Best open-source alternatives to Miro

Excalidraw is an open source whiteboard and sketching tool designed for creating hand-drawn style diagrams, wireframes, and other visual explanations. It is available both as an embeddable npm package and as a hosted web app at excalidraw.com. The project is aimed at developers, teams, and users who want a lightweight drawing experience with collaboration features. The hosted app supports real-time collaboration, end-to-end encryption, PWA/offline use, local-first autosaving to the browser, and shareable read-only links, while the library version provides core drawing features such as shapes, arrows, zooming, export, and localization.

AFFiNE is an open-source workspace platform designed for writing, drawing, planning, and organizing knowledge in one place. It combines document editing and whiteboard-style canvas interactions, aiming to serve users who want a Notion- and Miro-like experience in a single product. The project emphasizes a local-first approach, so users keep data on their own devices while still getting real-time sync and collaboration across web and cross-platform clients. It also includes AI-assisted creation workflows, such as turning outlines into slides or summaries into mind maps, and supports self-hosting for teams or individuals who want more control over deployment and data.

tldraw is a React SDK for building infinite canvas applications. It is aimed at developers who want to create whiteboarding, diagramming, drawing, collaboration, or other canvas-based products without starting from scratch. The README emphasizes that the library provides a feature-complete canvas engine and a set of primitives that can be extended into custom experiences. The project supports building on top of default whiteboarding tools or constructing entirely new interactions with custom shapes, tools, bindings, UI components, side effects, and event hooks. It also highlights real-time multiplayer via a self-hostable sync layer, runtime control through the Editor API, and support for AI-driven canvas workflows. The SDK is presented as browser-based and cross-device, with starter kits available for common app patterns such as collaboration, agent workflows, chat, branching chat, and shader-based experiences.

draw.io is a diagramming and whiteboarding application aimed at users who need to create and edit diagrams in a browser or as a desktop app. The README describes it as configurable and notes that it is jointly developed and maintained by the project’s core team. The project can be run in several ways: as a fully functional editor hosted on GitHub Pages without integrations, through an official Docker image, or by downloading the desktop application. It also provides packaged .war files on the releases page. The README explicitly states that this version does not support real-time collaborative editing and that it is not an SVG editor, while SVG export is intended for embedding in web pages.

WBO is a web-based collaborative whiteboard designed for groups that need to draw and edit together in real time. It supports many simultaneous users on a shared board, with updates broadcast instantly and board contents persisted so sessions can continue over time. The project is intended for self-hosting as well as use through a public demonstration server. It can be run either in Docker or directly with Node.js, and it includes configuration for authentication via JWT, board-specific access control, reverse-proxy deployment, and metrics export for self-hosted monitoring. The README also highlights use cases such as art, entertainment, design, and teaching.

Drawpile is a cross-platform drawing application built for real-time collaboration. It allows multiple people to draw, paint, and animate together on the same canvas, and it runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android. The project is aimed at artists, groups, and communities that want a shared digital canvas rather than a single-user illustration tool. Its README points users to downloadable builds, source compilation instructions, and support channels, and it also notes browser-accessible community chat options for getting help. The client depends on several shared libraries, and the build process includes pinned dependency versions and integrity checks for upstream sources.

OurBoard is an online whiteboard application aimed at people who want a simpler, self-hostable alternative to tools like Miro. It lets users create boards, add notes and images, organize content with areas and connections, and collaborate through shared board links. The README describes it as free to use and available both as a hosted service and as software that can be deployed independently. It supports lightweight access control, including Google sign-in for private boards and board sharing restricted by email or domain. For integration and automation, it exposes a limited HTTP API for creating, updating, exporting, and listing boards and board history, and it also includes a GitHub Issues integration via webhook. The project is built with TypeScript, Express, WebSockets, and PostgreSQL, and can be run locally with Docker Compose.