Excalidraw vs Miro
Excalidraw and Miro are both design and whiteboard software. Excalidraw is open source under MIT, with 135k GitHub stars. Miro is a commercial product from Miro.
Which to pick
- Pick Excalidraw when
- Teams want quick informal diagrams in meetings, docs or your own app without heavyweight diagram tools.
- Pick Miro when
- Distributed teams run workshops or planning sessions and need a shared visual canvas.
Side by side
A browser whiteboard for hand-drawn style diagrams and wireframes with end-to-end encrypted live collaboration, also published as an embeddable React component.
An online whiteboard for workshops, brainstorming, diagrams, retrospectives and planning, with templates and sticky notes.
The free app is light on team features; persistent workspaces and libraries are in paid Excalidraw+.
Boards turn into clutter without care, and paid seats add up for occasional participants.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, self-hosted server and library
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, React and Vite
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Miro
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
135k GitHub stars
2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release v0.18.1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More design and whiteboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.