Open any one of Excalidraw, tldraw, FigJam, Miro, or Figma and you'll see roughly the same thing: an infinite canvas, a toolbar in the corner, a cursor that draws shapes and arrows. The surface area between these tools has been converging for years. Underneath, they want completely different things from you, and the differences matter — because the right tool depends less on which features a checklist gives credit for and more on what you actually do when you're staring at an empty board.
We've been running every one of these in a real workflow for the better part of the last year. Below is the version of this comparison we wish someone had handed us three months in, when we were still bouncing between four of them and pretending they were interchangeable.
The shape of the field
Two axes describe almost every meaningful difference. The first is freeform vs structured — does the tool want you to sketch a loose idea, or does it want you to drop in templated frameworks, sticky notes with assigned colors, voting widgets, retrospective grids? The second is solo-friendly vs multiplayer-first — does the tool start with a single person thinking on a page, or does it assume from the beginning that this is a meeting?
Almost every team we've talked to ends up with one tool from the top half (for thinking) and one tool from the bottom half (for meetings). Combining them in one app turns out to be harder than it sounds — the tool that's right for a quiet 11pm rough sketch is rarely the one you want when twelve people are dropping stickies on a Tuesday morning planning session.
Excalidraw — the sketchpad that won
Excalidraw is the tool you reach for when you want to think on a page without any of the page thinking back at you. Its visual style is famously hand-drawn — sketchy lines, loose shapes, fonts that look like they were written with a felt-tip pen. The aesthetic is not decoration. It signals 'this is a draft, this is not a finished artifact,' and that signal turns out to be load-bearing. People treat Excalidraw drawings differently from polished diagrams. They argue less about visual hierarchy. They re-edit faster. The sketchy line is a feature.
It's also free, open-source, runs entirely in your browser, has an excellent self-hosted option, and works offline. The collaboration is real but optional — you can use it solo for a year before you ever invite anyone to a room. This is what makes it the default sketchpad for engineers and designers who want to draw something quick and not have a tool ask them about their workspace.
tldraw — Excalidraw's louder, fancier cousin
tldraw started as an open-source canvas demo and has, in the last two years, turned into something quietly remarkable. The surface still feels like Excalidraw — clean, fast, friendly to drawing — but the engine underneath supports a programmable component system, multiplayer that just works, version history, and a small army of plugins. Its 'make real' feature (sketch a UI, ask tldraw to turn it into a working prototype) was one of the more astonishing AI demos of 2024 and now ships as a real feature.
tldraw is the tool you pick when you want Excalidraw's vibe but you also want to invite collaborators, embed shapes from other apps, or build a custom internal whiteboard on top of an SDK. It's the natural choice for teams that have outgrown Excalidraw but find Miro and FigJam too heavy.
FigJam — the meeting tool dressed as a whiteboard
FigJam is what Figma built to take the meeting half of the market. The aesthetic is bright, the stickers are part of the brand, and the templates lean heavily toward facilitated workshop frameworks — retrospectives, brainstorms, journey maps, voting, timer widgets. It is designed to make a one-hour meeting with eight people productive, and at that specific job it is excellent.
It is, however, not really a sketchpad. The pen tool is fine; the shapes are fine; but you would not reach for FigJam to think alone at 11pm. It expects an audience. It also expects a Figma account, which is a tax that some teams happily pay (because they already have one) and other teams find vaguely irritating.
Miro — the maximalist option
Miro is the enterprise-grade member of this group, and it shows in every direction at once. There are more templates than you will ever use. There are integrations to every project management tool. There are dedicated facilitator features, agile-board widgets, voting modes, timer widgets, audio chat, presentation mode, and a marketplace. If FigJam is a friendly meeting tool, Miro is a meeting platform that happens to look like a whiteboard.
The trade-off is heaviness. Miro feels slower than the simpler tools, the free tier is genuinely limited (three boards), and there's enough chrome on the screen that getting to a quick sketch requires more clicks than it does in Excalidraw. Teams that love Miro tend to be running formal sessions for medium-to-large groups and need the structure. Teams that find it annoying tend to be small and just want a canvas.
Figma — the design tool that gets used as a whiteboard anyway
Strictly speaking, Figma is not a whiteboard. It's a design tool with a canvas big enough that people use it as one. The reason Figma shows up in every whiteboard comparison is that design teams already have it open all day, and 'open a new file, drop in some boxes' is faster than switching apps. The pen and shape tools are excellent, the multiplayer is excellent, the export story is excellent, and the constraint system means your sketches stay legible when someone resizes them.
It is, however, vastly overkill for sketching. Figma takes longer to load than any tool in this list. The default toolbar is intimidating for non-designers. The frame model rewards you for thinking in pixel-perfect terms — which is the opposite of what you want when you're sketching a system at 2x speed. We don't recommend Figma as your primary whiteboard. We do acknowledge that, if you're a designer, you'll probably use it as one anyway.
Side-by-side, on the things that matter
Three observations from the chart. First, only Excalidraw and tldraw work fully offline — a real consideration if you draw on planes, in coffee shops with bad WiFi, or just want to know your work won't disappear if the network goes down. Second, the hand-drawn aesthetic is unique to Excalidraw and tldraw; everything else gives you crisp lines whether you wanted them or not. Third, the templates-and-plugins ecosystem is overwhelmingly on the right side of the chart — FigJam, Miro, and Figma are where you'll find a template for any meeting format that has a name.
What we actually recommend
- 1Solo thinker, technical or design role: Excalidraw. Install it. Pin the tab. Stop thinking about which tool to use. The decision will pay back the first time you need to sketch a system architecture during a meeting.
- 2Team that runs facilitated sessions in Figma: FigJam. It's already in your account, your team already knows the shortcuts, and the templates fit the workflows you already use.
- 3Team that runs formal workshops with more than 8 people: Miro. The structure is worth the heaviness. The integration story alone justifies the price.
- 4You want one tool to do both jobs and you're willing to compromise: tldraw. It's the closest thing to a 'both freeform and multiplayer' answer, and it gets better every quarter.
- 5Designer who already lives in Figma: Figma is fine. We're not going to fight you on this. Just know that everyone who isn't a designer is paying a small cognitive cost when they open your link.
Where this is heading
All five of these tools are competing on AI features now — make-real, auto-arrange, summarize-this-board, generate-from-prompt. The interesting thing is that AI is making the differences between them sharper, not blurrier. Excalidraw and tldraw lean into 'sketch a thing, get a working version.' FigJam and Miro lean into 'summarize this messy board into action items.' Figma leans into 'turn this rough into a polished design.' The shared canvas hides genuinely different bets about what the future of the surface is.
Our prediction: the freeform side (Excalidraw, tldraw) keeps winning at solo thinking and small-team sketching, and the structured side (FigJam, Miro) keeps winning at formal facilitation. The middle gets squeezed. Figma stays Figma. None of these tools die. You'll keep ending up with two of them in your browser, and the choice of which two is the most useful decision in this whole comparison.
"The best whiteboard is the one you actually open when you have an idea."
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