Excalidraw: A Self-Hosted Miro/FigJam Alternative for Whiteboarding

Miro's free plan gives you 3 editable boards, and FigJam's free plan gives you 3 files — both fine if you sketch out the occasional flowchart alone. Once a small team wants to actually collaborate on more than a couple of boards at once, you're into per-seat billing: Miro's Starter plan runs about $8/user/month billed annually, and Business jumps to around $16/user/month. For a 3-person team on Starter, that's roughly $24/month for whiteboarding alone.

What per-seat billing actually costs you

The free tier isn't crippled on features so much as it's capped on volume — a fixed number of boards, sometimes limited board history. The moment you need more boards than the cap, or more than one or two people editing at once, you're paying per person, every month, for what is fundamentally just a shared canvas with some sync logic behind it.

What Excalidraw gives you instead

Excalidraw is an open-source, hand-drawn-style whiteboard — the same one a lot of engineering teams already use for quick system diagrams. Self-hosted, it's two small Docker containers: the main app, and excalidraw-room, a lightweight WebSocket server that handles real-time cursor and shape sync between people in the same room. No per-seat fee, no board cap — you create a room, share the link, and anyone with it can draw alongside you live. Both containers together idle under 150MB of RAM, so this runs comfortably on the same small VPS as the rest of this stack.

The catch, and it's a real one

Excalidraw is a whiteboard, not a workshop-facilitation platform. Miro's template library, voting/timer widgets, video huddles, and granular per-board permissions don't have an equivalent here — you get a shared canvas and shapes, not a suite of meeting-facilitation tools. Rooms are also ephemeral by default: the reference room server doesn't ship with user accounts or a persistent board list, so you're responsible for saving/exporting boards you want to keep (or wiring up your own persistence, which I haven't bothered to do for quick diagramming use). If you're running actual cross-functional workshops with a dozen participants and need facilitation features, Miro's per-seat cost is buying you real functionality. If you mostly need a shared canvas for architecture sketches and quick diagrams with one or two other people, Excalidraw does that part for free.

I run this on the same Vultr box as the rest of this stack — see the full cost roll-up for how it all fits together.

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