The best Miro alternatives, compared honestly
Miro is still the most complete workshop canvas you can buy: 7,000+ templates, 250+ integrations, voting, timers, private mode and facilitation tools nothing else on this list matches. What sends teams looking is not a price rise, and there is no dated one to point at. It is one sentence on Miro's own pricing page: the free plan lets you "create and share unlimited boards" and keeps "three most recent ones" editable. Everything older locks to view-only, you do not choose which three, and the full-fidelity backup that would let you leave is itself a paid feature. This page compares 7 alternatives on what their free tier really counts, whether they can import a Miro board, and what you can export and keep.
The best Miro alternative depends on what's actually hurting:
- You need your existing boards to come with you → FigJam: the only first-party Miro importer, and a comment-only seat costs $3.
- You want custody of your work → Excalidraw: MIT, self-hostable, saves to plain
.excalidrawJSON. - You run big facilitated workshops → Mural: closest like-for-like at $9.99, and guests plus visitors are free on every paid plan.
- Your archive should not count against you → Whimsical: the only free tier where private boards are unlimited and only team boards are metered.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Miro
Miro did not get worse at its job, and we found no dated price increase to blame, despite what a lot of listicles imply. Every recurring complaint is about the same thing: the mechanics of the free tier and what happens to your boards when you stop paying.
The three editable boards rotate, and you do not pick them
Miro's pricing page promises unlimited boards and three editable ones: "Three most recent ones will remain editable". The window is assigned by recency, so creating a fourth board silently pushes your oldest active board into view-only. Miro's Help Center offers three workarounds: delete an active board, duplicate an inactive one, or upgrade.
The exit door is behind the paywall
The .rtb board backup is Miro's only full-fidelity export, and a Miro moderator states it plainly on Miro's own forum: "the ability to backup and restore a board is only available through one of the paid plans." On Free, the pricing table lists board exports as low-res only. High-resolution and vector JPG or PDF starts at Starter.
A guest costs two tiers, not one
Miro's pricing FAQ says "the Free plan has no Guest role". Visitors on Free are view-only, visitor editing starts at Starter, and unlimited guests arrive at Business, €20 per member per month billed yearly. Mural gives you guests and view-only visitors free on every paid plan; FigJam charges $3 for a Collab seat.
There is no bulk export
Boards come out one at a time. Figma states this in its own migration doc, and Miro's community has a long-running feature request for bulk board export. For a workspace with two years of workshops, the export itself becomes the migration project.
The import arrow only points one way
Miro publishes importers from Lucidchart, Lucidspark, Mural, FigJam, Jamboard, Visio and Draw.io. No competitor reads .rtb, whose inner JSON Miro encrypted. Every documented route out of Miro runs through a flattened PDF, and the one native importer that exists needs a vector PDF you can only produce on a paid plan.
Who holds your files is not an abstract question
Miro acquired Freehand from InVision in late 2023 and committed, in a post dated 4 January 2024, to honour subscriptions and finish folding Freehand into Miro by summer 2024. InVision shut down on 31 December 2024 and permanently deleted all remaining content. Miro is the survivor in that story, not the casualty, but it is a fair prompt to check what you could take with you.
The shortlist
7 Miro alternatives worth evaluating
The category splits into two jobs that get sold as one: the workshop platform (voting, timers, facilitation, templates, a room full of people) and the shared canvas (a place to sketch a system together). Tools built for the first are priced per member and proprietary; tools built for the second can be open source and local-first. This ranking optimises for who most teams should pick, and every card lists one honest strength and one real weakness.
Figma documents File, Import, Miro, available on any team or plan, and the 2025 seat model prices a comment-only person at $3 Collab against $12 Dev and $16 Full. Viewers and commenters are free on paid plans. Weakness: the importer needs a vector PDF, a paid Miro feature, so free Miro users cannot use the front door, and the free Starter tier is one team with 3 files, no better than Miro.
MIT across the whole repository (there is no excalidraw-app carve-out, contrary to a common claim), 130k stars, pushed 2026-08-16. The editor at excalidraw.com meters nothing, and files save as .excalidraw plain JSON plus SVG and PNG on the free tier. Excalidraw Plus is $6 per user per month. Weakness: no Miro importer, no workshop toolkit, and self-hosted multiplayer needs the separate excalidraw-room server with no server-side persistence in the stock image.
The other full-fat enterprise whiteboard: $9.99 per member per month billed annually ($12 monthly), Business $17.99, no seat minimum. The single clearest improvement on Miro's model is that guests and visitors are free on paid plans, where Miro has no guest role at all until €20 Business. Weakness: the same 3-editable-mural free trap, no route in from Miro, and a smaller template and integration ecosystem.
$9 Individual, $10 per user Team, billed annually, and the free tier states "Unlimited shapes per Lucidspark board". Worth correcting: the 60-object cap listicles pin on Lucidspark belongs to Lucidchart, a different product. Weakness: still three editable boards on Free, guest collaborators only on Team, a 7-day trial that wants a card, and constant pull toward buying Lucidchart alongside it.
Local-first workspace where a page and an infinite edgeless canvas are two views of one file. Free local use is unlimited; cloud free gives 10 GB and 3 members, Pro is $6.75 per month annually, Team $10 per seat. Weakness: the licence is split, and the split matters. The editor is MIT, but packages/backend/server carries the AFFiNE Enterprise Edition licence, which conditions production use on a subscription. Source-available, not open source.
The only free plan here that separates the two kinds of board: 3 team boards and 3 teams, but unlimited private boards, plus 10 guests. Your personal backlog never touches the counter. Pro is $10 per editor per month annually, Business $20. Weakness: deliberately not a Miro clone. For a 30-person facilitated workshop with voting, timers and sticky-note clustering, it is the wrong shape.
An Excalidraw-based canvas inside your own Nextcloud, so boards are ordinary files in storage you control. AGPL-3.0, clean OSI copyleft, v1.5.9 released 2026-05-29, pushed 2026-08-17. No per-seat price at all. Weakness: 207 stars is a small project by this list's standards, the whiteboard server is a separate Docker service you have to run, and the feature set is thin next to Miro's templates and facilitation tools.
Deliberately left out: tldraw, whose licence conditions include "Not to use the Software in Production Environments" and licence-key plus watermark enforcement, and whose commercial pricing is "value-based" with no published figure; Canva Whiteboards, whose pricing page returns HTTP 403 to verification and which is a design suite with a whiteboard mode rather than a whiteboard product; and Milanote, kept in the meter table below for contrast but not ranked, because a moodboard tool is a different category from a workshop canvas.
Side by side
Miro alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page. The column that decides most migrations is "Export you can keep", not price: four tools here converge on three free boards, so the free tier is not the differentiator, and what you can walk out with is. Miro's own row is the baseline.
| Tool | Free tier meters | Free ceiling | Import from Miro | Export you can keep | Cheapest paid, yearly | Self-host / licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miro | Editable boards, rotating by recency | 3 most recent; unlimited created | n/a | ✗ .rtb is encrypted, Miro-only and paid-plan only; free exports low-res |
€8 / $8 per member | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| FigJam | Files in the single free team | 3 files, 1 folder, 1 team | ✓ native, needs a Miro vector PDF (paid Miro feature) | PDF, PNG, SVG; .fig is proprietary |
$3 Collab / $12 Dev / $16 Full | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Excalidraw | Nothing in the open editor; scenes in Plus | Unmetered editor; 1 scene on Plus free | ✗ none | ✓ .excalidraw JSON, SVG, PNG, all free |
$6 per user (Plus) | ✓ MIT, Docker; multiplayer needs excalidraw-room |
| Mural | Editable murals | 3 at a time; unlimited view-only visitors | ✗ none first-party | PDF, image | $9.99 per member | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Lucidspark | Editable boards | 3 boards, unlimited shapes per board | Partial: via Miro's paid .rtb backup |
PDF, image | $9 Individual / $10 Team | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| AFFiNE | Cloud storage and members | 10 GB, 3 members, 7-day history | ✗ none | Markdown, PDF, HTML; local-first files | $6.75 Pro / $10 per seat Team | Editor MIT; backend under AFFiNE EE licence (source-available) |
| Whimsical | Team boards only | 3 team boards, 3 teams, unlimited private boards, 10 guests | ✗ none | PDF, PNG, SVG | $10 per editor | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Nextcloud Whiteboard | Nothing; your own storage | Whatever your server has | ✗ none | ✓ Excalidraw-format files in your storage | $0 licence, you pay in hosting | ✓ AGPL-3.0; separate Docker backend required |
Currency note: miro.com/pricing serves EUR from the EU and USD from the US with identical numerals (8 / 20 yearly, 10 / 25 monthly per member), so a dollar figure copied from a US listicle is not the price an EU team pays. Miro's Enterprise tier starts at 30 members. Every other figure above is USD as published. Milanote, not ranked, is the outlier meter worth knowing: it counts objects, 100 notes, images or links plus 10 file uploads, rather than boards. Pricing and free tiers change often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Miro · Figma · Excalidraw · Mural · Lucidspark · AFFiNE · Whimsical · Nextcloud Whiteboard · FigJam Miro importer
A fair call
When Miro is still the right choice
Migrating costs more than the subscription you save. Boards come out one at a time, comments do not travel, and templates, charts and third-party widgets flatten into images. If your team runs real workshops, the honest advice is to price the facilitation features you would lose before you price the seats.
Miro is still right if…
- You facilitate sessions for more than a handful of people. Timer, voting, private mode, Engage activities, 7,000+ templates and 250+ integrations have no equivalent below the Business tier anywhere else on this list.
- Your team is small and your board count is genuinely low. The rotating three-board window is only painful once you keep an archive, and for two or three living boards the free plan costs nothing and does everything.
- You are the destination rather than the origin. Miro is the tool with importers from Lucidchart, Lucidspark, Mural, FigJam, Jamboard, Visio and Draw.io, so consolidating scattered canvases into one place is the case Miro serves best.
- You are about to leave. Pay for one month of Starter first, pull high-resolution vector PDFs and
.rtbbackups of everything you care about, and downgrade after. It is the cheapest insurance on this page.
Look elsewhere if…
- Your existing boards have to come with you: FigJam is the only native import path, and it needs a paid Miro vector export as input.
- Most of the people who touch a board only read or comment on it: Mural makes guests and visitors free on paid plans, and FigJam's Collab seat is $3.
- You want the file, not the account: Excalidraw is MIT and writes plain JSON you can read in ten years without a subscription.
- You keep a large personal archive and refuse to have it metered: Whimsical counts only team boards and leaves private boards unlimited.
- Compliance says the data stays on your hardware: Nextcloud Whiteboard is AGPL-3.0 and stores boards as files in your own Nextcloud.
Common questions
Common questions about Miro alternatives
What is the best Miro alternative in 2026?
FigJam, for most teams, because it is the only tool with a first-party Miro importer and the only one that prices a comment-only person honestly at 3 dollars a seat. If what you want is custody of your work rather than a like-for-like canvas, Excalidraw is the better answer: MIT licensed, self-hostable, and it saves to a plain JSON file you can read without Excalidraw. If you run large facilitated workshops and need the full Miro feature set, Mural is the closest match, and it makes guests and view-only visitors free on every paid plan.
What happens to my Miro boards if I downgrade to the free plan?
Nothing is deleted. Miro keeps every board you created, but only three of them stay editable, and Miro picks which three: the pricing page says you can create and share unlimited boards and that the three most recent ones will remain editable. Everything older is locked view-only, and you cannot pin which boards stay active, so making a new board pushes your oldest active board into read-only. Before you downgrade, note that downloading a full board backup is a paid feature and free accounts export in low resolution only.
How many boards does Miro's free plan really give you?
Three editable boards, on a rotating window. That is the same ceiling as Mural with three editable murals at a time, Lucidspark with three editable boards and Whimsical with three team boards, so three is the category convention rather than a Miro-specific squeeze. The difference is the rotation rule. Miro is the one that assigns the three by recency instead of letting you pin them, and Whimsical is the one that exempts private boards from the count entirely, so your personal archive never hits the meter.
Can I export my Miro boards and take them somewhere else?
Only partly, and only if you pay. Miro's full-fidelity export is the .rtb board backup, which is a paid-plan feature and imports only back into Miro, because the JSON inside the ZIP is encrypted. On the free plan exports are low resolution only; high-resolution and vector JPG or PDF export starts at Starter. There is also no bulk board export, so a large archive has to be exported one board at a time. Miro publishes importers from Lucidchart, Lucidspark, Mural, FigJam, Jamboard, Visio and Draw.io, and no competitor reads .rtb.
Which Miro alternative can actually import my Miro boards?
FigJam is the only one with a first-party importer. Figma documents File, then Import, then Miro, it works on any team or plan, and anyone with edit access in a FigJam file can run it. The catch is the input format: Figma's own instructions require you to export from Miro with Export image as Vector, which saves as a PDF and is a paid Miro feature. Comments and right-to-left text do not come across, and templates, charts and third-party widgets flatten into images or shapes. No other tool here has a native Miro importer.
Is there a truly open-source Miro alternative I can self-host?
Excalidraw is the cleanest answer: MIT across the repository with no directory carve-out, self-hostable with Docker, and it saves to .excalidraw, plain JSON you can read without the app. Two honest caveats: the stock image has no server-side persistence, so boards live in the browser until you add a storage backend, and real-time collaboration needs the separate excalidraw-room server. AFFiNE is MIT in the editor but its backend directory carries the AFFiNE Enterprise Edition licence, which conditions production use on a subscription. Nextcloud Whiteboard is AGPL-3.0 and needs its own Docker backend.
Is tldraw a free open-source alternative to Miro?
Not for a company. The tldraw SDK ships under tldraw's own licence, not an OSI-approved one, and its conditions include not using the software in production environments and not interfering with licence-key enforcement, backed by technical measures that ensure watermark display. The pricing page offers a commercial licence on value-based pricing with no published figure, currency or billing cycle. The hosted tldraw.com is an excellent free scratchpad, and the project is very much alive, but the SDK is something you negotiate for rather than a licensable Miro replacement.