Miro vs Penpot
Miro and Penpot are both design and whiteboard software. Miro is a commercial product from Miro. Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0, with 62k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Miro when
- Distributed teams run workshops or planning sessions and need a shared visual canvas.
- Pick Penpot when
- Your team wants a Figma alternative it can self-host or use without per-editor lock-in.
Side by side
An online whiteboard for workshops, brainstorming, diagrams, retrospectives and planning, with templates and sticky notes.
A browser-based design and prototyping tool for product teams, using open standards such as SVG, CSS and HTML, with components and design tokens.
Boards turn into clutter without care, and paid seats add up for occasional participants.
Plugin ecosystem and performance on very large files still trail Figma.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Clojure, ClojureScript, Rust and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Miro
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
62k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release 2.18.5.
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.