Canvas

Both, on one canvas — that is the point of it. Ink, sticky notes and screenshots live in the same document as proper flowchart shapes and connectors, so you can scribble a note beside a box, circle part of a diagram in red, or draw an arrow to a screenshot. Nothing makes you choose a mode first.

An arrow drawn with the arrow tool is a free line: both ends stay exactly where you put them, which is what you want when pointing at part of a picture. A connector is made by dragging one of the blue arrows from a shape, and it is attached — move either shape and it re-routes itself. Connectors can be labelled and given right-angle, straight or curved routing.

For the everyday job people open draw.io (diagrams.net) for — flowcharts, org charts, network and system diagrams — yes, with no account, no watermark and no export limit. It is deliberately smaller in scope: there are no plugin libraries, no cloud storage integrations and no real-time co-editing, so if you need those, draw.io itself is still the better pick. What it adds instead is freehand drawing over the top.

Yes — that is what it is built for. Share your screen, draw as you talk, and press X for the laser pointer to point at things without leaving a mark. The laser trail fades after a second and is never saved or exported. Use one board per step and you can hand the whole explanation over afterwards as a ZIP of numbered PNGs.

Yes. Copy a screenshot and press ⌘V, or drag the image file onto the canvas. It is scaled down to a sensible size, and you can then draw, highlight, add arrows and label it, then export the whole thing as one picture.

Hover a shape and four blue arrows appear around it. Click one and a new shape is added on that side, already connected. Drag one onto an existing shape to join those two instead, or drop it on empty space to create and connect in a single gesture. Double-click any connector to give it a label.

Rubbing over something removes the whole thing rather than punching a hole in the middle of it, which is how digital boards behave and is almost always what you want. Deleting a shape takes its connectors with it. Undo brings any of it straight back.

No. The canvas, the pictures you paste onto it, the templates and both exporters all run in your browser. There is no upload endpoint behind this tool, so a screenshot of something private, or a diagram of an internal system, never leaves your device.

It autosaves into this browser on this device, so a refresh or an accidental tab close will not lose it. It is not synced to an account, which also means it will not appear on your other devices and clearing your browsing data removes it. Press Save to download a file you can reopen here at any time. Very large boards full of pictures can outgrow what a browser will hold, and the tool tells you when that happens.

Yes. Press Open file and both formats load straight in, shapes, connectors, ink and all — a saved diagram arrives as one board. Anything either tool had left autosaved in this browser is carried over automatically the first time you open the canvas.

Each board is a separate page in the same file. They are useful for explaining something a step at a time — one board per step — and you can download them all at once as a ZIP of numbered PNGs.

PNG for slides, chat and documents — pick 2× or higher so it stays sharp on a retina screen. SVG for print, for a website, or when someone needs to recolour it later, because it stays sharp at any size and the text stays real text. Pictures you pasted are carried inside both.

Yes. Press Copy and then paste into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Slides, an email or a chat — it arrives as a picture you can resize like any other. Choose 3× or 4× first if it is going to be printed, or download the SVG, which Microsoft 365 places as a true vector.

Not yet. Those are different formats with their own XML schemas. This tool reads the .do101.json files it writes itself, so a drawing started here can always be finished here.

Yes. Drawing, placing, dragging, connecting and resizing all work by touch and by pen, and the panels stack on a narrow screen. A stylus on a tablet is the nicest way to sketch; a mouse and a larger canvas are far more comfortable for a diagram past a handful of shapes.