Whiteboarding without the per-seat bill.
Miro: ~$8/user/mo (~$96/year per seat) · Excalidraw: $0 hosted, no account · You keep: ~$96/year per seat (~$960/year for a team of 10)
Miro charges roughly $8 per user per month and puts the good parts behind tiers, so cost scales linearly with your headcount. Excalidraw’s hand-drawn canvas is free, open source, and needs no account to start — open the site, share a link, sketch. For anything under a formal facilitation workshop, that’s the whole pitch: you were paying per seat for a shared drawing surface you can now have for nothing.
The core whiteboard. Infinite canvas, shapes, arrows, connectors and text, real-time collaboration through a shared link, PNG and SVG export, reusable component libraries, and clean embedding into docs and wikis. The deliberately hand-drawn look is a feature — diagrams read as “draft, let’s talk” rather than “final, don’t touch”. At 90,000+ GitHub stars it’s the most popular open-source whiteboard by a wide margin, used by solo developers and enterprise engineering teams alike.
Miro is more than a whiteboard — it ships templates and frameworks (retro boards, story maps), voting, timers, presentation mode, and deep integrations with Jira, Confluence and the rest. Excalidraw does none of that; it’s a canvas, not a facilitation suite. Persistent shared boards and team libraries also need either the hosted Excalidraw+ tier (about $7/seat) or a self-hosted instance. If your team runs structured ceremonies inside Miro, this is a downgrade in scope even as it’s an upgrade in cost.
Minutes. There’s effectively nothing to import — open excalidraw.com and draw, or run the Docker image if you want your own instance. Existing Miro boards are usually ephemeral working artifacts, so you rebuild the handful that still matter by hand rather than migrating a library. Effort: minimal.