DadakiA free Adobe Illustrator alternative, in the browser
Illustrator is thirty-eight years of accumulated capability behind a subscription. Most people opening it are using perhaps a tenth of it. Dadaki is a serious attempt at that tenth, free, in a browser tab.
The tools you were reaching for
The honest test of an Illustrator alternative is whether the muscle memory survives. These are the same operations under the same names, and mostly the same chords.
- P
- Pen — bezier paths, with handle-by-handle control
- N
- Pencil — freehand curves, fitted as you draw
- V
- Select, with node editing on double-click
- R / O / L
- Rectangle, ellipse, line
- T
- Text, with a searchable Google Fonts picker
- B
- Paint bucket — Live Paint, filling regions between overlapping lines
- U
- Mesh — mesh gradients for soft, multi-directional shading
- C
- Scissors — cut a path at a point
- I
- Eyedropper — pick up a colour or a whole appearance
- ⌥⌘U / ⌥⌘S / ⌥⌘I
- Pathfinder: union, subtract, intersect
- ⇧⌘O
- Convert text to outlines
- ⌘G / ⇧⌘G
- Group and ungroup
Also here
- Offset path, outline stroke and path simplification.
- Variable-width stroke profiles and dash patterns.
- Clipping masks, blend modes, blurs and drop shadows.
- Linear, radial and mesh gradients, with on-canvas gradient editing.
- Align and distribute, smart guides, snapping and rulers.
- Artwork frames, a layer tree, lock and hide, and a full undo history.
- SVG import, SVG export, and PNG export at 1×–4×.
Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.
What Illustrator has that this does not
Deciding this matters more than the feature list above, because these are the things that will stop you rather than annoy you.
- CMYK and print colour management. Dadaki works in RGB. For commercial print with spot colours, an ICC workflow and separations, Illustrator remains the right tool.
- AI, EPS and PDF files. Dadaki reads and writes SVG. It does not open Illustrator's own formats.
- Image trace. There is no automatic raster-to-vector tracing.
- Type on a path, and advanced typography. Text is straightforward text: font, size, weight, tracking, alignment.
- Brushes, symbols, 3D effects, warps and the deeper effects gallery.
- Multiple artboards per document, and linked assets across files.
If you need any of those, you need Illustrator, and no amount of enthusiasm here changes that. If you are drawing an icon set, a logo, a diagram or an illustration for the web, you probably do not.
Why it is fast enough to be usable
Browser-based drawing tools have a reputation for feeling like a demo. The scene graph and geometry here are a Rust crate compiled to WebAssembly, drawing through CanvasKit — the Skia engine that paints Chrome itself. Boolean operations, curve fitting and hit testing run in compiled code rather than in JavaScript.
Dadaki is free and the editor is open source under the MIT licence — the whole thing is on GitHub. There is no watermark, no export limit and no paid tier gating the drawing tools. An optional account adds cloud sync and shared team files; everything else works signed out.
Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.
Questions
What is the best free alternative to Adobe Illustrator?
Inkscape if you want maximum feature depth and are happy to install a desktop application; Dadaki if you want to open a browser tab and start drawing immediately with no install and no account. Both are free and open source.
Can Dadaki open .ai files?
No. It imports and exports SVG. If you have an Illustrator file, export it as SVG from Illustrator first and open that.
Does it have a pen tool like Illustrator's?
Yes — press P. It draws bezier paths with per-handle control, and double-clicking a finished path puts you into node editing to move anchors, adjust handles, and add or delete points.
Can I use it for print work?
For anything going to a professional press, no — Dadaki works in RGB and does not do CMYK separations or colour management. For screen, web and everyday printing it is fine.
Is there a catch to it being free?
No watermark, no export limit, no trial period. The editor is MIT-licensed open source. The project makes money from optional cloud accounts for people who want sync and team files.