WBO

What WBO does

WBO (short for whitebophir) is an online whiteboard reduced to the essentials. You open a board by its URL, pick a tool and draw; everyone else on the same board sees the strokes appear as you make them, along with the other users’ cursors. The toolset is deliberately small: freehand pencil, straight lines, rectangles, ellipses, text, an eraser, a hand tool for moving things, a grid, zoom and a download button. There is no sign-up step. Boards are either the shared public board, a private board with a random name that only people with the link can find, or a named board with a URL you choose.

The project positions it for drawing, teaching, design sketches and collaborative diagrams. It works well as a shared scratch surface for a remote lesson or a quick architecture discussion.

Storage and access control

Each board is saved on the server as an SVG file, and any board can be downloaded as a standalone SVG through its preview address. Because the stored file is a standard vector format, backups are just a copy of the data directory and old boards remain readable without WBO.

By default anyone who knows a board’s URL can open and edit it. For private deployments, setting a secret key turns on JSON Web Token authentication: tokens carry global or board-specific roles (reader, editor, moderator), and a token that names boards can open only those boards. WBO does not issue tokens itself, so you generate them from your own application or login system. A board can also be marked read-only by setting a flag in its stored SVG. Recent versions add moderation tools for busy boards: user reports, warnings, temporary bans and temporary moderators, plus per-IP rate limits on drawing actions.

Self-hosting WBO

Self-hosting is one of WBO’s main attractions. The official Docker image runs the whole application in one container, with a mounted folder for the board files. Without Docker, it needs Node.js 22 or later and a single npm start. There is no database, and settings are environment variables: data directory, URL subfolder for reverse proxies, rate limits, which header to trust for client IPs, and the JWT secret. Logs go to standard output, and OpenTelemetry export can be switched on for monitoring.

The README is candid about the limits of this design. Edits are written to disk asynchronously, so a crash can lose changes made since the last save, and only one server process may use a given board directory, so WBO scales up rather than out.

Hosted version

The developer runs a free public instance at wbo.ophir.dev, with the anonymous public board and private boards. It has published community rules and states that it operates under French law. There is no paid plan or commercial edition.

Limitations

WBO is not a workshop platform. It has no sticky notes, connectors, images, templates, frames, comments or voting, and no user accounts. Compared with Miro it covers only live freehand drawing and basic shapes. Access control requires you to issue JWTs yourself, and the single-process storage model suits small and medium use rather than large organizations.

Who it suits

WBO fits teachers, small teams and communities who want a private live whiteboard they can deploy in minutes on a small server and keep running with almost no maintenance. If you need richer diagramming, Excalidraw and draw.io offer more tools, though their self-hosted builds do not include live collaboration out of the box. For a classroom board on a local interactive display rather than in the browser, see OpenBoard.