Canvas New

Canvas is back. Years after we stepped away from our original whiteboard, we have rebuilt Canvas from the ground up as a headless canvas platform: not another standalone app competing with Miro and Mural, but an engine other products embed and build on.

Headless means the hard parts are ours and the surface is yours. Canvas provides the rendering, the data model, the collaboration, and the object system. The product around it, the toolbars, the panels, the workflows, belongs to whoever integrates it. That is why Canvas runs directly inside Gleo and Forge rather than as a separate destination.

When we deprecated the original Canvas, we said we would return once we had a clear vision for visual collaboration in an AI-native world. That vision is now clear. The whiteboard is no longer just a place people draw. It is a shared surface where people and agents think together, where artefacts are generated as well as sketched, and where the record of the work is structured enough for machines to reason about.

You can read the full story of the original tool, from Vulcan through to a chapter at Mural, on the Canvas 1.0 page. This page is about what comes next.

Canvas is a platform of primitives that work together:

• Headless architecture: Canvas ships as an engine, not an app. Integrators bring their own interface and workflows, and Canvas handles rendering, state, collaboration, and objects underneath.
• High-performance WebGL and WebGPU rendering: an infinite canvas that stays smooth at scale, with WebGPU where available and a WebGL fallback everywhere else. Thousands of objects, fluid pan and zoom, no jank.
• CRDT data store on YDoc: state lives in a Yjs YDoc, so edits merge without conflicts, work offline, and sync when reconnected. The document is the source of truth, not a server lock.
• Realtime collaboration: shared presence, live cursors, and multiplayer editing built on the same CRDT foundation, so many people can work on one surface at once.
• Rich, extensible objects: text, shapes, connectors, media, and embeds, plus a model for third parties to define their own object types with custom rendering and behaviour.
• Forge integration: Canvas is a first-class citizen on Forge, so teams can build and deploy canvas-powered tools and objects alongside the rest of their IP.
• Voice and audio calls: talk while you work. Spatial, low-latency audio is built into the surface, so a session on the canvas is a conversation, not a silent document.
• Facilitation tools: timers, voting, focus and follow, and other primitives that turn an open canvas into a guided session for a group.

Because Canvas is headless, it does not ask people to leave the tools they already use. It shows up where the work is. Gleo and Forge are the first two homes, and they show two very different shapes the same engine can take.

• In Gleo: a canvas is an artefact. It lives alongside every other kind of artefact a quest produces, from all the different tools teams use: sheets, slide decks, docs, Notion pages, Granola notes, and even other canvases like Miro, Mural, and Figma. A Beach-native canvas simply becomes another first-class artefact in that mix, editable in place and part of the same trail.
• In Forge: Canvas brings visual collaboration and documentation closer to where people are building and managing their sites, apps, and products. It becomes the surface for ideation, design, planning, architecture, and research for the things being built on Forge, so the thinking lives next to the thing it shapes rather than in a separate tool.

These are just examples of how we see Canvas being deployed. Because of its headless approach, it can be embedded and integrated into any product workflow, wherever a team needs a shared visual surface.

Canvas has always been the digital expression of the campfire: a place where a group gathers, shares what they have discovered, and builds shared understanding through visible collaboration.

The new Canvas keeps that spirit and adds the ability to act on it. Sensemaking happens on the surface, artefacts leave a trail, and what the group builds can be deployed through Forge. Understanding becomes collective, and then it becomes something you can ship.