# Everything it does, in the order you'd use it

Shaping the idea, thinking it out with other people, turning it into work you finish, and keeping hold of all of it afterwards. Every drawing tool in the first group is live in [the standalone canvas](https://kromdraw.com/draw), with no account.

## Shaping the idea

Everything you reach for while the thing is still changing shape.

 The canvas Shapes, freehand strokes, text and pictures. An arrow joined to two boxes stays joined, so dragging one across the board takes the arrow with it.

 It comes out hand-drawn Not a theme you switch on. Everything you draw looks provisional, which is what lets you leave it that way.

 Sticky notesNClick anywhere and type. Ten colours, and the note grows downwards as you write; your words are never shrunk to fit a square.

 StampsM609 animated emoji — a vote, a reaction, or a bit of flair without stopping to write. They are deployed with the app rather than fetched from Google when you place one, so nobody outside the machines on the subprocessor page learns which emoji you picked.

 Trace connectionsCRest the pointer on a shape and the arrows bound to it light up while the rest of the diagram drops back, so you can read a crowded one node at a time, or walk somebody else through it.

 Embeds Paste a link and the page itself lands on the canvas, playing or scrolling in place: YouTube, Vimeo, Figma, GitHub Gist, X, Reddit, Giphy, StackBlitz, val.town and SimplePDF.

 Pictures Paste or drop a screenshot beside the part of the idea it explains. A pasted one too big for the canvas is resized down to fit, not refused.

 A key for every tool One key for each Kromdraw tool, and ⌘/ for a palette of twenty commands, so the drawing keeps pace with the thought rather than with the toolbar.

## Thinking it out with other people

Nobody should have to make an account to help you think.

 Live links Press Go live and send the link. They are on the board under a name they can set themselves, with no account and no seat.

 Draw, or only watch You set which when you start the session. Ending it puts everyone holding the link out at once and kills the link, while your own team carries on; starting again mints a different one.

 Everyone at once Cursors carrying names, avatars that stay put while somebody is thinking, and edits landing as they are made. Nobody takes a turn.

 Follow somebody Click their avatar and your canvas tracks their pan and zoom. A laptop following a big monitor zooms out to fit, so it never shows a quarter of the point.

 Comments Ask about one part of a board without stopping the rest. A pin marks what you mean, the thread hangs off it, and a sidebar lists every conversation on the board.

 Reactions and mentions Any emoji on any comment, and @ names a colleague inside one so the thread says who it is for. Guests can react, but they cannot browse your organisation to mention anybody.

 Guests keep their own words Somebody who commented from a link can go back and edit or delete their own comment from the same browser, without an account, and can never touch anybody else's.

 Organisations One invite link, which creates the account as well as joining it — so it works even while open signup is closed. Regenerating the link retires every copy already handed out.

## Turning it into something finished

Keep the plan on the board it came out of, so the reason each line is there stays with it.

 ![A checklist card on the canvas titled Sign-in rework, reading 2 of 6 done, with nested items under Build the form](/assets/landing/checklist-26184b6f.webp)

 ChecklistsKTurn the thinking into work you can finish, on the board rather than in another tool. A card with tick boxes and a bar counting what is done; Tab nests an item under the one above, four indents deep.

 Paste the list you already wrote Drop a block of text in and each line becomes an item. Indentation becomes nesting, bullets are stripped, and anything already marked [x] arrives ticked.

 Progress without opening anything The bar across the top of a list counts what's done, and the card on your boards page carries the same count for the whole board.

 It travels as what it looks like Take the board out and the list is still on it, drawn exactly as you left it: the card, the tick boxes, the bar and the words. Another editor draws it; only Kromdraw lets you tick it.

## Keeping it, finding it, taking it away

You worked hard on it. It should be yours on any day you decide it is.

 Export one board A .kromdraw file: Excalidraw's own format carrying your title and the comments pinned to the canvas as well. It opens on excalidraw.com like an ordinary drawing.

 Export a folder, or all of it A ZIP whose directory layout is your folder tree, so what you get back is filed the way you filed it.

 Import what you already have Single .excalidraw files or a ZIP of them. Every import stops and shows you what it found first, and a folder whose name matches one of yours asks before merging.

 A trash that gives things back It does not empty itself, so a mistake is not permanent. Unsharing or binning a folder hands other people's folders back to them as folders of their own.

 Search inside the boards Not just the titles. The text on a canvas is searchable too, so "the one where we argued about the sign-in flow" is a thing you can look up.

 Collections A tree of folders, shared with the organisation or kept to yourself. Sharing is set once at the top, so nothing is quietly visible because a subfolder disagreed with its parent.

 It saves itself Keep drawing without stopping to save. If a save ever does fail the indicator says so and gives you a button; it never sits there green.

 Boards that look like themselves Once a board has a preview, its card shows the drawing itself, so you spot the one you want by its shape rather than by reading twelve similar titles.

## And a few more

**A dark canvas** · **A laser pointer** while you're collaborating · **A shape library** that follows your account rather than your browser · **Pinch to zoom** that works over the toolbar and the panels too · **A dashboard** of your own boards and the ones you looked at recently · **A password change** that signs out every other device and tells you it did

## The best way to judge a canvas is to draw on one.

There's a real editor on the front page with no account behind it. Every drawing tool under "Shaping the idea" is live in it, and so are the checklists.

[Try it out](https://kromdraw.com/draw)[How it compares to Miro](https://kromdraw.com/kromdraw-vs-miro)