AcaDraw
AcaDraw turns plain-language prompts into scientific illustrations, editable diagrams and vector figures for research and teaching. It exports to PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF, converts raster images into editable SVG, and meters everything through monthly credits.
What is AcaDraw?
AcaDraw is a browser-based tool that turns a written description into a scientific illustration, a diagram or a figure meant for publication. Its homepage promise is blunt, science drawings in seconds, and the product is built around three distinct jobs rather than one. The first is image generation: you describe a free-body diagram, a synapse, a distillation apparatus or a planetary gear train in plain English or Chinese, and the tool renders it. Generation is announced as running on two engines, GPT-image-2 for publication-grade precision and Nano Banana for looser concept exploration, across eleven aspect ratios from 1:1 to 21:9. The second job is editable diagrams. An AI Canvas built on Excalidraw, shipped as version 1.1.0 on 17 November 2025, produces flowcharts and technical diagrams that reopen directly in draw.io or Excalidraw, and can also rebuild a diagram from an uploaded picture. The third job is vector conversion: a standalone converter accepts a JPG, PNG or WebP file up to 10 MB and returns an editable SVG, either text layers alone or every element, ready for PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Everything is metered in credits rather than in generations. An image costs five credits, the higher-end model ten, a diagram three with one credit per edit, a one-click enhancement one, and an SVG conversion one or three depending on the mode. A permanent free plan grants twenty credits a month; the paid annual plans raise that to 800 or 1,800 and unlock JPG, SVG and PDF export, watermark-free files and a licence to publish in journals. Dedicated pages cover scientific illustration, scientific diagrams and figures, graphical abstracts, medical illustration, biology diagrams, lab diagrams and flowcharts. What stands out on those pages is their tone: each one repeats that outputs are drafts, that the model can produce convincing mistakes, and that labels, arrows, proportions and terminology must be checked against a trusted source before any teaching or publication use. The interface is offered in eleven locales and the project keeps a public changelog and a public GitHub issue tracker. The publisher, however, is never named anywhere on the site.
What it does
- Generate a scientific illustration from a written description in English or Chinese
- Refine the result through an interactive chat with one-click adjustments
- Produce editable diagrams that open directly in draw.io or Excalidraw
- Rebuild an existing diagram from an uploaded image
- Convert a JPG, PNG or WebP image into an editable SVG, text layers only or every element
- Sharpen an image in one click with the AI image enhance function
- Export finished work as PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF depending on the plan
When to use AcaDraw / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if AcaDraw is the right fit.
When to use AcaDraw
- Researchers who need a first draft of a publication figure or a graphical abstract without opening a vector editor
- University lecturers and school science teachers building labelled diagrams for courses, lab sheets and exams
- Graduate and undergraduate students illustrating a thesis, a poster or a lab report on a near-zero budget
- Engineers and technical writers who want flowcharts and architecture diagrams that reopen cleanly in draw.io or Excalidraw
- Anyone holding a raster image, screenshot or scan that has to become an editable SVG for PowerPoint or Illustrator
When not to use AcaDraw
- Teams that need a documented GDPR posture: the site never mentions the regulation, publishes no DPA and names no hosting country
- Organisations with a vendor-vetting process, since no legal entity, address or country of establishment appears anywhere on the site
- Developers looking to call the tool from their own stack: there is no public API and no documentation page
- Users who expect factual accuracy out of the box, as every product page insists the outputs are drafts requiring expert review
- People wanting a mobile or offline workflow: AcaDraw is a browser-only product with no iOS, Android or desktop application
How to use AcaDraw
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account: twenty AI credits are granted on registration and reset every month
- Open the prompt field on the homepage or on the product page matching your need
- Describe the figure by naming the discipline, the concept, the audience, the labels, the visual style and the intended use
- Generate a first draft and inspect it against your own references
- Ask for targeted changes to labels, layout or colours through the chat until the draft holds up
- For a diagram, describe steps, branches, roles, inputs and outcomes, then reopen the result in draw.io or Excalidraw to correct nodes and connectors
- To vectorise an image, drag, paste or pick a JPG, PNG or WebP file under 10 MB and choose Convert Text Only or Convert All Elements
- Download the SVG, which is produced automatically once the conversion succeeds; credits are only charged on success
- To edit an SVG in PowerPoint, drop it in, right-click and choose Convert to Shape, then right-click again and use Group then Ungroup
- Have a domain expert review labels, arrows, proportions and terminology before teaching, submitting or publishing
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Immediate to use: a single prompt field, and no vector-editing skill required
- A genuinely permanent free plan of twenty credits a month, enough for four image generations
- Output is real editable SVG, including from an imported raster image
- Diagrams reopen in draw.io and Excalidraw, two widely used standards rather than a closed format
- Unusually honest product pages that spell out the limits of AI-generated scientific figures
- Paid plans include a licence to publish in journals and to use outputs commercially
- Public changelog and public GitHub issue tracker, plus an interface translated into eleven locales
Cons
- The publisher is anonymous: no company name, address or country appears anywhere, and the About page is written in the first person singular
- Legal documents are generic templates, all dated 10 March 2025, and have not followed the product through its October and November 2025 releases
- No GDPR mention, no DPA, no named subprocessor and no disclosed hosting country
- The terms grant a worldwide, royalty-free licence to modify and distribute submitted content, with nothing said about model training
- No public API, no mobile application and no browser extension: the browser is the only entry point
- The homepage section titled as a partner showcase displays Google, OpenAI, Stripe, GitHub, Vercel and Next.js, which are technology suppliers rather than partners
- Twelve named researcher testimonials are illustrated with randomuser.me portraits, so their provenance cannot be checked
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available at no cost and grants 20 AI credits per month. The cheapest paid entry point published on the pricing page is the Plus plan at 149.90 USD per year, announced as a 16% saving against the 178.80 USD monthly-billing equivalent. The Max plan is listed at 279 USD per year. Payment is processed through a redirection to Stripe, and a 14-day money-back guarantee is stated.
- 20 AI credits granted on registration and reset monthly
- image generation at 5 credits
- diagrams at 3 credits per generation and 1 per edit
- SVG conversion at 1 or 3 credits
- standard quality
- PNG export only
- community support
- personal educational use
- 800 AI credits per month
- Pro model at 10 credits per image
- AI image enhance at 1 credit
- high quality output
- PNG
- JPG
- SVG and PDF export
- priority email support
- 1
- 800 AI credits per month
- same features as Plus
- 90-day generation history
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how AcaDraw handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no GDPR mention at all. A full-text search across the twenty pages collected, homepage, terms, privacy policy and cookie policy included, returns zero occurrence of GDPR, CCPA, DPA or data processing agreement. The privacy policy, dated 10 March 2025, lists the categories of data collected and the purposes pursued, but names no legal basis, grants no data subject rights, sets no retention period, discloses no international transfer and identifies no controller. No Article 27 EU representative and no data protection officer is designated. The cookie policy announces advertising and targeting cookies without describing any consent mechanism. For a European user, this means the tool publishes none of the information a GDPR-facing vendor is normally expected to provide.
Who owns the data?
The Terms of Service state that you keep all rights to the content you submit, post or display through the service. In the same clause, you grant the publisher a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, modify and distribute that content, with no stated limit of duration or purpose. The site itself, its original content and its functionality remain the publisher's property. Paid Plus and Max plans add a licence to publish outputs in journals and to use them commercially, which implies the free plan does not. The terms carry a single date, 10 March 2025, and never name the company holding these rights.
Reuse rights
Nothing in the published terms restricts what you may do with the figures you generate, and the free plan is described on the pricing page as being for personal educational use. The right to publish in a journal or to use an output commercially is sold as a feature of the paid Plus and Max plans, so free-plan users should not assume commercial reuse is granted. In the other direction, the licence you concede is broad: the publisher may use, reproduce, modify and distribute your submitted content worldwide, free of charge, without asking again. No opt-out, no deletion procedure and no statement about model training accompanies that clause.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site publishes nothing about where user data is hosted. No country, no region, no data centre and no cloud provider is named in the privacy policy, the terms or anywhere else, and the only security statement is the generic sentence that appropriate measures are implemented. What can be observed from outside is not a substitute for that disclosure, but it is worth recording: the domain resolves to 216.198.79.1, an anycast address geolocated in the United States and announced by AS16509, Amazon.com, Inc.; the domain registrar is Cloudflare, Inc., an American company; and payment is delegated to Stripe. None of these facts tells a user which jurisdiction governs their stored figures, prompts or account data. Anyone with a residency requirement, whether contractual, institutional or regulatory, should treat the hosting jurisdiction as undetermined rather than assume it.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting AcaDraw.
- The publisher cannot be identified, so there is no known counterparty if a dispute, a data request or a service shutdown occurs
- The terms grant a worldwide, royalty-free right to use, reproduce, modify and distribute anything you submit, with no stated limit
- No document says whether prompts or uploaded images are used to train models, and no opt-out is offered
- Convincing but wrong figures are the core risk: the site says so itself, and a plausible diagram is far harder to catch than an obviously broken one
- Publishing or teaching from an unverified AI figure can expose an author to retraction, correction or a journal's AI disclosure rules
- Leaning on prompt-generated visuals can quietly erode the drawing and diagramming skill that lets a scientist notice an error in the first place
- Uploading unpublished data, patient material or confidential schematics to a service with no disclosed hosting country or subprocessor list is a real exposure
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Setup is close to trivial. AcaDraw is a web application with nothing to install and no configuration: an email registration opens an account credited with twenty AI credits, and the first prompt can be typed straight away. The homepage claims no technical skill is required, and the product bears that out. The only step that asks anything of the user is optional and comes later: opening an exported SVG in PowerPoint, Illustrator or Inkscape, or reopening a generated diagram in draw.io or Excalidraw to finish it.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind AcaDraw
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free plan, or only a trial?
How much does a figure actually cost in credits?
Which AI models does AcaDraw run on?
What export formats are available?
Can I keep editing the diagrams somewhere else?
May I use the figures in a published paper?
What does the site say about GDPR and data protection?
How do I contact support or cancel a subscription?
Should you pick AcaDraw?
AcaDraw is a young and narrowly scoped product, and both qualities show. The domain was registered in September 2025, the first public release landed in October 2025 and the Excalidraw canvas a month later, so the tool has barely a year of existence behind it. Within that scope it does something genuinely useful: it removes the vector-software barrier between a researcher, a teacher or a student and a labelled scientific figure, and it does so at a price that no illustrator or Illustrator licence can match. The chain that carries the most value is arguably not the image generation itself but what follows it, the conversion into editable SVG and the handover to draw.io or Excalidraw, because that is what keeps the output correctable rather than final. The reservations sit entirely on the other side of the ledger. No legal entity is identifiable anywhere on the site: no company name beyond the footer copyright, no address, no country. The privacy policy, terms and cookie policy are unmodified generic templates dated March 2025, silent on GDPR, on retention, on subprocessors, on hosting and on whether submitted content trains any model, while granting a worldwide licence to modify and distribute that content. Two homepage elements also invite caution, a partner section showing what are in fact technology suppliers, and testimonials illustrated with generated portraits. The honest reading is that AcaDraw is a capable drafting tool from an unidentified publisher. For a figure sketched, exported and then verified by a domain expert, that trade may well be acceptable. For anything involving sensitive material, institutional procurement or a documented data-protection posture, it is not.
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