Miro vs Excalidraw: which fits a sketching and workshop team
Consider a team that runs discovery workshops and sketches architecture on whiteboards, and must decide whether to keep Miro. Miro fits teams that depend on ready-made templates, a broad integration catalog and admin controls such as SSO and audit logging on higher plans. Excalidraw fits teams that value hand-drawn, sketch-style boards, the open .excalidraw JSON format and storage on infrastructure they run. Excalidraw is MIT licensed, so the editor itself carries no license fee, but the collaboration and storage layer is a separate decision.
The decision turns on three questions. First, data location: Miro offers EU data residency on all plans, while other regions are limited to the Enterprise plan, so confirm which region your board content must stay in. Second, integrations: count the connectors your workshops rely on today, such as Jira, Confluence or Slack, and check whether Excalidraw or its hosting path covers them. Third, operations: someone must run the collaboration server and keep it patched, and that person needs a named owner before the switch.
If your workshops mostly need freeform sketching and your data can live on your own servers, Excalidraw is a strong candidate to pilot. For a closer self-hosted option that keeps boards in Nextcloud, review the Excalidraw GitHub repository for the current editor and collaboration details, then compare the hosting path with your identity and backup standards before committing.
Which option fits which workshop scenario
This table matches common workshop situations to the option that fits them best, with the supplied fact behind each choice. Read it by finding your scenario, then checking whether the reason depends on data location, licensing or who will run the server. Most teams will find that one scenario in their organization drives the decision.
| Scenario | Better fit | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Customer-facing workshops that need templates and integrations | Miro | Miro offers templates, integrations and admin controls that Excalidraw does not match out of the box, and its EU data residency applies on all plans. |
| Informal sketching in engineering teams | Excalidraw | Excalidraw is MIT licensed and saves drawings in an open .excalidraw JSON format, so sketches stay readable outside the tool. |
| Regulated data that must stay on the organization's own servers | Excalidraw (self-hosted) | Running Excalidraw with excalidraw-room or Nextcloud Whiteboard keeps boards on your infrastructure, while Miro's data stays in Miro's EU or Enterprise regions. |
| Sessions where end-to-end encryption matters on the public app | Excalidraw | Excalidraw describes its excalidraw.com collaboration as end-to-end encrypted. Confirm the exact scope with the vendor before relying on it for regulated content. |
| Teams with no one to run a server | Miro | Miro is a managed service, while self-hosting Excalidraw needs someone to operate the collaboration server, updates and backups. |
| Team needs EU residency on a basic plan | Miro | Miro offers EU data residency on all plans, with Ireland as primary and Germany as backup. Confirm current hosting details in its help center. |
| Large workshops needing audit logs and SCIM provisioning | Miro | Enterprise controls such as audit logs and SCIM sit with Miro's paid plans. Excalidraw requires you to build or source equivalent controls yourself. |
| Teams that already run Nextcloud | Excalidraw (via Nextcloud Whiteboard) | Nextcloud Whiteboard is built on Excalidraw under AGPL-3.0 and stores boards inside Nextcloud. It needs a separate websocket server for live collaboration. |
Where boards live and who controls the data
Each card covers one place where a whiteboard's data sits or leaves: Miro's regional hosting, the difference between excalidraw.com and a server you run, the file format you can take with you, and the compliance evidence you must gather yourself. Read them together before you decide where boards are stored.
Miro data residency by plan
Miro states that EU data residency is included on all plans, with Ireland as the primary data center and Germany as the backup. US, Australian and Japanese residency is available only on the Enterprise plan. If your boards hold regulated or customer data outside the EU, the plan you buy determines where they can be stored. Ask Miro in writing which data classes, such as comments, uploads and audit records, follow the chosen region.
Excalidraw.com versus your own room server
Excalidraw.com offers real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption, so the service operator cannot read board content in transit. Running your own collaboration server with excalidraw-room, which is MIT licensed, keeps the sessions on your network. Confirm which features still work in your deployment, since encryption depends on the client and the room server together, and test a session with the server behind your firewall before you rely on it.
The open .excalidraw format and exit
Excalidraw saves drawings as .excalidraw JSON and exports PNG and SVG, so a board is a file you own rather than a record only the vendor can read. This matters at exit: Miro's exports are images, PDFs and CSV tables, and its .rtb backups restore only into Miro. Check that your team saves boards to shared storage on a regular schedule, because the file is only useful if it is kept outside any single tool.
Compliance evidence for your environment
Excalidraw+ states SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and encryption at rest and in transit for its hosted product. That statement covers the vendor's service, not your self-hosted stack. A self-hosted deployment needs its own access controls, logging, backups and hosting evidence, and a qualified auditor decides whether those meet your obligations. Ask the vendor for its report under its own terms, and list which controls your team must still evidence.
What self-hosting Excalidraw adds to the architecture
Self-hosting Excalidraw is not a single application. The web app serves the editor, but live collaboration depends on a separate collaboration server, excalidraw-room, which is MIT licensed and published as its own repository. Your team must deploy it, place it behind the same TLS termination as the web app, and update it on the same cadence. Before you commit to a rollout, confirm with the project which versions of the web app and the room server are known to work together, and build that pairing check into your change process so a web app upgrade does not silently break sessions.
The trust boundary moves in a specific way. Boards, scenes and session traffic stay on servers you control instead of a vendor cloud, which is the main reason many regulated teams look at this option. But you now own everything the vendor used to run: TLS certificates, who can reach the editor and the room server, authentication in front of the app, logging, and backups of the board data. Decide who holds those responsibilities before go-live. If you cannot name an owner for certificate renewal, access reviews and restore tests, the architecture is incomplete regardless of the software's license.
Nextcloud Whiteboard is another Excalidraw-based option, and it stores boards inside Nextcloud rather than in a standalone web app. That changes where access control, sharing and backups are handled, because they follow your Nextcloud configuration. The two paths share the Excalidraw editing model but not the same operational footprint, so compare them on who will run each component. This page does not recommend one over the other. Pilot both against a real workshop and record which set of components your operations team can maintain.
What Miro and self-hosted Excalidraw cost to run
Miro is priced per member and per plan tier, so its cost follows headcount and the features you need. Self-hosted Excalidraw replaces that subscription with infrastructure, a collaboration server and staff time, and the cards below show which of those costs recur and which are one-time.
Miro per-member subscription
Miro bills by member and by plan tier, so the recurring cost grows with every person who needs edit access to boards. Read the current Miro price list for your region and ask the vendor which seats are billed as full members and which as viewers. Check whether guest or external collaborators count toward your total, since workshops with partners often add seats quickly.
Plan tier for residency and SSO
Some requirements push you into a higher tier regardless of user count. EU data residency is available on all Miro plans, but US, Australian and Japanese residency is limited to Enterprise. Ask Miro which tier includes SSO, SCIM and audit logs for your use case, and price that tier separately from the base seat cost in any comparison.
Self-hosted infrastructure and collaboration server
Self-hosted Excalidraw has no license fee, but it needs a server for the app and a separate excalidraw-room collaboration server for real-time sessions. Hosting cost depends on your cloud account or data center, the number of concurrent sessions and the redundancy you require. Ask your infrastructure team to estimate these components from your own environment rather than from a generic figure.
Operations, updates and backups
Self-hosting moves patching, certificate renewal, monitoring and backup of board data onto your team. These are largely recurring staff effort, and the amount depends on how often you update and how many environments you run, such as test and production. Backups should cover the board storage location so that restoring a board does not depend on a vendor export path.
Optional support and retainers
Support is optional and can be bought in several forms: an internal platform team, a managed Excalidraw+ subscription, or an implementation partner on retainer. Fixed-scope deployment work is agreed in writing before it starts, and ongoing support, upgrades and testing are available as retainers. Request quotes that separate one-time setup from recurring support so the totals can be compared fairly.
Excalidraw+ as a managed option
Excalidraw+ Plus is priced at $6 per user per month with a 14-day trial, and it adds cloud-saved scenes, team management, read-only links and a REST API in public beta. Its per-user price is a useful baseline when your team wants managed hosting, but it is still a recurring per-seat cost. Confirm current pricing, tax and billing terms directly with Excalidraw before you rely on the figure.
What a move from Miro to self-hosted Excalidraw involves
The sequence moves the boards a team still needs into a self-hosted Excalidraw instance with its collaboration server, keeps the archive that Miro can export, and ends with Miro access retired only after a working pilot. Each step closes with a check the team can verify.
Inventory and classify every board
List all boards the team owns or edits, with their owners, last-edited dates, sharing settings and whether they hold sensitive content. Sort them into three groups: boards to rebuild as live sessions, boards to archive as static files, and boards to delete. Owners confirm their classification, and the team lead signs off the list. The output is a single register with one decision per board, which becomes the scope for every later step.
Export archive copies from Miro
For boards in the archive group, use the export options available on your plan and board owner settings. Miro's exports produce images, PDFs and CSV tables for some content, and .rtb board backups that only restore into Miro. Confirm with your Miro administrator which export paths your plan and settings allow, and whether comments and frames carry over. Store the exports in your own file share with the register as an index. The check is that a sample of each export type opens outside Miro.
Confirm what can be converted into Excalidraw
Excalidraw saves drawings in an open .excalidraw JSON format, and exports to PNG, SVG and the clipboard, so content that you keep as files stays readable. Converting Miro content into .excalidraw files is largely manual, because Miro's own export does not produce that format. Test one or two representative boards to see what can be recreated, and ask your implementation partner or the Excalidraw project to confirm any conversion option in your environment. The output is a short written note on which content is rebuilt by hand.
Rebuild the templates the team still uses
Identify the Miro templates that recur in retrospectives, workshops and design sessions. Recreate each one as an Excalidraw scene, and save the reusable elements as shape libraries that the team can load. Store the templates in a shared folder with a naming convention and a short usage note. Ask a few facilitators to run a dry session with each template. The check is that each template opens, can be edited and exports cleanly.
Deploy the web app and collaboration server
Your infrastructure or platform team deploys the Excalidraw web app and the excalidraw-room collaboration server inside your own network or cloud account, with TLS and the chosen identity controls in front of them. Confirm the license terms of both components, since Excalidraw and excalidraw-room are MIT licensed, and record the versions you deploy. The check is a two-browser test in which edits appear live on both screens, and that scenes are saved only to the storage you chose.
Configure access, encryption and backups
Set up user access and the storage location for scenes, then define how scenes are backed up and restored. Decide how end-to-end encrypted sessions fit your key handling and retention rules, and document who can create links and who can join them. Note that Excalidraw+ lists SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, but a self-hosted deployment is not covered by that statement, so your own controls and evidence must be prepared. The output is an access and backup runbook, tested with one restore of a sample scene.
Pilot with one workshop group
Choose one team that runs regular workshops and move a single upcoming session to the new instance. Collect feedback on performance, shape libraries, export needs and any Miro features that the group relies on, such as comments, integrations or admin reporting. Record each gap with a decision: accept, work around or keep Miro for that use case. The check is a completed session with the workshop owner's written sign-off on the gap list.
Retire Miro access in stages
Once the pilot is accepted, announce a cutover date to affected teams and move remaining live boards according to the register. Switch Miro boards to read-only or restrict new sharing where your plan allows, keep the archive exports available for the agreed retention period, and remove Miro seats only after the last active board is accounted for. The output is a closed register showing each board's final location, and a confirmed list of remaining Miro subscriptions to cancel.
Questions buyers ask before switching from Miro
How much effort does moving off Miro to Excalidraw actually take?
The effort depends mostly on how many boards you need to keep and how they were built. Excalidraw works well for sketches, flows and simple diagrams, so boards that are mainly sticky notes, freeform drawing or shapes move with the least rework. Boards that rely on Miro templates, embedded apps, live data or complex frames will need to be rebuilt by hand, because Miro's board format does not open in Excalidraw. Ask your team to sort open boards into keep, rebuild and archive before anyone estimates hours. That inventory sets the workload more accurately than any general figure.
Can our team migrate from Miro without outside help?
A small team with a clear inventory can often run a limited pilot itself, especially if it only needs hand-drawn sessions and exports to PNG or SVG. The harder parts are hosting the platform, setting up access, and deciding how to store and back up the .excalidraw files. If you want a self-hosted collaboration server with defined access control, backups and documentation, you can scope that work with DeployOpen as a fixed-scope engagement, with scope, deliverables and timelines agreed in writing before work starts. Compare the cost of your own staff time against that written scope.
Which cost drivers should we compare between Miro and self-hosted Excalidraw?
Start with the components on each side. Miro is a per-member subscription, and its price depends on the plan and on the number of seats you buy. Self-hosting replaces seat fees with components you pay for once or on a recurring basis: server or cloud capacity, storage, a collaboration server, staff time for setup and upgrades, backups, and any support retainer. The main cost drivers are the number of active users, how often boards change, how long you keep backups, and how much support you need. Ask vendors and integrators for a quote that lists each component separately, and check current Miro plan prices directly on Miro's site rather than relying on older figures.
How long does a pilot take before we decide to switch?
The timeline is set by what you are testing, not by a standard period. A pilot needs a defined group of users, a set of representative boards, a working collaboration setup, and a review of what was lost or changed. Teams with few boards and an existing server can finish quickly, while a pilot that includes access control, backup restores and sign-off from security or compliance takes longer. No duration has been fixed for this comparison, so ask any integrator for a written schedule tied to your scope.
What does the switch need from our IT and security staff?
IT staff need to provide a host, a domain or internal address, TLS certificates, identity integration if you want single sign-on, and a backup location. Security staff should review where board data is stored, who can read it, and how the collaboration traffic is protected. Excalidraw describes its excalidraw.com app as end-to-end encrypted, but a self-hosted deployment has its own configuration, so confirm encryption and access settings for your build with the maintainers' documentation. Plan for ongoing patching of the collaboration server and the application, since these are yours to run once they are live.
Can we replace Miro's integrations and templates with open-source options?
Some of them, but not all. Excalidraw supports shape libraries and exports to PNG, SVG and the clipboard, so common diagram shapes and simple templates can be recreated or shared. Miro's marketplace integrations, such as connections to Jira, Slack or live data sources, do not have one-to-one equivalents in Excalidraw, and you would need to build or find alternatives for each one you use. List every integration your teams rely on, then confirm with each tool's vendor whether a replacement exists before you commit to a switch.
How do we keep our boards after leaving Miro?
Miro's export paths include images, PDFs and CSV tables, and its .rtb board backups only restore into Miro, so they are not a portable copy. For a readable archive, export what Miro allows, keep the originals in a retained location, and record the sources and decisions behind each board. For boards you want to continue editing, rebuild them in Excalidraw and save them as .excalidraw JSON files, which are open and stored on your own server. Confirm with Miro which export options your plan and board owner settings allow, because these vary.
When keeping Miro is the better decision
Keeping Miro is the stronger choice when a team depends on its template library, its integration catalog or its enterprise admin controls. Excalidraw gives you a sketching canvas and a clean open file format, but it does not ship the large set of ready-made workshop templates, such as retrospective, journey mapping and planning boards, that facilitators often rely on. If your workshops run on those templates and on Miro's native connectors to the tools your product and delivery teams already use, the time to rebuild that setup elsewhere is a real cost, and you should count it in the decision. Check the current template and integration list in your own Miro workspace and in Excalidraw before you assume either side covers your workflows.
Enterprise administration is the second area where Miro's position is strong. Single sign-on on Business, and SCIM provisioning and audit logs on Enterprise, let an identity team tie board access to the same lifecycle as every other business application. Excalidraw's collaboration model is built around shareable links and end-to-end encryption, so it does not offer the same role-based governance out of the box. If your security or compliance function needs centralized user deprovisioning, board-level audit trails or policy controls, confirm those requirements against Miro's plan documentation and against what you would have to build or buy for a self-hosted setup. Residency is the third consideration. Miro offers EU residency on all plans, while data residency in the US, Australia and Japan is available only on Enterprise. If your footprint extends beyond the EU, Miro's regional options may be the simpler path.
Moving also costs time for teams whose workflow already runs on Miro. Boards contain sticky notes, comments, voting results and linked frames that people refer back to, and Miro's export paths do not produce an editable board format that opens in another tool. Decide early which boards are live working material and which are reference records, and keep the live ones in Miro until the team's sessions move. A practical check is to run one upcoming workshop in the proposed tool with the facilitators who will use it most, and measure how much rebuilding it takes. If the answer is a lot, the migration plan should phase the move rather than force it.
How DeployOpen helps evaluate and run a self-hosted whiteboard
DeployOpen plans, implements, customizes, integrates, hardens, backs up, upgrades, documents and supports self-hosted open-source platforms inside your own infrastructure. For a Miro to Excalidraw evaluation, we start from the sessions your teams actually run and build a deployment that fits them, inside your own cloud accounts, data centers or air-gapped network.
How we scope
- Inventory which Miro boards, templates and integrations your teams actually use before choosing a target.
- Agree in writing whether Excalidraw alone fits, or whether a collaboration server and storage layer are needed.
- Confirm which sessions need end-to-end encrypted collaboration and which need admin controls such as SSO or audit trails.
- Engagements are fixed-scope, with scope, deliverables and timelines agreed before work starts.
How we build
- Deploy Excalidraw with its collaboration server, sized and placed inside your own infrastructure.
- Configure access, backups and TLS, and document how boards are stored and where they live.
- Test real-time collaboration, export paths and shape library use with a pilot group of facilitators.
- Integrate sign-in with your identity provider where your security policy requires it.
How we hand over
- Deliver runbooks covering deployment, upgrades, backups, restores and collaboration server operations.
- Document how .excalidraw files are exported, archived and converted, so boards stay portable.
- Walk your platform and facilitation teams through daily use, admin tasks and known feature gaps against Miro.
- Provide evidence and configuration records for your own compliance reviews, without issuing any certification.
How we support
- Ongoing support, upgrades and continuous testing are available as a retainer after handover.
- Review each Excalidraw release and plan upgrades in your maintenance windows.
- Re-test collaboration, access controls and backups after changes to the server or hosting.
- Confirm the scope of any support change in writing before it starts.
