Excalidraw — Free Alternative to Miro

At a glance

GitHub repo

excalidraw/excalidraw

GitHub stars

135,477 (checked 11 November 2026)

Licence

MIT

Main language

TypeScript

Replaces

Miro

Paid price it replaces

$8/user/month (Starter, billed annually; $10/user/month billed monthly)

Best for

Anyone sketching architecture diagrams, brainstorming or teaching who has hit Miro's 3-board free limit.

Prices were checked on the vendor's pricing page on 11 November 2026 and may have changed since. Star counts are a snapshot from the same date.

What Excalidraw does

Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard for diagrams, wireframes and mind maps, drawn in a friendly hand-drawn style. It runs in the browser, supports real-time collaboration, and needs no account to start: open the site and draw. Boards are saved as open JSON files, so your work is portable and never locked into a proprietary format.

The comparison is Miro, whose Starter plan costs $8 per user per month billed annually ($10 billed monthly). Miro's free plan allows only three editable boards, which is the limit most people hit first. Excalidraw has no board limit at all — make as many diagrams as you like, for architecture sketches, brainstorming, teaching or planning.

The hand-drawn look is a deliberate choice, not a limitation. It makes technical diagrams feel approachable and makes rough ideas look intentionally rough, which suits early-stage thinking. For polished presentation diagrams you can still export clean images, and the library feature lets you save reusable shapes and components.

Excalidraw is also a library you can embed in your own app, which is how many products get a whiteboard without building one. For most people, though, the website is enough: no install, no sign-up, no board counter. If you draw diagrams every week and Miro's free tier keeps stopping you at three boards, this is the replacement.

Why it is worth using for free

• No account needed and no limit on the number of boards — Miro's free plan allows only 3 editable boards
• Files are open JSON, so your diagrams are portable and never locked in
• Real-time collaboration and a hand-drawn style that suits brainstorming and teaching
• Also available as an embeddable library, or self-hosted with npm

How to use Excalidraw

Open excalidraw.com and start drawing — nothing to install and no account to create. Use the shape tools for boxes, arrows and text, and save your board as a file or share a collaboration link.

To self-host, clone the repo and run `npm start`, or embed the Excalidraw library in your own application following the docs in the repo.

Frequently asked questions