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drawtonomy vs Excalidraw, tldraw, FigJam, and Miro

Online whiteboards are widely used for brainstorming, shared sketching, and team collaboration. drawtonomy is not an online whiteboard — it’s a 2D canvas for driving-scenario figures. The output pastes into any whiteboard as SVG or PNG.

The main online whiteboards

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Excalidraw, tldraw, FigJam (by Figma), and Miro are the main online whiteboards used by teams today.

Excalidraw

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What Excalidraw covers:

  • Open-source, browser-based whiteboard with a hand-drawn aesthetic.
  • End-to-end encryption for shared rooms.
  • Real-time collaboration through Excalidraw+.
  • Plugin ecosystem and embeddable library.
  • Self-hostable (the core editor is open-source).

For teams that want a free, open-source sketching tool, Excalidraw is one of the established options.

tldraw

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What tldraw covers:

  • Infinite zoomable canvas with snapping and alignment.
  • Multi-page support and multiplayer collaboration.
  • SDK for building custom canvas products on top of the tldraw editor.
  • Open-source codebase that doubles as a learning resource for canvas internals.

For developers building canvas-based products, tldraw is one of the main building blocks.

FigJam (Figma)

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What FigJam covers:

  • Online whiteboarding tool by Figma.
  • Sticky notes, widgets, voting, voice hangouts.
  • Tight integration with Figma design files.
  • Templates for brainstorming, retros, and planning sessions.

For teams already in the Figma ecosystem, FigJam is the natural whiteboard.

Miro

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What Miro covers:

  • Collaboration whiteboard with templates for brainstorming, retros, mapping, and workshops.
  • Video, chat, and timer features for facilitated sessions.
  • Integrations with Jira, Slack, Notion, Microsoft Teams, and many others.
  • Enterprise features (SSO, audit, governance).

For larger teams running structured collaboration sessions, Miro is one of the established options.

For general drawing, brainstorming, collaboration, and shared canvases, any of these will be a better fit than drawtonomy. drawtonomy is not a general whiteboard or a collaboration product.

See also: slide tools

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For finished presentation decks (rather than collaborative whiteboards), see:

Where drawtonomy might fit alongside a whiteboard

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drawtonomy is narrow: a 2D top-down canvas with driving-domain shapes built in — lanes that carry direction and connections, vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, road markings, intersection templates. It exists to make one specific kind of figure faster.

If you do this often:

“I need a clean driving-scenario diagram on a shared whiteboard — a lane merge, an intersection, a cut-in — and I’d rather not rebuild the lanes by hand each time.”

…drawtonomy can produce that figure as SVG or PNG with a transparent background. The image pastes into Excalidraw, tldraw, FigJam, Miro, or any other whiteboard without disturbing the rest of the board.

For everything else — sticky notes, brainstorming structures, voting, real-time collaboration, general-purpose sketching — your whiteboard tool is the right answer.

A reasonable pattern

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Keep your favorite whiteboard. When a driving-scenario diagram is needed, build it in drawtonomy and paste it in as SVG / PNG.

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