Analogy: Andy Wolber / TechRepublic

When people mention drawing tools, they typically mean things like pencils, pens, markers, chalk, or more recently, tablets and styluses. That'south appropriate, since people take used those tools to draw for years.

Just the Chrome browser also can serve as an effective drawing tool when used with a well-chosen web app. All of the apps below let you use a mouse or touchpad to draw in Chrome on a computer; if your system has a touchscreen, these apps accept marks made with a finger or stylus too. These apps permit you lot sketch a procedure, capture a concept, or illustrate your thinking — all within a desktop web browser.

See: Multicloud: A crook canvass (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Google and several developers offer drawing apps that work in a browser. Google makes at to the lowest degree five drawing apps, although no unmarried Google cartoon app includes a full set of drawing tools. The other browser-based apps below are listed roughly in order of ease of employ, power, and price. (The 2 apps at the bottom of the listing are both full-featured vector graphic design apps.)

1. Google cartoon apps

Google Drawings, Chrome Canvas, Jamboard, Google Keep, and Autodraw offering distinct drawing capabilities.

  • Google Drawings works all-time to create diagrams, process maps, and other shape or frame-style layouts.

  • Chrome Sail supports freehand sketching in four styles (pencil, pen, marker, and chalk) and lets you describe on up to 10 different layers.

  • Google Keep not simply lets yous depict a annotation, but also recognizes handwritten words in your drawn notes when you search in Keep.

  • Jamboard, a collaborative app meant mostly for meetings, lets people draw in 1 or more than rectangle-shaped frames.

  • The AutoDraw app's master purpose is to find a professionally created epitome that corresponds to the lines you draw.

For more details about Google's cartoon apps, read Comparing and Contrasting Google's Actual Drawing Apps by Tom Mullaney.

Run into: How to use four Jamboard features on the web (TechRepublic)

Google offers at to the lowest degree five apps that include drawing: Chrome Canvas, Google Drawings, Google Keep, Jamboard, and AutoDraw.

2. Limnu

Limnu is the about elegant and simple drawing app that works in a browser. It provides a express set up of colors, shapes, pens, and pen sizes, among other features. The app supports both private and collaborative boards, and also includes video-conferencing capabilities.

You tin can subscribe to the Limnu Pro Programme for $5 per month (or $l per year) or the Limnu Team Programme for groups at $eight per person per month (or $80 per person per year). Go more details about Limnu pricing.

Limnu provides a simple and elegant drawing feel.

3. Sketchpad

Sketchpad supports a variety of pen types, shapes, text, and clip art. With support for layers, the apps lets you hide, duplicate, or delete whatsoever layer, in add-on to moving a layer frontwards or backward, or to the front or back. Fifty-fifty better, Sketchpad is costless to utilize online, although you may purchase a desktop version of the app ($4.95), which lets you save files offline.

Sketchpad offers many pen types and tools. The app too supports layers.

4. Boxy SVG

Indigestible SVG (scalable vector graphics) delivers a powerful vector pattern app. Every bit the proper name implies, vector graphics scale, then the size of any images you lot create may be scaled upwardly or downwardly with no loss of resolution. The app includes a long list of drawing, text, object, and shape cosmos and manipulation tools.

Yous may subscribe to use the app from Chrome on Windows or macOS ($9 per month) or, on a Chrome OS device with access to the Chrome Web Store, buy the app for a one-time fee of $9.99.

Indigestible SVG provides a powerful vector blueprint app, available either equally a subscription (in Chrome on a reckoner) or Chrome Spider web Store buy (on Chrome Bone).

5. Gravit Designer

Now offered from Corel Corporation, Gravit Designer (gratis) and Gravit Designer PRO ($49 per yr) both provide professional vector-editing features. The paid version improves access to fonts, expands import and export options, and adds many other image edit options. The upgrade besides adds deject storage, with admission to project version history.

There is a free version of Gravit Designer that anyone may employ and a paid version that provides professional-level vector graphics design tools.

Your experience?

Android apps also may exist an option. Many Chromebooks and Chrome Os devices back up the installation of Android drawing apps, such as Autodesk SketchBook or Adobe Illustrator Describe. And while you won't be able to access those Android apps when you use Chrome on another platform, such as Windows or macOS, Autodesk and Adobe offer drawing apps for those platforms.

Which of Google's cartoon apps do y'all use about often? Which web-based drawing app practice you prefer that works in Chrome on your computer? Let me know either in the comments beneath or on Twitter (@awolber).