Self-host Miro

Online whiteboard / visual collaboration · Category: wiki, docs & notes

Miro is the dominant online-whiteboard product — infinite canvas, sticky notes, shapes, real-time multi-cursor collaboration, templates for everything from retros to user-journey maps. The self-hostable replacements all do the canvas + shapes + multi-cursor triangle; what they don't bundle is Miro's enormous library of consultant-grade templates.

Miro pricing anchor: Free 3 boards; Starter $8/user/mo; Business $16/user/mo; Enterprise custom.

Excalidraw excalidraw/excalidraw alive

GitHub: ★ 122.9k · last commit 3d ago · 3038 open issues
License: MIT
Setup time: 5min docker run
Monthly cost: $3-5/mo VPS for the static frontend; collab server adds light Node footprint.

Migration sketch. Pull `excalidraw/excalidraw:latest` from Docker Hub for the standalone frontend; pair with `excalidraw/excalidraw-room` for the WebRTC collab server. Drop the URL on a subdomain. Miro export: each board → Export → CSV (sticky notes only) or PDF/PNG; for shapes, recreate manually. Excalidraw's signature aesthetic is hand-drawn — best for whiteboards that read as casual diagrams rather than slide-deck-quality artifacts.

Good fit forEngineering teams that want quick whiteboards inside conversations — architecture sketches, retro boards, ad-hoc diagrams.

Weak atTemplates and pre-built frameworks are minimal compared to Miro's library.

tldraw tldraw/tldraw alive

GitHub: ★ 46.9k · last commit today · 356 open issues
License: Apache-2.0
Watermark removal for production / commercial use needs a paid license; OSS use is unrestricted.
Setup time: 10min — clone the example sync server + frontend
Monthly cost: $5-10/mo VPS for the sync server.

Migration sketch. Use the `tldraw/tldraw-sync-cloudflare` or self-hosted Node sync example from the tldraw docs. Embed the React component in your own page (`<Tldraw />`). Miro export → import images as background; recreate vector shapes natively. tldraw is the slickest of the three — pixel-perfect shape rendering, polished UI, and the upcoming AI-powered 'make real' feature.

Good fit forProduct teams that want a polished whiteboard inside their own app — embed the component, not host a separate site.

Weak atStandalone hosted-app story is thin; built more as an embeddable component than a Miro-shaped product.

drawio (diagrams.net) jgraph/drawio alive

GitHub: ★ 5.29k · last commit today · 176 open issues
License: Apache-2.0
Setup time: 5min docker run
Monthly cost: $3/mo VPS; static frontend.

Migration sketch. `docker run -it --rm --name="draw" -p 8080:8080 -p 8443:8443 jgraph/drawio`. drawio is structured-diagram-shaped (UML, network, BPMN, AWS architecture) rather than freeform-whiteboard-shaped; great for the diagram side of Miro work, less for sticky-note retros. Files save as `.drawio` (XML) anywhere — local disk, git, Nextcloud, GitHub Gist. No multi-cursor collab in OSS edition.

Good fit forDiagrams (architecture, ER, flowcharts) where Miro is overkill and you want files in git.

Weak atNo real-time collaboration; not a freeform whiteboard.

In a terminal? npx os-alt miro prints this table — how the CLI works →