4 Best Alternatives to Mural in 2026
By Noahlast updated pricing verified
The best alternative to Mural is Miro. Other top alternatives are Excalidraw and tldraw — 4 options compared below with verified pricing, pros and cons, and honest weaknesses.
How we picked
- Fit first: every listed tool replaces the core job of the product on this page.
- Pricing is read from each vendor's pricing page; the verification date is shown above.
- Third-party review scores are displayed with counts and linked to their source.
- Likes and “I use this” marks from signed-in users feed the ordering.
Paid placement never alters editorial rank — read the full methodology.
Mural alternatives at a glance
| Alternative | Best for | Learning curve | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Muralreference | running facilitated workshops and design-thinking sessions with large groups, including outside participants who join free as visitors | Moderate | Free tier · paid from $9.99/mo |
| Miro | running live workshops and planning sessions (retros, journey maps, roadmaps) with distributed teams on a shared board | Low | Free tier · paid from $8/mo |
| Excalidraw | sketching informal system diagrams and wireframes live with others during a meeting or interview | Low | Free tier · paid from $6/mo |
| tldraw | sketching quick diagrams and flows with collaborators on a free shared board | Low | Free |
| Figma | design and product teams that need real-time multiplayer editing and a shared design-to-development handoff, from solo freelancers on the free tier up to large enterprises managing design systems across many teams | Moderate | Free tier · paid from $16/mo |
Mural
Miro
Excalidraw
tldraw
Figma1Miro — best Mural alternative for running live workshops and planning sessions (retros, journey maps, roadmaps) with distributed teams on a shared board
Miro is Mural's most direct competitor: an infinite whiteboard for workshops and planning with 7,000+ templates and 250+ integrations, priced from $8/member/month billed annually.
Pros
- Free plan with unlimited members, 7,000+ templates and 250+ integrations.
- Docs, Tables, Timelines, Kanban and Slides live on the same canvas as the whiteboard.
- Visitor editing on Starter lets outsiders edit a public board without signing in.
- Native apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android; the iOS app rates 4.7/5 from 5,845 App Store ratings.
- An MCP server and two-way Jira, Asana, Linear and ClickUp sync (Business) connect board content to AI and delivery tools.
Cons
- The Free plan allows only 3 editable boards, and every board is visible to the whole team.
- Each workspace member takes a paid seat; signed-in guests require Business at $20/member/month billed annually.
- AI is credit-metered: 25 credits per member per month on Starter and 50 on Business.
- Enterprise features such as SCIM and data residency require at least 30 members.
Pricing: Free tier · paid from $8/mo (verified )
2Excalidraw — best Mural alternative for sketching informal system diagrams and wireframes live with others during a meeting or interview
Excalidraw is a free, open-source whiteboard with link-based collaboration and $6/user/month team workspaces, a lighter and cheaper option for teams that sketch more than they facilitate.
Pros
- Free and open source (MIT), with no account needed to start drawing.
- Link-based real-time collaboration, end-to-end encrypted for free users.
- AI text-to-diagram, wireframe-to-code and Mermaid conversion, with 10 free requests a day.
- Excalidraw+ costs $6/user/month billed yearly and is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.
- An embeddable npm package and a large open-source community, with 134,000+ GitHub stars.
Cons
- Free scenes live in the browser, one scene on the free plan; cloud saving, folders and comments need Excalidraw+.
- Excalidraw+ accepts credit cards only, and charges are non-refundable under its terms.
- MCP and REST API access are still in public beta.
Pricing: Free tier · paid from $6/mo (verified )
3tldraw — best Mural alternative for sketching quick diagrams and flows with collaborators on a free shared board
tldraw.com is a free collaborative whiteboard with live cursors and comments, a no-cost choice for quick team sketches that do not need Mural's facilitation tools.
Pros
- tldraw.com is free and opens instantly in the browser, with real-time collaboration, live cursors and comments.
- tldraw offline saves self-contained .tldraw files (canvas, images, videos and scripts) on macOS, Windows or Linux with no account or server.
- AI agents can create and edit boards, including Mermaid diagrams, through the tldraw plugin for ChatGPT and Codex and an MCP app for Claude and Cursor.
- The SDK behind it powers ClickUp's whiteboards, Padlet's Sandboxes and Jam, and its source is public on GitHub with 51,000+ stars.
- Developers get a free hobby license and a 100-day free SDK trial with no credit card.
Cons
- No paid team plan for tldraw.com, so organizations get no published admin, security or support terms.
- The SDK is not open source; production use requires a commercial license with unpublished, value-based pricing.
- Hobby licenses show a tldraw watermark in production.
Pricing: Free (verified )
4Figma — best Mural alternative for design and product teams that need real-time multiplayer editing and a shared design-to-development handoff, from solo freelancers on the free tier up to large enterprises managing design systems across many teams
FigJam, Figma's whiteboard, includes timers and voting for workshops and is the default for product teams already working in Figma.
Pros
- Real-time multiplayer collaboration works reliably even with many simultaneous editors in one file.
- Free Starter tier is genuinely usable for solo designers with unlimited drafts and basic AI credits.
- Dev Mode gives engineers direct, inspectable access to design specs, reducing handoff friction.
- Broad plugin and integration ecosystem plus FigJam and Slides extend it beyond pure UI design.
Cons
- Requires an internet connection for full editing; offline work is limited.
- No native CMYK color profile or 300dpi export, so print design work needs a separate tool.
- Per-seat, per-role pricing (full/dev/collab) can be confusing and adds up quickly for larger teams.
- Organization and Enterprise tiers are annual-billing only, reducing flexibility for smaller teams.
Pricing: Free tier · paid from $16/mo (verified )