DrawPen is a free, open-source Mac utility that lets you draw, highlight, and annotate directly on top of your screen in real time, without interrupting whatever is running beneath it.
What is DrawPen?
DrawPen is a lightweight screen-drawing overlay for macOS that puts a transparent canvas over your entire display, giving you a set of pens, highlighters, and erasers you can use to mark up anything on screen — live demos, code walkthroughs, design reviews, or video calls. When you are done, the annotations vanish and your desktop is exactly as you left it.
The project lives on GitHub under an open-source licence, which means it costs nothing and you can inspect every line of code before running it. For anyone who presents frequently or teaches over screenshare, that combination of zero cost and transparent provenance is genuinely hard to beat.
What does DrawPen do best?
DrawPen excels at frictionless, in-the-moment annotation — the kind where you need to circle something right now without opening a separate app or pausing a screen recording. A global keyboard shortcut summons the drawing layer instantly; you scribble, point, or highlight; then you dismiss it. The entire flow takes two keystrokes.
- Freehand drawing directly on the screen overlay with adjustable colour and stroke weight
- Highlighter mode for soft, semi-transparent emphasis over text or UI elements
- Eraser tool for correcting mid-annotation without clearing the whole canvas
- Instant clear so the overlay disappears cleanly when you are finished
- Global hotkey activation — no dock-clicking required during a live demo
I have used it during architecture deep-dives on Zoom where I needed to trace a data flow across a diagram that was already on screen. The ability to draw on top of a live browser tab — rather than switching to a whiteboard — keeps the audience's attention on the actual artefact, not a crude reconstruction of it.
Is DrawPen free?
Yes — DrawPen is completely free to download and use. It is an open-source project hosted on GitHub with no paid tier, no subscription, and no in-app purchase. You can install it directly from the repository or via Homebrew Cask.
Who should use DrawPen?
DrawPen is the right tool for developers, designers, educators, and support engineers who annotate their screen regularly as part of their work. If you record tutorials, run live code reviews, or explain UI decisions over screenshare, the workflow gap it fills is real.
It is not the right fit if you need persistent annotations saved as image files, multi-page markup sessions, or a tool that integrates with a note-taking system. For those needs you would be better served by something like Skitch, Annotate, or the markup tools built into macOS Screenshot. DrawPen is deliberately ephemeral — its superpower is also its limitation.
What are the best DrawPen alternatives?
The closest native alternative is the annotation layer in macOS Screen Recording (Control-click the record button), but it is clunky to invoke mid-session. Annotate (formerly Glui) offers a richer toolset and paid features for teams. HiDock and Docktor touch adjacent territory but are not annotation-focused. For pure screenshare drawing, Zoom's built-in whiteboard and Screen Pen (a paid App Store app) are the most direct competitors — Screen Pen wins on polish, DrawPen wins on openness and price.
If your annotation needs extend beyond live drawing into screenshot markup and sharing, Skitch remains the classic choice, though Evernote's stewardship has kept it in a feature freeze for years. For purely ephemeral on-screen drawing on a budget of zero, DrawPen has very little real competition.
How does DrawPen compare to Screen Pen?
Screen Pen is a polished, paid App Store app with spotlight search integration, shape tools, and a dedicated settings panel. DrawPen is the scrappier, fully open-source counterpart — it has fewer tools but zero cost and no telemetry concerns. I reach for DrawPen when I want something minimal and auditable; Screen Pen when I want a more complete toolkit and do not mind the price. For most developers who annotate occasionally, DrawPen is the sensible starting point.
