ChemDoodle | Chemical Drawing Software

for Windows, macOS and Linux
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Looking to create 3D graphics for molecules and chemistry?Check out ChemDoodle 3D →↓
3D Chemical Graphics, Animations and Modeling
Trusted by thousands of institutions in over 100 countries
ChemDoodle 2D contains thousands of chemistry features, helping you produce the highest quality graphics and saving you hours of work.
We spend a very long time scrutinizing the graphics output in ChemDoodle. The software automatically orients bonds in the correct directions, merges bond strokes together, places attributes in the best locations and automatically makes smart decisions that lead to the most beautiful and appealing images. Of course, you can always override the software to your preference.
Every component of the graphic is fully customizable. Whether you are looking to control bond widths, arrowhead sizes or shape transparency and color; you are in control.
Represent chemical structures with the widest range of chemical bonds avialable in any software tool. From standard integer bonds, to specialty bonds like ionic and covalent, you can accurately depict any structure. All of the bonds orient themselves and merge together for the most aesthetic graphics.
In other programs, you will see disconnects where bonds meet, or a heavy reliance on rounded bond ends. In ChemDoodle, all of the bonds merge together for the most aestheic figures.
Formatted atom labels allow you to clearly represent chemical entities as text and create concise, professional graphics.
Any characters supported by your fonts are available over the entire unicode range. Quick access to chemically relevant symbols is provided through the Symbols widget.
ChemDoodle is the only chemical drawing tool to contain superscript and subscript merge formatting in text fields to easily create atomic notations and other chemical text.
Render charges, radicals and electrons, dipole moments, asterisks, tags and custom attributes on your structures, with full control over how they render.
Atomic and molecular orbital graphics are easily added to figures. These are completely customizable just like the rest of ChemDoodle, so you can control color, stroke styling, fill type and more!
Easily highlight parts of your structures for emphasis and attention.
ChemDoodle provides you with all the tools to build perfect figures of Lewis Dot Structures. Draw them yourself, or have ChemDoodle automatically create the Lewis Dot Structures for you!
Easily create 3D effects in figures by using protruding and bold bonds. ChemDoodle will automatically merge their strokes for an optimal appearance. Bonds in the foreground will buffer intersecting bonds in the background.
Choose from 7 different stroke styles to add a bit of character to your figures (Basic, Bristle, Brush, Charcoal, Scribble, Slant, Wobble). Perfect for use in group meetings and in presentations.
Draw rectangles, ovals, arcs, lines, brackets, Bézier curves, rulers, and more. And of course, all of the shapes are fully stylable.
Tables are very powerful shapes for creating organized groupings of content in grid patterns. You can control the table grid and its formatting as well as the content that appears within each table cell and cell formatting. Tables can be drawn in several styles and are defined and controlled by an intuitive anchor box set that provides instant feedback for edits you may want to perform. Rowspans, colspans, padding and alignment are supported. Tables can be fit to contained content. This is a great way of creating really attractive and informative figures of data.
Draw thin layer chromatography plates using the TLC Canvas widget.
ChemDoodle’s drawing controls are made to clearly model the atoms and bonds they manage. Copious visual feedback is provided. There are also many options for customizing the drawing tools to your preference, including for accessibility concerns.
ChemDoodle will help guide your drawing to create the most aesthetic figures using a feature we call the "Optimize Zone" for standard bond angles and lengths. Just move your mouse out of the zone to override it.
In addition to the standard elemental labels, you can input any custom label you desire. ChemDoodle will automatically chemically interpret and format labels. You can also directly control text formatting. Labels can be expanded to full atom models and full atom models can be automatically collapsed into concise labels based on your abbreviation library or to a custom label.
Abbreviations and compound labels like "COOH" and "Ph", as well as formulae can be expanded to quickly build and work with complex chemical structures. You can define your own custom abbreviations to be used in ChemDoodle.
In addition to the predefined Jmol, Rasmol, PyMOL and CDK color sets, you can also manually define your own elemntal color set to apply to molecule rendering.
If you need to tag atoms or bonds by increments, ChemDoodle provides powerful tools to do this. Simply click on the atom or bond to tag them and the next tag is automatically incremented. Tag by alphabet, number, roman numeral or greek letter.
ChemDoodle will automatically place your charges, radicals, stereocenter labels and other attributes for you in an aesthetic manner. You can override these decisions at any time by holding down and dragging the mouse during placement.
Several methods are available to control the z-ordering of bonds, or how they layer on top of each other when overlaps occur. Easy to use context-menu options are provided for quick control. ChemDoodle also includes an advanced algorithm to automatically layer bonds for you based on the assigned wedges within a drawn structure.
In addition to standard ring tools and templates, ChemDoodle provides special arbitrary ring and crown ether tools for quickly building advanced ring systems.
Quickly build structures using our built-in template libraries, or create your own templates. The Templates widget or