SVGEdit

What SVGEdit does

SVGEdit is a vector drawing editor that runs in the browser and works directly on SVG, the standard vector format of the web. You draw with a freehand pencil, lines, rectangles, ellipses, paths and text, place images, organize the drawing in layers and style shapes with colors and gradients. Clicking a path a second time switches to node editing, where you can move nodes, adjust curve control points and add or close sub-paths, and any shape can be converted to a path. When the visual tools are not enough, the SVG source of the document can be edited directly.

Bundled extensions add connectors between shapes, line markers, polygons and stars, a shape library, a grid, an eyedropper, an overview window and panning. Drawings are saved as SVG and can be exported as PNG, JPEG, BMP, WEBP or PDF. The interface is translated into more than 50 languages.

SVGEdit was started more than 15 years ago, went through a long period without maintenance, and has since been revived by a new maintainer team. Version 7 rebuilt how the editor is integrated, and the 7.4 releases in 2026 added flip buttons and fixed a series of long-standing bugs around transforms, gradients and undo.

Embedding in other software

A large part of SVGEdit’s use is inside other products. The full editor can be injected into any div on a page and configured with options and extensions, including extensions written as React components. Developers who want their own interface can use only the underlying drawing engine, published separately on npm as @svgedit/svgcanvas, and build on top of it with any framework. Because the main code is MIT-licensed, it can be included in commercial software.

Hosting SVGEdit

There is no backend. You build the project with npm and serve the resulting files from any web server; files are opened from and saved to the user’s computer through the browser. Recent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari are supported, and older releases remain available for older browsers.

Hosted version

The project publishes builds of the current editor on Netlify and through the unpkg CDN, so you can use it in the browser without installing anything. These are plain deployments of the editor, without accounts or cloud storage.

Limitations

SVGEdit is a single-document drawing editor. It has no collaboration, comments, components, templates or prototyping, so it does not replace Figma or Canva. Compared with mature desktop vector editors such as Inkscape it has fewer tools, and its user documentation is thin; the FAQ itself warns that parts of it may be out of date.

Who it suits

SVGEdit suits developers who need an SVG editor inside their own web application, and anyone who wants to make or fix an SVG quickly in the browser without installing software. For more ambitious vector work in the browser, Graphite offers a node-based approach; for collaborative interface design, see Penpot.