DrawAnywhere vs Open Note Scanner
Side-by-side comparison of two open source alternatives
DrawAnywhere
DrawAnywhere lets you sketch, annotate, and highlight directly on top of any screen — great for video courses, tutorials, and presentations. Drawing tools Freehand pen, rectangle, ellipse, and laser pointer Pixel eraser; stroke eraser via stylus button 50-step undo/redo HSV color wheel, 18 presets, recent colors, hex input Stroke width and opacity sliders Canvas and gestures Infinite canvas — pan and pinch-to-zoom freely Three-level lock (none, zoom only, all) with HUD indicator Two-finger pinch: zoom | double-tap: reset zoom | triple-tap: reset position Three-finger double-tap: toggle passthrough | triple-tap: hide canvas Toolbar Horizontal and vertical layout, draggable anywhere via long‑press Auto-dims after 3 seconds of inactivity Hide canvas or pass touch events through to the app below Finger-drawing toggle for stylus-only mode Convenience Quick Settings tile to toggle the service Drag the toolbar to the bottom of the screen to close the app Second-launch closes the service Brush hover preview while drawing Tips Turn on Clear canvas on hide to auto-clear when hiding the canvas (passthrough is also disabled). Turn off Open canvas on start to hide the canvas on startup. Source: https://github.com/DrawAnywhere/DrawAnywhere
Open Note Scanner
With Open Note Scanner you can capture documents, handwritten notes, arts, shopping receipts, etcetera. It will automatically adjust the image aspect, contrast and save it. It will allow browsing, view and share the scanned documents. It also supports the automatic scan of preformatted pages with QR Code and action indicators. PDF file with the pages are available on the application website, in the releases section. In order to work, Open Note Scanner needs to have access to the OpenCV Manager application installed. If it could not find it, it will offer to download it from GitHub or Play Store. It is also possible to manually install it from the OpenCV SDK for Android, available on https://opencv.org/
| Feature | DrawAnywhere | Open Note Scanner |
|---|---|---|
| License | AGPL-3.0-or-later | GPL-3.0-only |
| Install sources | F-DroidGitHubIzzyOnDroid | F-DroidGitHub |
| Categories | ProductivityPhoto EditingGallery | ProductivityGallery |
| Features | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking | Ad-FreeOpen SourceNo Tracking |
| Platforms | Android | Android |
| Website | ||
| Source code |