Doodly alternatives: how to choose a whiteboard video tool

Doodly made whiteboard video approachable for people who are not animators. You picked characters and props from a library, arranged them on a board, and the software animated a hand drawing them in. It is now sold as part of the Voomly suite, and a lot of people who used it are looking around to see what else exists.

If that is you, the useful question is not "what is the closest clone". It is "which way of producing the video fits how I actually work".

How does whiteboard video actually get made?

Almost every tool in this space belongs to one of two families.

Library and hand. You assemble each scene from prepared assets, set the order and the timing, and the software animates a hand moving across the board. Doodly works this way, so does VideoScribe. The strength is control: you decide exactly what appears, where it sits and when. The cost is assembly time, and the fact that your video looks like whatever the library contains. If your subject is generic, the library covers it. If your subject is specific, you spend the evening looking for a prop that is close enough.

Generation. You give the tool the content, in the form of a topic, a script or a document, and it produces the scenes for that specific content. There is nothing to assemble and no library to search. The strength is speed and fit to the subject. The cost is a different kind of control: you steer the result by editing the script and choosing the style rather than by dragging objects around a canvas.

Neither family is better in the abstract. They optimize for different things, and which one is right depends on what you make and how often.

What should you compare, and in what order?

How the artwork gets made. Ask whether the drawing is assembled from stock elements or produced for your script. This single question predicts most of the rest: how long a video takes, how well it matches an unusual topic, how much the tool constrains you.

Consistency across scenes. A ten scene video where scene four is drawn in a slightly different look reads as sloppy, and viewers notice even when they cannot name what is wrong. Check what happens across a whole video rather than judging a single frame in a demo.

Narration. Some tools give you a timeline and expect you to record yourself. Some generate the voiceover. Both are fine, but they change the production loop: recording yourself means every script edit is a re-record.

Revision. This is the one people underestimate. Content ages, a rule changes, a product renames a feature. Find out what it takes to change one line six months later. In a library tool that means reopening the project and moving objects. In a generator it means editing the script and rendering again.

Export and rights. Check resolution, whether there is a watermark, and whether you can use the output commercially. If the video is going on a course platform or a client's landing page, this matters more than any feature.

Where it runs. Desktop application or browser. Desktop means installs, licences per machine and file management. Browser means the work is wherever you log in.

How do you test a tool properly?

Demo videos are made by people who know the tool. They tell you what is possible, not what is likely for you.

Take one real script you already have, ideally something you know is awkward to illustrate, and run it through every tool on your shortlist. Then look at three things: how long it took from script to finished file, whether the visuals actually carry the meaning or just decorate it, and how the last scene compares to the first. That afternoon is worth more than a week of feature tables.

Where does explain.ink sit?

We are in the second family. You give a topic, a script or a document, pick one of 18 drawing styles, and explain.ink writes the story, draws every scene stroke by stroke in that style and records the narration. There is no asset library, because the drawing is made for your script. You get an MP4 without a watermark.

That makes it a good fit if you produce regularly and want the look to hold across a series, for example a course, a training library or a channel. It is a weaker fit if what you want is to place every element by hand on a canvas. If that is the requirement, a library tool is genuinely the right answer, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

If you want to see the drawing style first, the whiteboard animation page shows how it works end to end.