The Best Miro Alternatives in 2026
The best Miro alternative for most teams is Excalidraw, self-hosted on InstaPods for $3/mo flat with unlimited boards and collaborators. Miro Starter is $8 per member per month billed yearly and Business is $20. FigJam is $3 per collab seat if you already pay for Figma.
Prices verified against vendor pricing pages on 2026-08-06.
The 5 best Miro alternatives, ranked
| # | Tool | Price | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Excalidraw (self-hosted on InstaPods) Our pick | $3/mo flat, unlimited boards and collaborators | Yes (open source, MIT) | Engineering teams sketching architecture, flows and wireframes without a per-seat bill |
| 2 | tldraw | Free to use. Self-hosting the SDK commercially requires a licence | Yes (source-available SDK) | Developers embedding a canvas in their own product |
| 3 | AFFiNE (self-hosted on InstaPods) | $15/mo flat, unlimited members | Yes (open source, MIT) | Teams that want the whiteboard attached to their docs and databases |
| 4 | FigJam (Figma collab seat) | Collab seat $3/mo on Professional, $5/mo on Organization and Enterprise | No | Teams already paying for Figma who want design and whiteboard in one place |
| 5 | Miro | Free $0. Starter $8/month per member billed yearly, Business $20/month per member billed yearly | No | Facilitated workshops: templates, voting, timers, and a huge integration list |
The catch with each one
Every tool here has a real downside, including ours. These are them.
Excalidraw (self-hosted on InstaPods)
No templates library, no voting, no timers, no Jira integration. It is a whiteboard, not a workshop-facilitation suite.
tldraw
Aimed at builders more than teams. Commercial self-hosting needs a licence, so read the terms before deploying it internally.
AFFiNE (self-hosted on InstaPods)
Five times the price of Excalidraw, and you are adopting a whole workspace to get a canvas.
FigJam (Figma collab seat)
Collab seats need a paid Figma plan underneath, so the true cost is the Figma plan plus the seat.
Miro
Per-member pricing on an annual commitment. A 10-person team on Business is $200/mo, and the free plan caps editable boards.
Why people look for Miro alternatives
Miro prices per member on an annual commitment: Starter is $8 per member per month billed yearly and Business is $20. Ten people on Business is $200/mo, or $2,400 a year. The free plan exists but caps how many boards stay editable, which is usually what pushes teams to pay.
The awkward part is that a lot of teams use maybe 5% of Miro. They draw boxes and arrows to explain a system, screenshot it, and never open the board again. Paying $20 per person per month for that is the cost of the workshop features you are not using.
Excalidraw is the honest version of that use case: an MIT-licensed, hand-drawn-style whiteboard with real-time collaboration and shareable links. Self-hosted on InstaPods it is $3/mo flat on the Launch plan (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB disk) and collaborator count is not a billing dimension. It is $36 a year for the whole team.
Where Miro genuinely wins: facilitated workshops. Templates, dot voting, timers, private mode, Jira and Azure DevOps sync. If you run retros and design sprints for a living, Excalidraw will feel bare and you should keep paying Miro.
Which one should you pick?
Three situations, three different right answers.
You sketch diagrams and flows
Excalidraw on InstaPods. $3/mo flat, unlimited collaborators, and boards stored on your own server rather than a vendor cloud.
You want the whiteboard next to your docs
AFFiNE at $15/mo. The canvas, the docs and the databases live in one self-hosted workspace.
You facilitate workshops and retros
Stay on Miro. Voting, timers and its template library are the product, and no open-source whiteboard replaces them today.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free Miro alternative?
Excalidraw. It is MIT-licensed and free as software, with real-time collaboration and a public instance at excalidraw.com. Self-host it on InstaPods for $3/mo flat if you want the boards on your own server with unlimited collaborators.
How much does Miro cost per user?
Miro Starter is $8 per member per month billed yearly and Business is $20 per member per month billed yearly. There is a free plan with limits on editable boards, and Enterprise starts at 30 members with custom pricing. Prices read from Miro on 2026-08-06.
Can I self-host a collaborative whiteboard?
Yes. Excalidraw self-hosts cleanly and runs in 512 MB of RAM, which is why it fits the $3/mo Launch plan on InstaPods. AFFiNE also includes an infinite-canvas whiteboard alongside docs and databases, at $15/mo.
Does Excalidraw support real-time collaboration?
Yes. Multiple people can edit the same board at once with live cursors, and boards are shared by link. What it does not have is Miro’s workshop layer: no voting, no timers, no facilitator controls.
Deploy Excalidraw in 30 seconds
$3/mo flat on a real Linux server (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB disk), with HTTPS, a managed database where the app needs one, and nightly backups.
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