Online whiteboard tools compared
There is no best online whiteboard, only the right one for what you run. This compares six of them on the four things that decide a workshop: what is free, whether guests can join without an account, whether voting and a timer are built in, and whether your boards come out as files you can keep.
The short answer
- Workshops with people outside your company: pick a tool where guests join from a link, without an account, on the plan you are on. That rules out more tools than you would expect.
- A whiteboard for everything, across a large company: the big visual workspaces do the most, and charge per member for it.
- A diagram in five minutes: a drawing tool with no accounts is hard to beat.
- Boards that must outlive the tool: check the export before you start, not when you leave.
Six whiteboards side by side
| Tool | Free to use | Guests without an account | Voting and timer | Your boards as files | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blending Links | Quick boards with no account; a free account with no limit on boards | Yes: anyone with an edit link joins and picks a name | Dwell voting, a shared timer and spotlight on every board | OCIF, an open format; also SVG, PNG and PDF | Workshops with guests and clients |
| Miro | Three editable boards | Not on the free plan; visitor editing starts on the first paid plan | Voting and timer start on the first paid plan | Its own format; image and PDF exports | A broad visual workspace for a whole organisation |
| Mural | Three editable murals at a time | View-only visitors on the free plan; editing visitors on paid plans | Voting and timer on all plans, the free one included | Its own format; image and PDF exports | Facilitated workshops inside a larger company |
| FigJam | A free Starter plan, with limits | Open sessions let people without an account join a jam for 24 hours at a time | Voting and timer in the editor | Figma’s own format; image and PDF exports | Teams that already design in Figma |
| Excalidraw | Free and open source, with no accounts at all | Yes: a live-collaboration link, end-to-end encrypted | None built in: it is a drawing tool | .excalidraw JSON, PNG and SVG | Quick hand-drawn diagrams |
| Microsoft Whiteboard | Free with a Microsoft account | People need a Microsoft account to open a shared board | Basic reactions; it lives inside Microsoft 365 and Teams | Stored in OneDrive; image exports | Organisations already on Microsoft 365 |
Checked against each tool’s own plan and help pages on the date above: Miro, Mural, FigJam, Excalidraw, Microsoft Whiteboard. Plans change; those pages are where they are current, prices included.
What to look for
Guests who can just join
A workshop is often for people who are not in your organisation: a client, a contractor, the person you are pitching to. If each of them must create an account, or take a paid seat, the session starts with ten minutes of sign-ups. Check what the free plan allows, not only the paid one.
Facilitation, not just a canvas
Most of a workshop’s time goes on two things a plain canvas does not do: choosing between notes and keeping to time. A vote that everyone can see and a timer on everyone’s screen save more time than any number of shapes. Several tools keep both for paid plans.
How many boards the free plan keeps
A common free plan keeps three boards editable. That is enough to try a tool and not enough to run a team’s retrospectives for a quarter. Count how many boards you make in a month.
Getting your boards out
Images and PDFs are pictures of a board, not the board. If the work matters after the meeting, look for an export you can open again and edit — ideally in an open format that another tool can read. Blending Links writes every board as an OCIF file, and the converter reads other formats.
Where Blending Links fits, and where it does not
Blending Links is built for running workshops: sticky notes, frames, tags, comments, voting and a timer, 15 templates and 14 retrospective formats, with guests who join from a link. It is in public preview and does far less than the big workspaces: no freehand drawing, no diagram shape libraries, no integrations and no version history. If you need those, choose one of the others; if your boards are mostly notes in a workshop, it may be all you need.
Miro, Mural, Figma, FigJam, Excalidraw and Microsoft Whiteboard are trademarks of their owners. Blending Links is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them.