currently connected; after 30 days of inactivity a board is purged automatically. There is no backup, no recycle bin and no way for us to restore it afterwards — that's the point.

Does it work on mobile and tablet?

Yes. The toolbar collapses into a bottom pill on touch devices. It works well on iPad with a Pencil, on Android tablets, and one-handed on phones. Two-finger drag pans; pinch zooms.

Can I install cnvs.app, and does it work offline?

Yes to both. cnvs.app is an installable Progressive Web App — your browser surfaces “Install app” (or “Add to Home Screen” on iOS) once you've used it once. The app shell is cached on install, and every board you open while online is cached locally. If you lose network you still see a banner, can browse any previously-opened board and switch between them via the recent-boards sidebar, and can pan and zoom freely. Writes pause until you reconnect; the WebSocket then resumes automatically. Boards deleted on the server are also evicted from your local cache so nothing erased can be resurrected from a stale snapshot. PWA & offline →

Can I connect an AI assistant like Claude to a board?

Yes. cnvs.app exposes a Model Context Protocol endpoint at https://cnvs.app/mcp that any MCP-capable client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, custom agents) can connect to. The AI can read the current state of a board, add text and sticky notes, draw strokes, drop images and erase items — all synced live to the humans also connected via browser. No API key is needed: the board ID is the access key, exactly like when you share the URL with another person.

Can cnvs.app be used as a kanban or todo board?

Yes. Besides the free drawing canvas, every board can be switched to todo mode — a kanban task board with columns and cards. Pick the mode while the board is empty (it's immutable afterwards); switching to todo seeds three default columns (To do / In progress / Done). Cards carry a name, description, due date, priority and assignee, can be dragged between columns, and the whole board syncs live to every collaborator. Like the rest of cnvs.app it's free with no signup, and AI assistants can read and edit the same kanban board over MCP or the REST API. See how we compare to Trello and other free kanban boards.

Where is the data stored?

On Cloudflare's global edge network, delivered over TLS. A dedicated EU-resident storage option is on the roadmap.

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