Replacements

Open source alternatives to Miro

Excalidraw covers the part of Miro most people actually use: a shared canvas for diagrams and rough thinking, with a hand drawn look that keeps a sketch from reading as a decision. It is deliberately much smaller than Miro.

What you are replacing

Miro sells the infinite canvas plus everything built on it: templates, voting, timers, facilitation for a workshop with twenty people. If you run workshops, that scaffolding is the product.

The candidates

excalidraw/excalidraw

TypeScript · MIT

Why it fits

For architecture sketches, flows and the diagram that has to go in a document tomorrow, it is faster than Miro and produces something that looks like a sketch, which is honest about how settled the thinking is. It runs in a browser and can be self hosted, so a diagram does not have to live in a vendor's account.

What it does not replace

It is a drawing surface, not a facilitation product. Templates, voting and structured workshop tooling are absent, and a large simultaneous session is not what it is built for.

Read the full review

When to stay put

Stay on Miro when the canvas is where meetings happen rather than where diagrams get made. Replacing a workshop tool with a sketchpad is a downgrade dressed as a saving.

All replacement guides