Open-source alternatives to Miro

At a glance

Open-source alternatives to Miro compared
Tool	Licence	Self-hosting difficulty	Who it suits	Strengths
Excalidraw	MIT	Easy to use in a browser. Self-hosting the drawing app is easy with Docker, but live collaboration needs extra parts	Small teams who sketch ideas, draw diagrams and run the odd workshop	No sign-up needed, hand-drawn look, end-to-end encrypted sessions, shape libraries, export to PNG and SVG

Excalidraw: MIT. The Excalidraw+ hosted service is a separate paid product. Licence checked 31 October 2026.

Miro is a very good whiteboard. It's also the sort of tool that creeps onto the bills of companies who use it for a workshop every couple of months.

The free plan lets you have unlimited team members, but only your three most recent boards stay editable. After that it's $8 per member a month on Starter, billed yearly, or $20 on Business. That's about £6 and £15. For 10 people on Starter, you're at roughly £730 a year, and on Business about £1,820.

If what you really want is somewhere to sketch a process on a video call, you probably don't need all that.

Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a free, open-source whiteboard with a deliberately hand-drawn look. Boxes come out slightly wobbly, like something on the back of an envelope. That sounds like a gimmick, but it's a clever one. A rough-looking diagram invites people to argue with it, which is exactly what you want in an early planning session.

Go to excalidraw.com and you're drawing straight away, with no account. It has:

An infinite canvas with shapes, arrows, freehand drawing and text.
Live collaboration. Start a session, send the link, and everyone draws together.
End-to-end encryption on those sessions, so what you draw isn't readable by Excalidraw's servers.
Shape libraries for common diagrams.
Export to PNG, SVG and the clipboard, plus its own open .excalidraw file, which is plain JSON you can keep.
Dark mode and a good range of languages.
No analytics or tracking in the self-hosted Docker image, according to its docs.

What it isn't is a full Miro replacement. Miro is a whole workspace for teams, with AI features and a big set of templates and integrations. Excalidraw is a very good drawing board. Think whiteboard in a meeting room, not a whole workshop facilitator's kit.

Saved boards are the other difference. The free version gives you one scene at a time, kept in your browser, and you can save it as a file. For cloud storage, folders and team sharing there's the paid Excalidraw+ at $6 per user a month, with 14% off for annual billing. That's the company behind the open-source project, and its free tier offers one scene and unlimited collaborators. It's a hosted service rather than open source, so you wouldn't be escaping a subscription, just paying a smaller one.

Should you self-host it?

Here's where most reviews get a bit optimistic. Running the drawing app yourself is simple: one Docker command and you've got your own copy at your own address.

But Excalidraw's own documentation says, at the time of writing, that self-hosting doesn't support sharing or collaboration features. To get those you need to run a separate collaboration server, and storing shared scenes relies on Firebase in the standard code. The community has built workarounds with other storage, but they're unofficial, and the settings are fixed when the app is built, so every change means a rebuild.

For a whiteboard, that's a lot of effort. I'd only do it if you've got a real reason, such as a client contract saying drawings must stay on your own systems.

Which one?

My pick is the free version at excalidraw.com. There's nothing to install, sessions are encrypted, and it costs nothing.

Main drawback: no shared library of saved team boards, unless you pay for Excalidraw+.
Excalidraw+ if you want saved team boards and can live with a small subscription.
Self-hosted Excalidraw only if drawings genuinely can't leave your own server, and you have someone technical to look after it.
Stay on Miro if you run workshops for a living, or have your team's history already stored in boards. It does much more, and that's worth paying for if you use it.

What it costs

Excalidraw is free to use at excalidraw.com. If you want saved team boards in the cloud, its paid Excalidraw+ plan is $6 per user a month, about £4.55.

Miro

Miro Starter: £6.06 per user a month, billed annually (converted from $8 at the European Central Bank reference rate on 2 October 2026). Checked 31 October 2026 (source).
Miro Business: £15.15 per user a month, billed annually (converted from $20 at the European Central Bank reference rate on 2 October 2026). Checked 31 October 2026 (source).

Self-hosted, run for you

No per-user fees. Adding people doesn't add licence costs.
Setup: a one-off fee to set it up and move your data across.
Hosting and care: a fixed monthly fee covering every app on your server.
I'll quote once I know what you need.

Paid tool prices exclude VAT unless stated.

The UK angle

This isn't a deciding factor. Whiteboards hold ideas and process diagrams, not usually customer records, and for most small firms a US or EU-hosted tool is fine. Miro's default home for data is actually the EU, on all plans, with its main data centre in Ireland and backup in Germany. The one exception it mentions is its AI features, which may be processed elsewhere.

Excalidraw's encrypted sessions give you a tidy answer if anyone asks who can read your boards. If you're sketching something sensitive, such as a client's systems or an unannounced deal, that's useful to know. But don't put personal data on a whiteboard in the first place, whichever tool you pick.

Ownership is where Excalidraw does well. Your drawing is a plain file on your own computer, so you can keep it with the project and open it in years to come. Just remember that the browser copy isn't a backup. Clear your browser data and it's gone, so save important drawings as files.

Honest drawbacks

Much less than Miro. It's a drawing board, so expect far fewer templates, workshop tools and integrations.
Free boards aren't really stored. They live in your browser unless you save a file.
Hand-drawn style won't suit everything. It's great for a workshop, but less so for a polished client-facing document.
Big boards aren't its strength. Miro is built for sprawling company-wide spaces. Excalidraw is happiest with one diagram at a time.
Self-hosted collaboration is a project in itself, as above.

Want it inside your own software?

Excalidraw is also available as an npm package that developers can embed in their own apps, and if you'd like a whiteboard built into your own system, the team at Dev Partners can help with that.