Miro’s free plan bets on people: unlimited teammates, three boards. The open-source whiteboards pitched as Miro alternatives bet the other way — no account, no board count — and the teamwork plumbing is where free stops. Which of those limits stops your work is the only comparison worth running.
Everything below comes from the vendors’ own pages, checked in September 2026.
The free tiers are opposite products
Miro’s pricing page is unusually explicit about free: unlimited team members, three editable boards, ten AI credits a month, low-resolution exports only, and — the detail people miss — every board you create is visible to the whole team, since free has no visitor or guest role. Board-level access and outsiders start at Starter.
Excalidraw runs that upside down: MIT-licensed, free in the browser, one infinite scene, unlimited collaborators, with the file end-to-end encrypted on your machine rather than a server. Its paid cloud, Excalidraw+ at about $6 per user per month, sells back what Miro charges for — unlimited scenes, access management, read-only links, comments.
draw.io is blunter: Apache 2.0, no account required, shared cursors, files stored wherever you already keep them, and — its own homepage wording — no enterprise tier reserved for SSO.
So the free-tier choice is your constraint. Board count: open source wins outright. One workshop board with forty people arriving by link: Miro free is generous, and Excalidraw’s single free scene holds the sticky notes, not the facilitation.
Official image from appflowy.io.
What self-hosting actually costs
“Just self-host it” skips a step. Excalidraw ships as an npm package and Docker image, so the editor is an afternoon on a small VPS; live collaboration is the part that is not a download, since room sync needs a realtime backend you keep alive. draw.io needs no server at all — browser or desktop app, files in Drive, OneDrive or Nextcloud — which is why it survives in locked-down organisations.
AFFiNE markets itself as an open-source replacement for both Notion and Miro, self-hosted via Docker — you then operate its database and backups. AppFlowy, the AGPL-3.0 workspace on our AppFlowy tool page, makes the same trade with documents, databases and boards in one place, and prices AI as an add-on rather than pretending inference is free.
Add it up: a small VPS runs roughly $5–15 a month, plus upgrades, backups and whoever gets the message when sync breaks. That maintenance figure, not the licence, is the real price of leaving SaaS.
Where the paywall lands once a team arrives
Neither camp gives away permission control; they charge differently. Miro lifts the ceiling plan by plan — read-only visitors from Starter, guests from Business — and sells governance above that. On free, every invited person is a member with access to all three boards.
Open source splits in two: the software is free, the hosted convenience is not. Excalidraw+ hosts access management and comments; draw.io argues SSO should never have been a paid tier. Self-hosting AppFlowy or AFFiNE means wiring up your own identity provider and accepting that a permissions bug is your outage, not a support ticket. Leaving Miro because a security review refuses cloud boards: self-hosting answers it. Leaving because seats got expensive: a $6 hosted seat is a lateral move.
| Dimension | Miro | Open-source alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Unlimited members, 3 editable boards, 10 AI credits/month, low-res exports | Excalidraw: full editor, 1 infinite scene, unlimited collaborators; draw.io: no account, no limits |
| Where the paywall sits | Board count, guests, facilitation, AI credits and MCP calls | Hosted scene management, rights, comments (about $6/user/month) |
| Self-hosting | Not offered, cloud only | npm/Docker or no server at all; you own backups and upgrades |
| Permissions | Visitors from Starter, guests from Business | Configuration burden on you; identity setup included in that |
| Facilitation (voting, timer, private mode) | Paid tiers | Minimal or absent |
When to pick which
A single workshop board, dozens of guests. Miro free — or paid if you need voting, timers and private mode, since paying for facilitation beats building it.
Diagramming that must not leave the building. draw.io first, because it needs no server; self-hosted Excalidraw or AFFiNE if boards must sit beside your notes, with maintenance budgeted.
A small team that wants notes, databases and boards without per-seat pressure. AppFlowy, self-hosted or cloud, with AI bought separately when you need it.
Four questions people ask
Is there a free alternative with no board limit? Yes. draw.io has no account and no board count, and self-hosted Excalidraw drops the one-scene cap. What you give up is facilitation, not drawing.
Can Miro be self-hosted? No. It is cloud-only, and the paid tiers sell governance rather than deployment. Self-hosting means changing tools and rebuilding whatever you used.
Do these free tiers expire? Miro’s free plan has no timer, but its AI credits are monthly, pooled and non-rolling. Excalidraw’s browser editor never expires; the 14-day trials belong to Excalidraw+ and Miro Business.
What happens to my boards if I stop paying? On Miro, a downgrade leaves you three boards and low-resolution export, so check current terms before a lapse. A .excalidraw or .drawio file on your own disk does not care whether you keep paying.
The call
If the limit that hurts is board count, close the pricing pages: draw.io or self-hosted Excalidraw fixes it today for nothing. If the limit is people and facilitation, the money is better spent on a Miro seat than on engineer hours. And if the requirement is that diagrams never touch someone else’s cloud, pay in maintenance instead of seats — but pay it knowingly.
Details come from miro.com/pricing and its plan FAQ, plus.excalidraw.com/pricing (updated 18 September 2026), drawio.com, affine.pro and appflowy.com, checked on 21 September 2026. We have not tested these whiteboards hands-on — our testing covers AI hardware and coding tools, and the comparison method applies here. For the meeting half of the loop, see our Sony XM6 meeting-summary test.