10 Best Miro Alternatives in 2026 (Free & Paid)
Miro is the default answer to "we need a shared canvas." It is also a large product, and large products fit some teams better than others.
People look for alternatives for four recurring reasons. The autocomplete suggestions for this search say them out loud: free, open source, self-hosted, and personal use. Those are four different problems, and no single tool solves all four.
This list covers ten tools that occupy the same space from different angles. They include pure whiteboards, design-native canvases, mind mappers, open-source options you can run yourself, and file-first workspaces that turn board content into finished documents. Each entry states what it does differently, what it costs on the day of writing, and where it stops being the right pick.
Why teams look for a Miro alternative
Start with what Miro publishes about itself, because the honest reasons live there rather than in complaints.
Miro's free tier states its own boundary clearly: three editable boards. The plan page explains that you "create and share unlimited boards" but that the "three most recent ones will remain editable." For a team that runs a workshop every week, that ceiling arrives quickly.
Above free, the pricing page lists Starter at $8 per member per month billed yearly and Business at $20. Enterprise starts from 30 members with pricing on request. Per-member pricing is standard for collaboration software. It does mean that inviting occasional participants has a cost. A fifteen-person team pays for fifteen seats whether or not all fifteen open a board in a given month.
The product has also grown well past whiteboarding. Miro's own navigation lists Whiteboard, Diagrams, Kanban, Timelines, TalkTrack, Tables, Docs and Slides as formats, plus AI features and an MCP server. That breadth is a strength for teams that want one surface. It is a reason to look elsewhere for teams that wanted a whiteboard and got a platform.
None of that makes Miro a poor tool. It makes it a specific one.
How this list was built
Three rules governed inclusion, and they are worth stating because they changed the final roster.
First, every tool had to publish a real pricing page with readable tiers on the day of writing. A landing page that only offers a sales call does not let a reader compare cost. It therefore does not belong in a list organized around cost. This removed more candidates than any other rule.
Second, prices had to be verifiable in a stable currency. Several vendors render pricing based on visitor location. Some tiers could only be read in a local currency and not confirmed in USD. Those tools were left out rather than converted, because a converted figure is not a displayed price.
Third, the vendor had to still be operating independently under its own name. Acquisition and rebranding change what a reader will actually find when they click through.
Tools that were checked and excluded, with the reason:
- Lucidspark — the pricing page rendered tiers in Japanese yen rather than USD. The displayed figures could not be confirmed against the rule above.
- Klaxoon — its pricing page now carries the title "Plans and pricing | Klaxoon by Wrike," placing it under another vendor's brand.
- Conceptboard, MindMeister and Stormboard — tier prices did not render as readable amounts on their pricing pages, including in a full browser.
- Creately — the pricing URL returned a 404 at the time of checking.
- tldraw — it publishes an infinite-canvas SDK for developers rather than an end-user whiteboard product, which is a different category.
Feature claims below come from each vendor's own product and pricing pages. Prices are the amounts displayed at the time of writing and will drift.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Free tier | Entry paid tier | Strongest at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Powerdrill Bloom | $0 | $13.27 / month | Turning board content and files into documents |
| Mural | $0, 3 editable murals | $9.99 / member / month | Facilitated workshops at company scale |
| FigJam (Figma) | Starter, free | $3 / month collab seat | Teams already living in Figma |
| Whimsical | $0 per editor | $10 / editor / month | Diagrams, wireframes and docs together |
| Excalidraw | Free forever | $6 / user / month | Open-source sketching and self-hosting |
| Milanote | Free, 100 notes | $9.99 / person / month | Visual planning and moodboards |
| AFFiNE | $0 | $6.75 / month | Docs and canvas in one open-source app |
| Sketchboard | Free | $6 / month, 1 editor | Software diagramming with viewer-friendly pricing |
| Xmind | $0 | $4.92 / month | Mind mapping that exports to slides |
| Visme | $0 | $12.25 / month | Turning visual work into branded output |
1. Powerdrill Bloom
How it differs from Miro
Miro starts with an empty canvas that a group fills in. Powerdrill Bloom starts with a file. Its canvas is generated from content that already exists. You upload spreadsheets, CSVs, PDFs and documents, and the workspace builds an exploration surface from them. The homepage describes the product as an analyst that "shows its work." Every number "comes back with the page, the row and the figure behind it."
That makes it a different kind of Miro alternative from the others here. It is the right substitution when the board was never the goal. What the team actually needed was a document, a chart set or a deck built from source material.
Pros
Accepts Excel, CSV, PDF and docs as direct inputs with no modelling step. Produces slides, Office documents, spreadsheets and images as outputs rather than only board content. Traceability back to source rows is a stated product behavior. Scheduled agents can re-run a recurring analysis without a person restarting it. On-premise and private-cloud deployment are offered for data that cannot leave a network.
Cons
It is not positioned as a facilitation tool. Its published feature list does not describe sticky-note voting, workshop templates or a laser pointer. The things that make Miro useful for a live retrospective sit outside its stated scope. The free tier limits scheduled tasks to one, so recurring automation requires a paid tier. Credit allocations rather than seats govern how much heavy analysis a plan supports, which is a less familiar unit than per-member pricing.
Pricing
Free at $0 with 1,000 daily refreshed credits, upload of Excel, CSV, PDF and docs, and one scheduled task. Pro at $13.27 per month adds 5,000 monthly credits, agent skills and twenty scheduled tasks. Plus at $26.60 per month raises the monthly allocation to 11,000 credits. Premium at $132.67 per month goes to 60,000. Team Pro is $13.27 per seat per month with shared team credits.
Bottom line
Choose it when the canvas was a means to an end and the end was a deliverable built from files.
2. Mural
How it differs from Miro
Mural is the closest like-for-like substitution on this list, and it competes on facilitation rather than on breadth. Its vocabulary is built around running a session — rooms, murals, and facilitator controls — rather than around being a general work surface.
The free tiers of the two products mirror each other closely enough to be a real comparison. Mural offers unlimited murals with three editable at a time, against Miro's three editable boards.
Pros
The free plan allows unlimited members, which is unusual and useful for organizations that want wide access before committing budget. That is a direct contrast with Miro's per-member model. Unlimited visitors with view-only rights on free, and with editing rights on Team+, keeps the cost of occasional participants low. Business adds SSO via SAML 2.0 and unlimited guests, which covers the common enterprise blocker directly.
Cons
Editable murals are capped at three on the free plan, so the ceiling that sends teams looking for a Miro alternative exists here too. The product is focused on collaborative sessions. Teams wanting document, table and slide formats on the same surface will find a narrower format list than Miro's.
Pricing
Free at $0 for unlimited members. Team+ at $9.99 per member per month billed annually, or $12 billed monthly, with unlimited editable murals and private rooms. Business at $17.99 per member per month billed annually, adding SSO and unlimited guests. Enterprise is arranged through a demo.
Bottom line
The natural move for a team that liked Miro's workshop experience and wants the same thing with different seat economics.
3. FigJam (Figma)
How it differs from Miro
FigJam is a whiteboard that lives inside a design platform. The difference is not the canvas itself but what sits next to it. Figma design files, Figma Slides, Figma Draw and Figma Sites are all part of the same product family and the same account.
For a team whose designers are already in Figma every day, that adjacency removes a tool boundary rather than adding one. Moving off Miro costs them nothing extra in tooling.
Pros
Starter is free and includes unlimited drafts, UI kits and templates, plus a daily AI credit allowance. The Collab seat at $3 per month is the cheapest paid entry point on this list. It exists precisely for people who contribute to boards without doing design work. Handoff between a whiteboard session and actual design files happens without an export.
Cons
The seat structure is more complex than a single per-user price. Full, Dev and Collab seats each carry different capabilities and costs, which takes reading to get right. The value proposition weakens considerably for teams with no design practice, since most of what you are buying into is a design platform.
Pricing
Starter is free with unlimited drafts and 150 AI credits per day, up to 500 per month. Professional lists a Full seat at $16 per month, a Dev seat at $12, and a Collab seat at $3. Each carries its own monthly AI credit allocation. Organization and Enterprise tiers are listed above that.
Bottom line
The obvious answer if your team already pays for Figma, and a hard sell if it does not.
4. Whimsical
How it differs from Miro
Whimsical treats diagrams and documents as first-class objects rather than as things you draw on a board. Flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps and docs each have a dedicated editor, so the output looks structured rather than hand-arranged.
Its pricing is also metered by object count rather than by board count, which is a meaningfully different constraint from Miro's.
Pros
Viewers are always free, so sharing work costs nothing. Pricing is per editor rather than per member, which suits teams where a handful of people create and many people read. Boards and docs sit in the same workspace, covering the common case where a diagram needs surrounding explanation. Version history runs 7 days on free and 90 days on Pro.
Cons
The free plan caps creation at 50 board objects and 50 doc blocks per month, and puts a watermark on exports. That is a tighter ceiling than a board count for anyone doing detailed diagrams. The structured editors that make output look clean also make freeform sketching less natural than on an open canvas.
Pricing
Free at $0 per editor per month with 50 board objects and 50 doc blocks monthly. Pro at $10 per editor per month removes those caps and the export watermark, with 90-day version history. Business at $20 per editor per month targets larger organizations.
Bottom line
The pick when the artifact needs to survive the meeting and be read by someone who was not there.
5. Excalidraw
How it differs from Miro
Excalidraw is open-source software with a deliberately hand-drawn aesthetic, and the free editor runs entirely in the browser with end-to-end encryption applied locally. That combination answers two of the four things people search for alongside Miro — open source and free — without a trial period attached.
The paid product, Excalidraw+, adds cloud persistence and team features on top of the same editor.
Pros
The free tier is described as free forever with full editor functions, unlimited collaborators, and export to PNG, SVG or file. Integrations with Notion and Obsidian make it easy to embed diagrams in notes you already keep. Being open source, it can be self-hosted, which covers teams whose diagrams cannot sit on a vendor's servers. Prices on the paid page are explicitly stated in USD.
Cons
The free scene limit is one infinite scene, so organizing many separate diagrams requires the paid tier. The feature set is focused on drawing and diagramming. Teams looking for workshop facilitation tooling such as voting, timers and structured activities will find the surface deliberately minimal.
Pricing
Free solo is free forever with full editor functions, one infinite scene and unlimited collaborators. Plus is $6 a month per user with unlimited scenes and folders, cloud storage, access management, presentations and comments, following a 14-day trial. Annual billing is discounted relative to monthly.
Bottom line
The best answer on this list for "open source" and "self-hosted," and a good one for "free."
6. Milanote
How it differs from Miro
Milanote is organized around visual planning rather than group whiteboarding. Its own site frames the use cases as moodboarding, storyboarding, creative writing and creative briefs. That is work often done by one person or a small pair rather than by a room.
The unit of pricing reflects that. It sells per person, with a separate flat team plan, rather than charging per member the way Miro does.
Pros
The free plan has no time limit, which suits an occasional personal workflow better than a trial. Unlimited shared boards are available even on free, so sharing is not the thing that forces an upgrade. The team plan is a flat monthly price for up to a set number of people rather than a per-seat multiplier. Apps exist for mobile, iPad, desktop and as a web clipper.
Cons
The free plan caps you at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads. That is a hard content ceiling rather than a feature limit. The product is built for visual arrangement rather than for structured diagramming, so flowcharts and system diagrams are not its strength.
Pricing
Free with no time limit, covering 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads. Pay per person at $9.99 per month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with unlimited notes and uploads. A team plan is $49 per month billed annually for a defined headcount.
Bottom line
The strongest "personal use" answer in this group, particularly for creative planning.
7. AFFiNE
How it differs from Miro
AFFiNE puts a document editor and an infinite canvas, which it calls Edgeless, into the same open-source application. The same content can be viewed as a page or as a board. Miro added Docs to a canvas product; AFFiNE built both from the start.
It is also available for self-hosting and offers commercial source-code licensing. That is a different relationship with a vendor than a Miro subscription.
Pros
Docs and canvas are the same object viewed two ways, which removes the copy-paste step between writing and diagramming. Self-hosted and private-cloud deployments are offered. A lifetime purchase option exists alongside the subscription, which is rare in this category. The free tier supports up to 3 members per workspace, so small collaboration does not require payment.
Cons
Free workspace storage is 10 GB with a 10 MB maximum file size, and version history on free runs 7 days. Heavier or longer-lived projects hit those limits early. AI is sold as a separate add-on at $8.9 per month billed annually rather than being included in the Pro tier. The advertised Pro price is therefore not the full price for an AI-assisted workflow.
Pricing
Free at $0 with 10 GB cloud storage, 10 MB maximum file size, up to 3 members per workspace and 7-day version history. Pro at $6.75 per month raises storage to 100 GB, file size to 100 MB, membership to 10 and history to 30 days. A Team tier covers 10-plus seats with per-seat storage. A Believer plan is a one-time $499.99 for lifetime personal use with 1 TB of storage. Enterprise contracts cover self-hosted deployment and source-code licensing.
Bottom line
The pick when you want one open-source app for both writing and diagramming, and are willing to treat AI as a separate line item.
8. Sketchboard
How it differs from Miro
Sketchboard is aimed squarely at software teams. It ships shape libraries for AWS and Google Cloud architecture, and a sketch-style rendering that keeps early diagrams from looking falsely finished.
Its pricing model is the most viewer-friendly here, and the furthest from Miro's: it bills editors and lets everyone else in free.
Pros
Unlimited free viewers on the Team and Business plans means a diagram can be shared across an engineering org at no additional cost. Extra editors are priced individually — $6 each on Starter, $5 each on Team and Business — so growth is incremental rather than stepped. Cloud architecture shape libraries are built in. Export to PDF and SVG is available from the entry tier.
Cons
Editor seats are bundled in fixed counts of 1, 5 and 10 rather than sold purely per person. A team of seven pays the ten-editor tier or adds paid extras onto the five. Storage on the entry plan is 1 GB for uploaded photos and board versions, which is modest if boards carry many screenshots.
Pricing
A free plan is available for trying the product. Starter is $6 per month with 1 editor included, or $60 per year, with extra editors at $6 each per month. Team is $20 per month with 5 editors, or $200 per year, with extra editors at $5. Business is $39 per month with 10 editors, or $390 per year, adding unlimited private teams and business admin controls.
Bottom line
The best economics on this list when many people need to read diagrams and few need to draw them.
9. Xmind
How it differs from Miro
Xmind is a mind mapper first. Where Miro gives you a blank plane, Xmind gives you a structure: a tree that branches. The tool's job is to keep that structure tidy as it grows.
It also converts maps into presentations, which is an output path neither Miro nor a general whiteboard advertises.
Pros
Its Pitch feature turns a map directly into slides, unlimited on the paid tiers, which covers the common path from brainstorm to presentation. Pricing is the lowest of any paid tier here at $4.92 per month. A dedicated education tier exists alongside individual and team plans. AI credits are included to try assisted map generation.
Cons
Free creation is capped at a limited number of manually created topics. The free tier also includes only 50 AI credits and up to 5 slides in Pitch, so the trial surface is narrow. The structural model that keeps maps tidy also means it is not suited to freeform spatial work like affinity mapping across a wide canvas.
Pricing
Free at US $0 for classic and essential mind mapping. Pro at US $4.92 per month adds advanced features and removes watermarks, with unlimited Pitch slides. Premium at US $8.25 per month adds AI-powered features and collaboration. Separate plans exist for teams and for education.
Bottom line
Choose it when the work is genuinely hierarchical and the deliverable is a presentation.
10. Visme
How it differs from Miro
Visme is a visual content platform where the whiteboard is one surface among presentations, documents, charts, infographics and forms. The center of gravity is producing branded output rather than hosting a live session the way Miro does.
That makes it an alternative for a specific failure mode: the workshop went fine, but the board cannot be shown to anyone outside the room.
Pros
Output formats span presentations, documents, charts and graphs, infographics, and forms and surveys, so one tool covers the path from raw idea to publishable asset. Unlimited projects are available even on the free plan. Brand controls target teams that need consistent output across many creators.
Cons
Template and asset access is limited on the free plan, with full access gated to paid tiers. The visual library is the main reason to pick this category of tool, and it sits partly behind the paywall. Collaboration on a live canvas is not the product's focus. It is a weaker substitute for the real-time session use case than Mural or FigJam.
Pricing
Basic at $0 per month per person with unlimited projects and limited template access. Starter at $12.25 per month per person, or $147 per year, unlocking all premium assets and templates. Pro at $24.75 per month per person, or $297 per year. Business and Enterprise tiers are listed above those.
Bottom line
The pick when the board's purpose is to become a polished artifact someone outside the team will read.
Free versus paid
Four of these tools have a free tier that is genuinely usable rather than a trial, and they fail in different places.
Excalidraw's free plan is the least restricted in terms of what you can draw. It gives full editor functions, unlimited collaborators and no time limit, but limits you to one scene. Mural's allows unlimited members but caps editable murals at three. Whimsical's caps monthly object creation at 50 and watermarks exports. Milanote's caps total content at 100 items and 10 uploads.
The pattern is worth naming. Free tiers in this category restrict one of four things: how many boards, how much content, how many people, or whether the output is clean. Work out which of those four you will hit first, and the choice narrows fast.
Paid entry points range from $4.92 per month for Xmind to $13.27 for Powerdrill Bloom, with most landing between $6 and $12. At those prices the deciding factor is rarely cost. It is whether the tool's unit — editor, member, person, or credit — matches how your team actually works.
Best for: matching the tool to the job
- Best for free use: Excalidraw, for full editor access with no time limit.
- Best for open source and self-hosting: Excalidraw and AFFiNE, both of which publish self-hosted paths.
- Best for personal use: Milanote for creative planning, Xmind for structured thinking.
- Best for facilitated workshops: Mural, with free unlimited members and dedicated facilitator controls.
- Best for design teams: FigJam, for adjacency to design files and a $3 collaborator seat.
- Best for software architecture: Sketchboard, for cloud shape libraries and free viewers.
- Best for diagrams that become documents: Whimsical, for structured editors and docs in one workspace.
- Best for turning work into polished output: Visme and Powerdrill Bloom — Visme from design templates, Powerdrill Bloom from source files and data.
Final verdict
If you want the smallest change from Miro, Mural is the substitution that requires the least re-learning, and its free tier allows unlimited members.
Your reason for leaving may be philosophical rather than practical. If you want the software to be open and hostable on your own infrastructure, Excalidraw and AFFiNE are the two real options. Excalidraw is stronger on drawing and AFFiNE on documents.
If the canvas was never the point, the last cluster is the relevant one. Visme and Powerdrill Bloom both exist to produce something shareable. Visme does it by giving you a branded template system. Powerdrill Bloom does it by generating the artifact from files and data you already have. Teams that kept using a whiteboard as a staging area for reports and decks usually belong in that group. They were never really in the whiteboard category.
FAQs
What is the best free Miro alternative? Excalidraw's free tier is the least restricted for drawing — full editor functions, unlimited collaborators and no time limit, with a one-scene cap. Mural's free plan is the better choice if you need unlimited members on a team.
Is there an open-source Miro alternative? Yes. Excalidraw is open source with a self-hostable editor, and AFFiNE is open source with self-hosted and private-cloud deployment plus commercial source-code licensing.
Can I self-host a whiteboard tool? Excalidraw and AFFiNE both publish self-hosting paths. Among the others on this list, Powerdrill Bloom offers on-premise and private-cloud deployment for data that cannot leave a network.
Which alternative is cheapest? Xmind's Pro tier at US $4.92 per month is the lowest paid entry point here. Figma's $3 Collab seat is cheaper still, but it is only available within a Professional plan.
What should I use if I need the board to become a report or deck? That is a different job from whiteboarding. Visme converts visual work into branded presentations and documents from templates, and Powerdrill Bloom generates slides, documents and spreadsheets from uploaded files and data.
Conclusion
The four things people search for alongside "Miro alternatives" — free, open source, self-hosted, personal use — map onto four different tools, not one.
Match the constraint before matching the feature list. If the constraint is budget, look at which free ceiling you hit first. If it is control over infrastructure, the open-source pair is the short list. If it is that boards keep needing to become documents, the tool should start where the source material is rather than on an empty canvas.
For that last case, try Powerdrill Bloom free and upload one file to see the path from raw content to a finished deliverable.
Sources: vendor pricing and product pages, accessed September 11, 2026 — Miro · Mural · Figma · Whimsical · Excalidraw · Milanote · AFFiNE · Sketchboard · Xmind · Visme