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Whiteboarding 2 alternatives tracked

Open-source alternatives to Miro

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform used for product workshops, design thinking, sprint planning, and team retrospectives. It provides templates for common facilitation frameworks (user story mapping, journey mapping, affinity diagramming) and real-time co-editing with video calling embedded. Enterprises use it for large-scale async visual collaboration across distributed teams.

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The alternatives

excalidraw

★ 122,566 TypeScript MIT

Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams

excalidraw/excalidraw Updated 2026-05-05

tldraw

★ 46,829 TypeScript NOASSERTION

very good whiteboard infinite canvas SDK

tldraw/tldraw Updated 2026-05-05

Comparison notes

Excalidraw (MIT) provides an open-source infinite canvas whiteboard with real-time collaboration via its cloud version or self-hosted backend. Tldraw provides a cleaner structured whiteboard with SDK capabilities. The main gaps vs. Miro: Miro's template library for structured facilitation frameworks (sprint retrospectives, journey maps, business model canvas) is extensive — Excalidraw requires manually creating these. Miro's Jira, Confluence, and Asana integrations for embedding live project data into boards have no OSS equivalent. Self-hosting Excalidraw requires deploying a room server for persistent collaboration.

Migration tips

  • Export Miro boards as PDF, PNG, or CSV — there is no structured data export preserving interactive elements
  • Recreate frequently used Miro templates in Excalidraw or tldraw and save them as your team's starting templates
  • Install the Excalidraw backend (excalidraw-room or equivalent) for persistent multi-user collaboration
  • Update team norms for async collaboration — Miro's cursors, video, and co-editing features differ in Excalidraw
  • Export any embedded images, sticky notes, and diagrams from Miro boards you want to archive

FAQ

Can I fully replace Miro with an OSS tool?

Feature parity varies. Most OSS alternatives cover 70-90% of core workflows, but may lack polish, integrations, or specialized features. Pilot the alternative with a subset of your team before fully committing.

What's the cost of self-hosting?

Plan for ~$5-50/month in VPS costs (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc.) plus 2-8 hours/month in maintenance. For a team of 20+, self-hosting usually breaks even against SaaS pricing within 6-12 months.

Which alternative should I pick?

Sort by GitHub stars (a proxy for community health), check the last-pushed date (avoid unmaintained projects), and read recent issues to gauge responsiveness.