Top pick

Offering a smooth drawing experience and plenty of space and hotkeys, this model is a great drawing tablet for all but the most demanding professionals.

Wired | 12 by 7 inches; 8.7-by-5.4-inch usable workspace

The Huion Inspiroy 2 M proves that you don’t have to pay more than $100 for a great drawing tablet with features where it counts—if you’re willing to deal with a wired connection. It offers a large drawing surface with good stylus detection, plenty of hotkeys, and a comfortable, battery-free pen. The drivers are also relatively painless to deal with, and most important, this tablet was a pleasure to draw on almost straight out of the box. Most people shouldn’t bemoan its lack of multitouch support, especially for the price, but the absence of wireless connectivity might make this model a tougher sell for people who can’t stand cables on their desk or are frequently out and about while connected to a laptop. If you need a wireless tablet, consider the Wacom Intuos S or even the Wacom Intuos Pro M.

The Inspiroy 2 M covers all the bases and doesn’t compromise where it counts. This model is an excellent drawing tablet, especially if you don’t have one already or own something much smaller and are looking to upgrade without spending a lot of money.

The Inspiroy 2 M is a pleasure to draw on. It doesn’t really matter how cheap or feature-filled a drawing tablet is if it’s laggy, stuttery, or physically tiring to draw on, and the Inspiroy 2 M is none of those things. In our tests, drawing on the tablet felt easy right away, thanks in part to a relatively smooth pen surface that causes the stylus nib to glide across it. Some artists prefer a rougher drawing-tablet surface, as it more closely resembles drawing on a more textured paper surface. As someone who works in a variety of media and tends to draw in smoother sketchbooks by manufacturers such as Moleskine, I personally found the Inspiroy 2 M’s tablet surface a joy to draw on and less tiring than other tablets with more friction. If you want a rougher-feeling surface with the Inspiroy 2 M, you can buy replacement felt nibs for the stylus, which add friction to the feel of the pen.

In our line and ruler tests, the Inspiroy 2 M performed well, exhibiting minimal wobble on slow, straight lines and tracking tight curving strokes and circles without wobbling or stuttering. Though the initial stroke quality felt a little soft in comparison with that of other tablets, we easily fixed that in the pen-pressure settings within Huion’s software.

It has plenty of hotkeys. The Inspiroy 2 M has eight hotkeys along the left side of the tablet. It also offers three additional buttons that store presets for the hotkeys, for a total of 24 possible programmed keys and commands. The result is a fair bit of customizability that provides easier access to commands and tools. The tablet also sports a programmable dial, though it’s more of a scroll wheel than the capacitive input you might find on more expensive tablets.

Setup is easy, and the drivers are fairly user-friendly. The Inspiroy 2 M was one of the very few tablets I tested that defaulted to single-monitor mode on my dual-monitor desktop setup, which is what most people want out of a drawing tablet in that situation. Changing the mapping settings was about as painless as these things get for drawing tablets, its hotkeys were fairly intuitive to assign, and the driver utility itself was responsive. Plus, in my time with the Inspiroy 2 M across both Windows 11 and macOS Sonoma on an M1 MacBook Pro, the drivers were stable. However, as with every tablet we tested, we had a daunting amount of privacy prompts and settings to approve while setting this model up in Sonoma.

It’s cheap. This is a great-feeling tablet that routinely sells for much less than $100—while conducting research and testing for this guide, we routinely saw the Inspiroy 2 M on sale for about $65 or less. Most people don’t need to spend more.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The design is boring. The Inspiroy 2 M is inoffensive in its design and construction, but it’s still just a slab of (mostly) plastic—though it does come in multiple colors, at least. If you get the black version, be ready to wipe off fingerprints all the time. It’s also available in green and light pink.

It lacks wireless connectivity. If you absolutely cannot stand wires, the Inspiroy 2 M isn’t for you. This is one of the two main compromises that Huion makes with this tablet, the other being the absence of touch input. If you need a wireless tablet and you don’t want to spend more than $100, your next best option is our also-great pick, the Wacom Intuos S. If you want a tablet that performs just as well as, or better than, the Inspiroy 2 M without wires, it will cost you a fair bit more: The Huion Inspiroy Giano G930L performs similarly and supports wireless, but it sells for $200 and is, frankly, massive at almost 17 by 10 inches. Our upgrade pick, Wacom’s Intuos Pro M tablet, is around the same size as the Inspiroy 2 M and offers similar performance, more customization features, and wireless support, but it sells for $380. We love wireless connectivity, but we would hesitate to make it one of our most important criteria for a drawing tablet right now.