Questions, answered

A free, real-time canvas for diagrams, whiteboards, illustrations and plans. Every document is a stack of tabs, and each tab can be worked on in five modes: Diagram for shapes and arrows, Draw for freehand whiteboarding, Facilitate for running a session with your team, Illustrate for designed pages, and Plan for boards of cards. Your team can join any of them live.

No. Open the editor and start drawing straight away, with no sign-up. Your work saves in your browser as you go, and pressing Share puts it online for others to join. Signing in (also free) keeps your documents with you across devices and unlocks teams, API tokens and the AI connection. See guest vs account.

Press Start drawing and pick a starting point: a blank canvas in any mode, or one of 125 templates. The document opens straight away, and a short tour points out where everything lives.

It runs in any modern browser, with nothing to install. A laptop, desktop or tablet gives you the full editor, and a tablet with a pen is lovely in Draw mode. Small phone screens are best for viewing and light edits. See supported devices.

Plenty. Cmd-Z (or Ctrl-Z) undoes and Cmd-Shift-Z redoes, Cmd-K opens the command palette for any action, and single keys pick tools. The keyboard essentials article lists them all.

Yes. The canvas is a stop in the Tab order: move through its elements and edit them with the keyboard, and screen readers announce what is selected. See accessibility.

Yes. Choose Light, Dark or System from the Appearance button, and one choice covers the editor and the help centre alike. See dark mode.

Yes. Every feature is free for everyone, with no paid tier, no trial and no plan to introduce one. If we ship it, every user gets it.

Yes. The whole codebase is MIT-licensed and public on GitHub. You can read it, run your own copy, or contribute.

No. There are no "Pro" features and no billing anywhere in the code. The free hosted version and a self-hosted copy run the same software.

Flowcharts, mind maps, org charts, retrospectives in five formats, Lean Coffee and town hall Q&A boards, kanban and Plan boards, spreadsheets, roadmaps, story maps, SWOT grids, Business Model Canvases, timelines, Gantt charts, funnels, flywheels, infographics, posters, logos, tables, pie, bar and line charts, UML class, sequence and state diagrams, system architecture, event storming, incident postmortems, risk matrices, stakeholder maps, user personas, meeting agendas, UI wireframes, slide decks, articles and a to-scale floor plan.

125 starter templates across 13 categories, and twenty-four themes that recolour every shape and arrow in one click, including dark and multi-colour schemes. You can also build and save a colour scheme of your own.

Diagram is for structured shapes, connectors and layouts. Draw is a freehand whiteboard with pressure-sensitive markers. Facilitate runs a session with your team, with timers, dot votes, polls and reveals to hand. Illustrate lays out designed pages like posters and slides. Plan turns a tab into boards of cards with columns, WIP limits and quick add, beside spreadsheets with formulas. A mode belongs to the tab, so everyone on it works in the same one, and each tab of a document can have its own.

Yes. A document holds as many tabs as you need, which you can group into folders, link between and open two at a time side by side. Each tab has Photoshop-style layers you can hide, lock and restack, and your documents live in nested folders in the Explorer, shown as a list, as cards or as a sortable Details table. Drag a document onto a folder to file it.

Yes. Press Tab to add a child and Enter to add a sibling, so a map grows without the mouse. Pick a Tree, Balanced, Downward or Bubble layout, tidy it in one click, or open Edit Outline to rewrite the whole map as an indented list. See mind maps.

Yes. Switch a tab to Plan for boards of cards with columns, swimlanes and WIP limits. Card types carry your own fields, the same card can sit on two boards, and charts of the cards (a Gantt chart, due and start calendars, counts by person or priority) can fill a tab of their own. A Dashboard puts boards, Sheets, charts and figures side by side. See Plan mode.

Yes. Upload an image once and reuse it from your gallery, or search Openverse for an openly licensed photo or illustration without leaving the editor. See images.

Yes. Add a table and paste cells straight in from a spreadsheet, or place a pie, bar or line chart, a progress bar, a rating or a timeline. For real formulas, put a Sheet on a Plan tab. See data elements.

Yes. Right-click an element and pick an animation that suits it: a shape can pulse, a label can type itself in, and a drawing can draw itself. Hover a choice to preview it on your selection first. See animations.

Yes. Add to Document puts the tab you are on into another of your documents. It is the same tab in both places, not a copy, so an edit in one shows up in the other. See Add to Document.

Yes. Isometric mode tilts the whole tab and raises each box into a solid block, for an architecture walkthrough or a screenshot. It is a way to look at a diagram rather than edit it. See Isometric mode.

Yes. Switch a tab to Illustrate and write an article straight onto pages: Markdown shortcuts, a / menu for every block, and clean paste from web pages, Google Docs and Word. Writing flows onto new pages as it grows, pictures, charts and diagrams sit in the text, and teammates comment on the words themselves. Pick one of five looks, then export every page as a PDF. See Articles.

Yes, in Illustrate. Lay out pages in print sizes (A4, US Letter, A3) or social sizes, starting from one of 92 layouts, and export them print-ready as PDF, PNG or SVG. A logo page is a square artboard with 25 logo layouts, construction guides, mirror drawing and wordmark type, and it exports a logo kit. See Illustrate mode.

Yes. Switch a tab to Draw for a plain whiteboard: three pressure-sensitive markers, text, an eraser and shapes, on a plain, dotted or grid board in light or dark. With a stylus, a resting palm never leaves a mark. See Draw mode.

Yes. Put a Sheet on a Plan tab: cells with over 150 functions, number formats, sort, filter and freeze, edited live by everyone on the tab. Formulas can read the cards on the board, or list the cards as rows that stay linked both ways. Select some cells to chart them in a bar, line or pie chart that sits in the Sheet over its cells. CSV files come in and go out, and twelve templates start you off, from a Budget Planner and an Invoice to a Loan Calculator and a Habit Tracker. See Sheets.

Yes. Presentation mode builds a slide deck from elements across your tabs and runs it full screen. Slides point at the real elements, so editing a shape updates every slide it appears on. For designed slides, Illustrate adds 16:9 or 4:3 slide pages started from one of 46 layouts, which join the same deck. Each slide can carry presenter notes and a time budget, transitions slide or fade between them, and a laser pointer and spotlight help you guide the room.

Yes. Press Cmd-Z (or Ctrl-Z) to step back your recent edits and Cmd-Shift-Z to bring one back; the buttons also sit in the bottom-right corner. Undo is personal, so it rewinds your own changes, not a teammate’s; if you both changed the same element, it puts that element back as you had it.

Deleted documents wait in the Trash for 30 days before they are removed for good, so you can restore them from the Trash in the Explorer or in Settings › Account. Team documents go to their team’s Trash.

Yes, that is the point. Share a link and teammates join the same document in real time, whatever mode a tab is in, with live cursors, selection rings, presence on each tab, comments and a laser pointer. If you have not signed in, a new document starts in your browser, and the first Share syncs it in one step.

Every change shows up for everyone live. Edits to different elements merge cleanly. If two people change the same element at the same moment, the most recent change is the one that sticks.

Yes. Comment on any element and reply in threads, then resolve them when they are done. You can also attach an action to an element and assign it to a teammate, so the follow-ups a meeting produces stay with the document instead of getting lost.

Yes, once you sign in. Create a team from the Explorer, invite people by email, and everyone gets a shared library of documents. Teams have Admin and Member roles: admins manage membership, everyone else just gets to work.

Yes. Open Collaborators from the avatars on the tab bar and press Follow beside a teammate: your view goes wherever theirs goes, until you move away yourself. See following along.

Yes. Lock it from the tab’s menu and the whole canvas becomes read-only until someone unlocks it, with a padlock beside its name. You can also lock single elements or whole layers. See locking a tab.

Your Inbox gathers the actions, Plan cards and comment threads waiting on you across every document, and Home shows what other people did while you were away. Once you sign in, emails can tell you too, and you choose which in Settings. See the Inbox.

Very. Switch a tab to Facilitate, the mode for running a session, or start from a retrospective, Lean Coffee or town hall Q&A template, which opens there. Whoever holds the facilitator role runs the room’s timer, votes, polls and reveals. Estimate cards run planning poker, a temperature check shows how the room feels, a quiz asks what it knows, and an idea box collects anonymous ideas. See Facilitate mode.

From a document you own, create an editor link (full edit access), a participant link (add stickies, write and vote, without reshaping the board) or a view-only link. Anyone with the link can join. Give a link an expiry of a week, a month or six months so it stops working on its own, or revoke it at any time and it stops working immediately.

Yes. Add a password in the Share dialog and every link to that document asks for it before opening.

Yes. When a document has more than one tab, the Share dialog lets a link open a single tab, as an editor, participant or view-only link, and the rest of the document stays private. See sharing one tab.

Yes. Any share link can be embedded as a live-updating iframe: an editor link embeds an editable canvas, and a participant or view-only link a read-only one. Copy the snippet from the Share dialog and paste it into Notion, Confluence, a wiki or any page that allows iframes; it always shows the current state of the diagram.

Yes. A live image is a plain image URL that follows your document, redrawn after each save, so a GitHub README or a doc always shows the current version. See live images.

A public gallery of documents people are proud of. Signed-in owners can publish a document with a title, description and tags; anyone can browse it, open it read-only, like it and make their own copy in one click. Take a look.

Yes. livediagram runs an MCP server at mcp.livediagram.app. Connect a compatible AI tool and, after a one-time authorisation, it can find, read, create and edit the documents in your account, including writing articles, building slide decks and designing logos. Its changes appear live for anyone on the tab, outlined so you can see them and undo them. Build with AI walks you through connecting Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and more.

Optionally. Turn on AI assistance in Settings for an in-editor panel with two modes: Ask answers questions about the tab in front of you, and Clean fixes typos and tidies sizes, positions and styles. It is off by default.

Yes. Once you sign in, create an API token and call the REST API to read and manage your documents from scripts, CI or anything that can send a header. See the API overview.

Yes. Install it from npm as @livediagram/cli (or run it with npx). It signs in through your browser and can read, edit, create, share and export documents from your terminal, which makes it handy for scripts and coding agents.

Yes. Link a repository to a folder of documents with the CLI, and it keeps a snapshot of each one in the repository, so coding agents find your diagrams by name and read them as text. livediagram stays the home of every document. See diagrams in your repository.

Yes. Export a diagram or whiteboard tab as PNG, SVG, PDF, Mermaid, Markdown, Excalidraw or a portable JSON file, Illustrate pages as PNG, SVG or one print-ready PDF, a logo page as a logo kit, and a Sheet as CSV. Hidden layers stay out of image exports unless you switch them on.

Yes, both ways. Paste or open a Mermaid flowchart, state diagram or ER diagram and livediagram lays it out on the canvas with every connection intact. Export a diagram tab back to Mermaid text for your READMEs, issues and AI tools. Other Mermaid types, such as sequence, class, Gantt, pie and mind map, are not supported.

Yes. Import draw.io diagrams (a tab per page, a whole folder at a time if you like), Excalidraw scenes (a .excalidraw file, or a PNG or SVG exported with the scene embedded) and Microsoft Whiteboard boards, and they land as editable content. Markdown and JSON import too, and a CSV file dropped on a Plan tab becomes a Sheet.

Yes, on an event storming board. Take a photo of the wall and livediagram finds the sticky notes and places them on the canvas for you to tidy up.

Yes, once you sign in. Switch on the Google Drive mirror and the documents in My documents are kept in step with matching files and folders in your own Drive, so you always hold a copy.

Documents saved to your account are stored in our database on Cloudflare, and Local only documents stay in your browser. There are no tracking pixels, no advertising and no third-party analytics. We do record anonymous, first-party usage (which features get used, never your content or name) and show it openly on our telemetry page. See the privacy policy for the details.

Yes. Offline Mode saves a document only in your browser, never on our servers. Until you sign in, new documents start that way; after, you can choose it when you create one. Either way you can switch later. See Offline Mode.

A document kept only in your browser goes with it, so share it or sign in first. Share syncs a document online in one step, and after you sign in livediagram offers to move every browser-only document into your account. Documents saved to your account are never touched. See Offline Mode.

Yes. Every change saves on its own, with a status that shows saving, saved or a problem. Close the tab and reload, and your document comes back exactly as you left it.

Delete any document you own at any time, and delete your account and everything in it yourself from your account settings. See deleting your data.

Yes. It is MIT-licensed and the source is on GitHub. Deploy the static frontends and the Cloudflare Workers backend to your own Cloudflare account and you get every feature. See deploying livediagram.

No. Without sign-in configured, your copy runs in guest mode with persistence, sharing and real-time collaboration all working. AI assistance and photo import switch on when you add an AI key, and email and the Google Drive mirror once sign-in and their own keys are set up.

Try reloading first. If it still will not open, the editor offers to repair this browser’s saved state without touching your documents. The troubleshooting guide walks through every step.

The status page lists every part of the service and notes any incident we are working on. If it loads, the site is up.

It is built in the open by Tom McClean and Webber, with contributions welcome on GitHub.

Use the contact page, or email hello@livediagram.app. Bug reports and ideas are welcome on GitHub too.