4 Best Open Source Miro Alternatives

Miro is a hosted online whiteboard used for brainstorming, diagramming, retrospectives, and workshop facilitation. Teams use it for sticky-note style collaboration, flowcharts, and templates covering everything from user story mapping to org charts, and its main value is real-time multiplayer editing that works well over video calls.

The push toward open-source alternatives usually comes from cost and control. Miro's pricing scales with the number of seats, which gets expensive for larger teams, especially since occasional whiteboard users still need a paid seat to edit boards. Boards containing sensitive product plans or strategy discussions live on Miro's servers, and exporting a board's full editable structure out of the platform isn't always straightforward, creating a soft form of lock-in around historical work.

Excalidraw is a lightweight open-source whiteboard with a distinctive hand-drawn sketch style, well suited to diagrams and quick collaborative drawing, and it can be self-hosted or embedded into internal tools. AFFiNE takes a broader approach, combining a whiteboard canvas with document and database features in one workspace, aimed at teams that want whiteboarding alongside notes rather than as a standalone tool.

When evaluating alternatives, check real-time collaboration performance with the number of simultaneous editors your team actually uses, since this is where hosted tools with dedicated infrastructure tend to have an edge over self-hosted setups on modest servers. Look at the template library and integrations if your team relies heavily on pre-built workshop formats. Also consider export formats, since being able to get diagrams out as standard image or vector files matters for including them in other documents regardless of which tool you settle on.