Open source alternatives to Miro

What Miro does

Miro is an online collaboration canvas. Teams fill infinite boards with sticky notes, shapes, connectors, drawings and images, starting from a library of more than 7,000 templates for brainstorming, mapping, retrospectives and planning. The canvas also holds docs, tables, timelines, Kanban boards and slides. Paid plans add facilitation tools such as a timer, voting and private mode, workspaces and guest access, shape libraries for technical diagrams, prototypes, more than 250 integrations and AI features measured in credits.

Why people look for an alternative

• Free plan limits. On the Free plan only the three most recently used boards stay editable. Unlimited and private boards need a paid plan priced per member.
• Workshop tools behind paid tiers. Timer, voting, high-resolution export and custom fonts start on the Starter plan; workspaces, guests and technical diagramming on Business.
• Data location. Miro’s privacy policy says data may be transferred to and processed in the United States, under Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Its trust center lists AWS as infrastructure provider, with data residency available for Australia, the EU, the US and Japan.
• Exports are not editable boards. Boards can be downloaded as images, PDF or a CSV file of their text, which makes moving to another tool a matter of rebuilding.
• No self-hosting. Miro is available only as a hosted service.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Live collaboration where you host it. Check that several people can draw at once on your own install, not only on the developers’ cloud.
2. Workshop features. Sticky notes, templates, voting and timers are where most open source whiteboards are thinner than Miro.
3. Drawing and diagram tools. Freehand drawing, shapes, connectors that stay attached, and shape libraries.
4. Access. Whether guests can join with a link, and how you restrict who can open a board.
5. Storage format. Whether boards are kept in an open or readable format you can back up.
6. Running it. A static site, a single container, or a stack with a database.

Which one to choose

Excalidraw is the most capable open source whiteboard for sketching and explaining: shapes, arrows that stay attached, text, images, shape libraries and conversion of Mermaid diagrams, with end-to-end encrypted collaboration on its hosted site. Its documentation says a self-hosted instance does not support collaboration without extra work, so it suits teams who are happy with the public app or who will wire up the collaboration server themselves.

WBO is the simpler choice when the board must run on your own server with live collaboration built in. It runs in one container, saves each board as an SVG file and needs almost no maintenance, but it covers only freehand drawing and basic shapes, without sticky notes, templates or voting.

For structured diagrams, draw.io is a better fit than either, though its self-hosted build has no live co-editing. Teachers presenting in a classroom should look at OpenBoard.