Cocreate

Cocreate is a web-based shared whiteboard tool for drawing, teaching, and brainstorming together with others.

Features

Here is a summary of the main features of Cocreate. Features marked with ^★ are rare among shared whiteboard tools.

• Instantly create a new board and share the URL to draw together with others. No accounts required^★.
• Works on computers, tablets, and phones without any software installation (use any modern web browser, such as Chrome)
• See everyone's cursors, with their names, updated live
• See everyone's drawing while they draw^★
  • Freehand pen drawing, with pressure sensitivity^★ for supporting devices (e.g., Wacom, Surface, iPad Pencil)
  • Separation of pen, touch, and mouse inputs^★: disable drawing via touch
  • Basic drawing tools, in particular for cleaner mouse input: line segments, rectangles/squares, ellipses/circles
  • Text tool with LaTeX math^★ support (via MathJax) and basic Markdown formatting^★
  • Other basic tools: pan, zoom, eraser
  • Basic settings: line thickness (scaling correctly with zoom), color palette, fill, font size
• Vector representation:
  • Select, edit, move, duplicate^★, delete existing objects, including rectangular select^★
  • Export as SVG^★
• Multiple pages^★
  • Page duplication^★ (for animation or exploring alternatives)
  • Basic grid and grid snapping^★
• Undo/redo (of your own operations)
• Time travel^★ to see entire past history of the board
• Keyboard shortcuts^★
• Minimalist user interface leaves lots of room for drawing, without hiding features behind dropdowns, while tooltips explain the many buttons
• Free/open source^★ (MIT license)
• Via Comingle, you can have one interface with both your video conference and your shared Cocreate drawing (and any other web tools).

There are plans for many more features. Short-term goals include:

• Uploading images/SVG/PDF to annotate

Feel free to help by submitting a pull request!

User Guide

Want to know how to get started or how to use the features listed above? Read our user guide.

Installation

To run your own Cocreate server, see detailed installation instructions.