Miro → Excalidraw
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Miro, as listed on its pricing page on 2026-10-03: Free is $0 with 3 editable boards. Starter is $8 per member/month billed yearly or $10 billed monthly. Business is $20 per member/month billed yearly or $25 billed monthly. Enterprise is custom-priced from 30 members. Excalidraw, as listed the same day: the editor is MIT-licensed and free. The free tier on excalidraw.com gives one infinite scene with unlimited collaborators. Excalidraw+ is $6 per user/month on monthly billing, and annual billing is listed as saving 14%; it adds unlimited scenes and folders, cloud storage, access management, comments and presentations. Worked example from those prices: 10 people cost $200/month on Miro Business (yearly) or $60/month on Excalidraw+ (monthly). Self-hosting the Docker image costs $0 in licences, but Excalidraw's docs say a self-hosted instance does not support sharing or collaboration.
Moves cleanly
Very little moves as editable objects. Miro's 'Save as image' exports JPG, and its Vector export produces PDF or SVG; Free accounts get small, low-resolution exports only. You can drop those images onto an Excalidraw canvas as references. Miro can also export the text on sticky notes, cards, text boxes, shapes and tables to a CSV file, which can seed new notes.
You rebuild
You redraw shapes, sticky notes, connectors and frames as Excalidraw elements. Miro tables, Docs, mind maps, Kanban boards, freehand strokes, comments, votes and embeds have no direct counterpart: rebuild them or keep them as images. Miro's .rtb board backup can only be restored inside Miro.
What Miro costs you today
Free for 3 editable boards. Starter is about $8 per member per month billed annually, Business about $16, with Enterprise quoted. Every member who needs to edit counts, and the free plan's three-board limit is reached almost immediately by any real team. A 50-person company on Business is roughly $9,600 a year. Figures checked 2026-08-04.
What actually holds you in
Low technically, high socially. Boards export to image or PDF and Miro provides a JSON export, so the content comes out even if the fidelity does not. The real friction is that boards are shared artefacts: links live in tickets, documents and calendar invites across the organisation, and moving means every one of those references breaks. Teams that treat boards as disposable workshop output migrate trivially; teams that use them as durable documentation are moving a wiki that happens to be a canvas.
What you are moving to
Excalidraw opens in a browser tab with no account and produces diagrams in a deliberate hand-drawn style — which sounds cosmetic and is not. A sketchy diagram signals 'this is a draft, argue with it', where a polished one signals 'this is decided', and for architecture discussions that difference changes how people respond. MIT licensed, self-hostable, with real-time collaboration and end-to-end encryption. Around 100k stars. For engineering diagrams specifically it has quietly become the default, and the reason is that it removes every step between having an idea and drawing it.
Free and open source. Excalidraw+ is an optional paid hosted tier.
Excalidraw strengths
- Opens instantly with no account, no loading, no onboarding
- Hand-drawn style invites argument rather than closing it down
- MIT and self-hostable, with end-to-end encrypted collaboration
- Exports cleanly to SVG and PNG, and embeds in most documentation tools
What you give up
- No workshop facilitation tools — no voting, timers or templates
- Weaker for large structured boards
- Real-time collaboration needs the hosted service or your own server
- Not a Miro replacement for cross-business workshops
The migration, step by step
- 1List the boards that are still in use and decide for each one. Either archive it as a PDF or SVG snapshot, or rebuild it as editable Excalidraw. Most retrospective and workshop boards only need the snapshot.
- 2For each board you keep, export a Vector PDF or SVG of each frame and export its text to CSV. Also download a .rtb board backup as the full-fidelity copy; this needs Starter or above, a board owner or co-owner, and a board under the 1 GB limit.
- 3Choose where Excalidraw runs: excalidraw.com, Excalidraw+ for saved and shared scenes, or the `excalidraw/excalidraw` Docker image if drawings must stay on your own network and nobody needs live collaboration.
- 4Rebuild the boards worth editing. Place the exported image on the canvas and redraw over it, or script a conversion that reads Miro's REST API and writes the `.excalidraw` JSON format, which has frame and sticky-note elements.
- 5Run both tools in parallel for one sprint. Start new diagrams in Excalidraw while Miro stays open for reference, and save each finished scene as an `.excalidraw` file in your repository or shared drive.
- 6Cut over once the boards still in use are rebuilt. Set the Miro boards to view-only and keep the PDF, SVG and .rtb backups. Reduce Miro seats before renewal: Miro says removing a member takes effect at renewal, not immediately.
The gotcha
Excalidraw has no Miro importer, Miro has no Excalidraw export, and the scripted route has gaps. Miro's developer docs say mind maps are 'Not supported in the REST API'. Tables, documents, code blocks, Kanban boards, mockups, freehand strokes, emojis and user story maps cannot be reached through it either, so a script cannot read those items at all. A community converter under the MIT licence (miro-to-obsidian) writes `.excalidraw` files from the REST API, but its README notes two limits. The API exposes no connector control points, so curved arrows are approximated, and it has no z-index field, so stacking order is guessed from shape size. Boards that use those formats will need redrawing or will stay as images. Export before you downgrade: on Miro Free, exports are small and low-resolution, and board backups need Starter or above.
When to stay on Miro
Stay if your team runs live workshops with voting and templates, keeps Docs, Tables, Kanban and Timelines on the same canvas, or relies on Miro's 250+ integrations and on visitors editing boards without signing in. Miro lists 7,000+ templates. Excalidraw is good for sketches and diagrams, but its self-hosted build has no collaboration, and Excalidraw+ lists no voting feature.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-08-04 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.