Excalidraw vs Miro
Miro is free until you need a fourth editable board, then it is $8 per member per month billed annually and $20 on Business. Excalidraw is an open-source whiteboard with the hand-drawn look, no board limit and no seat count, served from your own pod for $3/mo.
Excalidraw vs Miro: The Verdict
Be clear about what each one is. Miro is a multiplayer workspace: persistent cloud boards, live cursors, 7,000+ templates, voting and timers for workshops, and two-way integrations with Jira, Asana and Linear. Excalidraw is a drawing tool that opens in under a second and makes diagrams that look sketched rather than corporate. Self-hosted Excalidraw on InstaPods serves the app itself from your pod: scenes are kept in your browser and in .excalidraw files you export, and there is no board database. Live collaboration does work in the self-hosted build, but be clear about what that means. The production build ships pointing at the public Excalidraw collaboration server and its Firebase room store, so a shared session is end-to-end encrypted with a key that stays in the URL fragment, and it does not run on your pod. You get multiplayer sketching. You do not get named, persistent, permissioned boards. That is the honest trade. If your whiteboard use is architecture sketches, wireframes and diagrams you paste into docs and tickets, Excalidraw does it better and costs $36 a year. If you run remote workshops with a dozen people on one board, pay Miro, or self-host AFFiNE, whose edgeless canvas has a real backend behind it.
Last updated: 2026-08-06Quick Comparison
| Feature | Miro | Excalidraw |
|---|---|---|
| Price, 5 people | $40/mo on Starter billed annually ($480/yr) | $3/mo flat ($36/yr) |
| Month-to-month price | $10 Starter, $25 Business per member per month | $3/mo, no annual lock-in |
| Free tier | Yes, but only the 3 most recent boards stay editable | Not applicable - the software is free, you pay for the pod |
| Board limit | Unlimited from Starter up | No limit, and no board concept to meter |
| Per-seat pricing | Yes. $8 Starter, $20 Business per member per month billed annually | No. Anyone with the URL can use it |
| Real-time multiplayer | Yes, live cursors and presence | Yes, but the session runs on the public Excalidraw collab server, not your pod |
| Persistent cloud boards | Yes, named boards in a workspace | No. Scenes live in your browser and as .excalidraw files |
| Templates | 7,000+ | A libraries ecosystem, much smaller |
| Workshop tooling | Timer, voting, facilitation tools | None |
| Diagram quality | Clean vector, 4,700+ shapes on Business | Hand-drawn style that reads as a sketch, not a spec |
| Speed to first stroke | Sign in, load workspace, open board | Load the page and draw |
| AI credits | 25/member/mo on Starter, 50 on Business | None, nothing metered |
| Where your drawings live | Miro cloud | Your browser, plus files you export. Encrypted in transit during a shared session |
| License | Proprietary subscription | MIT, ~124,000 GitHub stars |
Where Miro Gets Expensive
Trade-offs to weigh before committing.
The Free Plan Expires Board by Board
Miro Free lets you create unlimited boards but keeps only the three most recent ones editable. Everything older becomes read-only, which turns the free tier into a countdown rather than a plan.
It Is Priced Per Member
Starter is $8 per member per month billed annually and $10 month-to-month. Business is $20 annually and $25 month-to-month. Five people on Starter is $480 a year for a whiteboard, and Enterprise has a 30-member minimum.
The Features You Want Are One Tier Up
Unlimited workspaces, unlimited guests, the 4,700+ shape diagramming set, interactive prototypes and two-way Jira and Linear sync are all Business at $20 per member per month, not Starter at $8.
Your Boards Are Not Files
A Miro board lives in Miro. You can export images and PDFs, but the board itself does not leave as a portable document you can commit to a repository next to the code it describes.
Why Self-Host with Excalidraw?
What you get when you pick this stack.
Nobody Counts Members
There are no seats to buy, no members to invite and no boards to run out of. One $3/mo Launch pod (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB storage) serves the app to your whole team on your own domain.
No Board Database Anywhere
The pod serves the Excalidraw application as a static build behind nginx. Scenes stay in your browser and in .excalidraw files you save, so nothing is holding your architecture diagrams in a searchable store. Start a shared session and the drawing is end-to-end encrypted with a key that never leaves the URL fragment.
Diagrams as Files You Can Commit
An .excalidraw file is JSON. Put it in the repository beside the service it documents, diff it, review it in a pull request, and export a PNG or SVG for the README. That workflow does not exist in a hosted board tool.
The Sketch Look Is the Feature
Hand-drawn boxes and arrows signal draft, which is exactly what you want on an architecture diagram nobody should mistake for a finished spec. It is the reason Excalidraw spread through engineering teams that already had Miro.
Real Cost Comparison
A five-person engineering team sketching architecture diagrams and wireframes.
- Miro Starter: $8 per member per month, billed annually
- 5 members: $40/mo, $480/yr
- Business, for unlimited guests and two-way Jira sync, is $20 per member per month
- Free plan keeps only the 3 most recent boards editable
- InstaPods Launch plan: $3/mo
- Excalidraw: free and open source (MIT)
- No seats, no board limit, nothing metered
- Scenes stored in your browser and as .excalidraw files
Frequently Asked Questions
Is self-hosted Excalidraw a full Miro replacement?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise has not run a workshop. Miro gives you persistent shared boards, live cursors, 7,000+ templates, voting and timers, and deep project-tool integrations. Self-hosted Excalidraw does support live collaboration, but through the public Excalidraw collab server rather than your pod, and it has no server-side board storage, so a session is something you start and share rather than a board that lives somewhere. For diagrams, wireframes and quick sketches it beats Miro on speed and on price. For facilitated group sessions it does not compete.
How much does Miro cost in 2026?
Miro lists Free with the three most recent boards editable, Starter at $8 per member per month billed annually or $10 month-to-month, Business at $20 annually or $25 month-to-month, and custom Enterprise pricing with a 30-member minimum. Prices checked on miro.com on 6 August 2026.
Where are my drawings saved?
In your browser local storage, and in the .excalidraw files you export. The pod serves the application, not your scenes, which means nothing you draw is sitting in a database anywhere. The practical workflow is to keep working files in the repository or a synced folder and treat the pod as the app you load them into.
Can two people draw on the same board?
Yes, with a caveat worth knowing. Excalidraw builds ship pointing at the public Excalidraw collaboration server, so starting a shared session works out of the box on your self-hosted copy, with live cursors and end-to-end encryption using a key that stays in the URL fragment. What it is not is self-hosted collaboration: that session runs on Excalidraw infrastructure, not on your pod, and it ends when everyone leaves rather than persisting as a named board. If you need multi-user editing that runs entirely on hardware you control, self-host AFFiNE, whose edgeless canvas is backed by PostgreSQL on your own pod.
Why self-host Excalidraw at all when excalidraw.com is free?
Two reasons. It runs on your own domain, so it survives the public instance changing, rate-limiting or going away, and it is available inside a network that does not reach the public internet. Some teams also have a policy against pasting internal architecture into a third-party web app, even one that stores locally.
What does Excalidraw need to run?
Almost nothing. The InstaPods image builds the app from source with Node 22 and then serves the static output with nginx, so at runtime it is a web server handing out files. The $3/mo Launch plan with 1 vCPU and 512 MB of RAM is genuinely enough, and it will serve a large team without moving up a tier.
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