Drawpile

What Drawpile does

Drawpile is a drawing and painting program with a multiplayer mode. Used alone, it is a fast, lightweight painting app; connected to a session, it lets several people sketch, paint and animate on the same canvas at once, each seeing the others’ strokes as they happen.

The painting tools are complete enough for finished work. The project lists more than 200 built-in brushes across several brush engines, including support for MyPaint brushes, a brush editor and a stabilizer for smoother lines. Layers and layer groups support blend modes, alpha preserve, clipping groups, masks and alpha lock. Lines, curves, shapes, selections, transforms and flood fill cover the rest. An animation mode adds a timeline with key frames and tracks, onion skins and a flipbook, and animations can be exported. Pressure-sensitive tablets work on every platform.

Canvases can be saved as OpenRaster, which Krita, MyPaint and GIMP can open, or as PSD for other software, so a picture started together can be finished elsewhere.

Sessions and privacy

To draw together, one person hosts a session and shares an invite link. Sessions are password-protected by default, so only invited people can join; removing the password makes a session public and lists it for others to find, which the documentation says must come with active moderation. Sessions end on their own once everyone leaves. The project states it runs no ads, does not want users’ personal data, and does not need an account for most things.

Self-hosting Drawpile

The client apps for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android need no server for offline use. For online sessions you can use the official community servers or run your own. The dedicated server, drawpile-srv, runs on Linux, Windows and macOS and is light enough for a cheap virtual server or a Raspberry Pi. The documentation provides an all-in-one Docker installer that sets up the server, a session listing server and a web administration interface. Configuration lives in a text file or an SQLite database, and the server supports TLS, persistent and file-backed sessions, session recording, templates, external authentication and a WebSocket interface for browser clients. The desktop client also has a built-in server, but the project advises against it because of home network limitations.

Hosted version

Drawpile’s non-profit organization runs community servers where anyone can host sessions free of charge under published community rules, and a web version of the client runs in the browser, including on iPads where no native app is available. The project is funded by donations.

Limitations

Drawpile is a painting tool, not a meeting whiteboard: there are no sticky notes, connectors, templates or vector shapes, so it does not replace Miro for workshops or diagrams. According to the project, most development is done by a single person. Public sessions attract strangers and need moderation, and there is no native iOS app.

Who it suits

Drawpile suits artists, illustration classes, art communities and friends who want to paint together live, either on the free community servers or on a private server they control. For simpler image editing on the desktop, see Pinta; for collaborative sketches and diagrams in the browser, see WBO and Excalidraw.