head to head
Miro vs Excalidraw
Excalidraw is the open source alternative to Miro — online collaborative whiteboard. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Excalidraw is a viable free replacement for Miro. Excalidraw is open source under MIT, written in TypeScript, with 132,233 GitHub stars, 15,326 forks and 3,445 open issues; it was last pushed 5 hours ago. Miro costs from $8, while self-hosting Excalidraw carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 1 other open source Miro alternative is tracked here, led by Affine at 72,715 stars. Excalidraw ranks #1 of 2 tracked open source Miro alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Affine (72,715 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Excalidraw and 3 reasons to stay on Miro.
choose Excalidraw if
- Your Miro bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Miro if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Miro integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Excalidraw (open source) | Miro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free / $8-16/user/month |
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — excalidraw/excalidraw | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 132K · ⑂ 15K | — |
| Built with | TypeScript | — |
Why people look for a Miro alternative
About Excalidraw
Excalidraw is an open source virtual whiteboard application built in TypeScript, designed for sketching hand drawn style diagrams, wireframes, and freeform ideas. It lives within the web based productivity and design visualization ecosystem, offering a lightweight alternative to commercial tools like Figma, Miro, and Canva. The project includes both a standalone web app at excalidraw.com and an embeddable npm package for integration into third party applications.
read the full Excalidraw overview →
Other open source alternatives to Miro
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Excalidraw a good replacement for Miro?
Excalidraw is an open source alternative to Miro (Online collaborative whiteboard). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under MIT, with 132,233 GitHub stars.
Is Excalidraw free compared to Miro?
Yes. Excalidraw is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Miro is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Miro to Excalidraw?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Excalidraw's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.