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.
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.
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.
Strokes, text and pasted images sync instantly over WebSockets through a single Cloudflare Durable Object per board, so there's no lag between collaborators.
One canvas, four ink colours, text, eraser and undo. No template picker, no sidebar of widgets — the interface disappears so the idea doesn't.
Clipboard images (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, SVG) drop straight in. Paste a plain URL and it renders as a clickable capsule you can edit later.
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.
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.
The promise is simple: the basic whiteboard will always be free. If we ever charge, it will be for new optional capabilities like access control, long-term retention, AI assistance and team workspaces — never for the core canvas you're using today.
A quick look at 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 | Sign-in required |
| Free tier with real 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 |
| 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 hosted² paid 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. We ship early versions of the SDK to tldraw.com for testing and evaluation.” 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.
Everything below ships on the free tier today.
Strokes, text nodes and images sync instantly across every participant through a single Durable Object per board.
Pan with scroll, zoom with Ctrl/⌘/Shift + scroll or pinch, two-finger drag on touch.
High-definition anti-aliased lines rendered as SVG paths — crisp at every zoom level.
Click anywhere to drop a draggable, editable text block. Idle nodes auto-save after 10 seconds so stray editors never block shortcuts.
Clipboard images (PNG/JPEG/WebP/GIF/SVG) and plain URLs drop onto the canvas. Links render as clickable capsules.
Radial collision eraser cascades deletes to everyone; Ctrl+Z restores your last local delete and re-broadcasts it.
One click exports the whole board — with your share URL watermark — to a PDF you can save or print.
“Hold to delete” wipes the canvas from the database, broadcasts the erasure live, and reserves the ID for 30 days so stale links don't recycle.
Glassmorphism toggles for day, night and auto — follows macOS and mobile system settings out of the box.
Because the tool has no opinion on what it's for, it shows up in very different places.
Pair programming, architecture sketches, API design — open a link, draw boxes, screenshare is optional.
Maths workings, handwriting practice, language drills. Works on iPad with a pencil; students join from a phone.
Rapid idea dumps without fighting template pickers. Paste reference images, cluster, screenshot.
A shared scratchpad for the call. Export to PDF when the call ends and drop it into the meeting notes.
Share one URL, both candidate and interviewer draw on the same surface. No account, no install.
Plan a trip on a shared map, sketch a wedding seating chart, doodle with kids across two phones.
Privacy is the product. The simplest thing we can promise about your board is: almost nothing happens to it.
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.
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.
When you hold-to-delete a board, or when it expires after 30 days of inactivity on the free tier, the content is irreversibly destroyed. There is no backup to restore from and no “recycle bin”.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. The core whiteboard — creating a canvas, sharing a link, drawing and collaborating in real time — is free forever, with no signup. Only future optional add-ons (password protection, domain-lock, magic-link access, long-term retention, AI features, team workspaces) will be paid. Everything you're using today stays free.
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.
Free 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. 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 a planned paid option.
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.
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.
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. Future paid tiers will add explicit access control (password / domain-lock / magic-link / one-time code) for cases where “share by link” is not enough.
It is irreversibly destroyed. Hold-to-delete wipes the contents immediately and broadcasts the erasure to anyone currently connected; after 30 days of inactivity on the free tier 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.
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.
On Cloudflare's global edge network, delivered over TLS. A dedicated EU-resident option is planned for the paid Team tier.