A Miro alternative built for workshops

The reasons we hear are not about any one feature. They are about fit:

• A tool for the workshop, not for everything. If what you run is retrospectives, Event Storming and planning sessions, you want sticky notes, frames, a vote and a timer that are quick to reach, and little else in the way.
• Clients and guests who just join. The people a workshop is for are often outside your organisation. They should be able to open a link and take part.
• Boards you own. Years of workshops are worth keeping in a format that does not depend on one product staying the same.

• Real-time collaboration. Everyone edits the same board at once, with named cursors and a presenter to follow. See the online whiteboard.
• No sign-up to start. A quick board opens in one click, and guests join from a link without an account.
• Facilitation built in. Dwell voting and a shared countdown timer are on every board, in the Facilitate menu.
• Sharing with a role. A link can edit or can view, any link can be revoked, and a signed-off board can be locked. See sharing boards with clients.
• An open file format. Every board is an OCIF file you can download, alongside SVG, PNG and PDF.
• Templates for the workshop. EventStorming, Retrospective, Kanban board, Retrospective formats, Brainstorm, Impact / effort matrix, SWOT analysis, Lean Coffee, Check-in, Empathy map, Customer journey map, User story map, Example mapping, Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, each with a legend of the notes it uses. See the templates.

An honest comparison says this part too. Blending Links is in public preview and does much less than Miro. Today it has no freehand drawing, no tables, no diagramming shape libraries, no integrations with other tools and no version history, and it has 15 templates rather than a gallery of them.

If your team relies on those, Miro is the better choice. If your boards are mostly sticky notes, frames and arrows in a workshop, this may be all you need.

You do not have to start again. We are building a small desktop app that exports your Miro boards to open OCIF files on your own machine, through Miro's documented API, without your password reaching our servers. It is not available yet. How moving boards will work, including what comes across and what does not.

Until then, start new workshops here and leave the old boards where they are.

Do I need an account to try it?

No. A quick board opens without one. People you invite can edit it for 50 minutes; sign in to keep it with no time limit.

Can my clients join without an account?

Yes. Anyone with a board's link opens that board, and only that board, and picks a name.

Can I import my Miro boards today?

Not directly yet: the export app is still being built. Any board that is already an OCIF file imports today with Import OCIF….

What happens to my boards if I leave?

You download them. Each one is an OCIF file that any tool reading the format can open.