Miro dominates the whiteboard market, but it's designed for project managers and enterprise teams. If you're a designer looking for visual collaboration that fits how creative work actually happens, these alternatives are purpose-built for you.
Last updated:
March 6, 2026
Ivan S
Lead Marketing Designer @Scribe, Founder @bookmarkify
Miro is a powerful visual collaboration platform with over 60 million users, 5,000+ templates, and deep integrations with Jira, Asana, and Microsoft 365. It's exceptional for sprint planning, retrospectives, process mapping, and cross-functional workshops. But there's a gap: Miro was built for how project managers think, not how designers work.
Designers don't just need a whiteboard — they need to collect real web references, organize visual inspiration across client projects, study how responsive designs actually behave, and extract design details like fonts and color palettes from sites they admire. Miro's sticky notes and flowchart connectors weren't designed for that workflow. If you've found yourself screenshotting websites, pasting them as static images onto Miro boards, and losing all the interactivity that makes web design worth studying, you're using the wrong tool for the job.
Here are seven alternatives that better serve the creative professional's actual workflow — from inspiration collection to design analysis to client presentation.
Bookmarkify takes a fundamentally different approach from Miro. Instead of starting with a blank whiteboard, it starts with the websites you actually want to reference. Save any website through the Chrome extension, and it loads as a fully interactive preview — you can scroll through the page, click navigation, and test interactions without leaving Bookmarkify. No other tool on this list offers live website previews.
The infinite canvas mode lets you arrange saved websites, images, and videos spatially, resize them, create folders, add notes, and draw connections between items. Six view modes — including triple grid, fullscreen, long scroll, and mobile preview — let you study saved sites across responsive breakpoints. The Design Analyse feature extracts fonts, colors, gradients, and assets from any saved website, turning passive references into actionable design data.
Bookmarkify also includes team collaboration through shared workspaces with comments and tags, and the ability to share collections via unique URLs. It's built specifically for designers and creative professionals who collect web inspiration as part of their daily workflow.
Best for: Web designers, UX designers, and creative teams who collect and organize web design inspiration as a core part of their workflow.
Pricing: Free plan with Grid Mode and up to 12 bookmarks. Pro unlocks unlimited bookmarks, all view modes, tags, dark mode, design analyse, and sharing.
Where Miro falls short: Miro has no way to save interactive websites. Every web reference becomes a static screenshot, losing the interactivity and responsive behavior that makes studying web design valuable.
Milanote is the closest to a traditional mood board tool. Its drag-and-drop canvas supports images, text, links, files, and to-do lists arranged in a freeform layout. The interface is intentionally minimal and aesthetically focused, making it popular with brand designers, art directors, and creative strategists.
Milanote's strength is its visual organization — boards look clean and presentable enough to share directly with clients. The web clipper saves images, links, and text from the browser. However, saved websites appear as link cards with thumbnails, not interactive previews. There's no way to scroll through or interact with saved sites.
Best for: Brand designers and art directors who need clean, client-presentable mood boards.
Pricing: Free plan with up to 100 notes, images, and links. Pro starts at $9.99/month.
Where Miro falls short: Miro boards are functional but visually cluttered. Milanote's aesthetic focus makes boards that clients can understand without explanation.
FigJam is Figma's built-in whiteboard tool. Its core advantage is seamless integration with Figma's design environment — you can copy-paste components between FigJam brainstorms and Figma design files. For teams already embedded in the Figma ecosystem, this eliminates the friction of switching between a whiteboard and a design tool.
FigJam offers AI-powered template generation, sticky note sorting and summarization, dot voting, timers, audio chat, and 300+ community templates. It's more lightweight than Miro, which can be an advantage for teams that find Miro's feature set overwhelming. Recent updates include an MCP integration with Notion for automatic documentation of meeting discussions.
Best for: Design teams already using Figma who want a whiteboard without leaving the ecosystem.
Pricing: Included with all Figma plans. Free Starter plan limited to 3 shared FigJam files. Professional plan at approximately $5/user/month.
Where Miro falls short: Miro can't match FigJam's native Figma integration. If your design files live in Figma, FigJam keeps everything in one place.
Eagle is a desktop application for organizing visual assets — images, screenshots, icons, color palettes, fonts, and more. It excels at managing downloaded files with powerful tagging, filtering, and batch operations. If your workflow involves saving and organizing design assets that live on your hard drive, Eagle handles that better than any web-based tool.
The limitation is that Eagle is desktop-only and file-focused. It doesn't save live websites, doesn't offer an infinite canvas for spatial arrangement, and has limited collaboration features. It's a personal asset library rather than a team workspace.
Best for: Solo designers who manage large libraries of downloaded visual assets on their local machine.
Pricing: One-time purchase of $29.95 with lifetime updates.
Where Miro falls short: Miro has no asset management capabilities. Eagle gives designers a proper system for organizing downloaded visual references.
Raindrop.io is a polished bookmark manager with visual thumbnails, nested collections, tags, full-text search, and browser extensions for every major browser. It's the best pure bookmark manager available — fast, clean, and well-designed. Saved links display with visual previews and can be organized into hierarchical collections.
For designers, Raindrop.io covers the bookmarking workflow well but stops at the surface. Saved websites appear as thumbnail cards, not interactive previews. There's no canvas mode, no responsive device previews, and no design analysis features. It organizes your links effectively but doesn't help you study them.
Best for: Anyone who saves lots of links across platforms and needs clean, searchable organization.
Pricing: Free plan with unlimited bookmarks and 5 nested collections. Pro at $5.83/month unlocks full-text search, duplicate detection, and more.
Where Miro falls short: Miro isn't designed for persistent link saving. Raindrop.io gives you a permanent, organized library you can search across all your saved references.
Pinterest is the most widely used visual bookmarking platform with over 450 million monthly active users. Its algorithmic feed surfaces related content as you pin, making it excellent for open-ended visual exploration. The vast user base means nearly every design aesthetic is represented.
For professional design work, Pinterest has significant limitations. The algorithm-driven feed prioritizes engagement over relevance to your specific project. Pins are image-focused — you can't save interactive websites or study responsive behavior. Organization is limited to boards and sections without tags or advanced filtering. And the platform's consumer orientation means it's not built for the structured, project-based workflow designers need.
Best for: Early-stage inspiration gathering when you want to explore broadly.
Pricing: Free.
Where Miro falls short: Miro has no discovery mechanism. Pinterest's algorithm actively surfaces related inspiration you wouldn't have found on your own.
Are.na is a visual research platform favored by artists, architects, and academics. It takes the opposite approach from Pinterest — no algorithm, no ads, no engagement optimization. Content is organized into channels that can be connected and cross-referenced, creating a web of related ideas rather than a linear feed.
The community is smaller but more focused on design, art, and cultural research. Are.na is best for designers who approach inspiration as a research practice rather than a collecting habit. The limitation is that it's a public platform, so it's less suited for client-specific or confidential project work.
Best for: Design researchers who value depth and curation over volume.
Pricing: Free with limited blocks. Premium at $5/month for unlimited blocks.
Where Miro falls short: Miro is transactional — you use it for a specific meeting or sprint. Are.na supports ongoing, evolving research collections.
The right choice depends on what Miro isn't doing for you. If you need to save and interact with live websites, study responsive behavior, and extract design tokens, Bookmarkify fills a gap no other tool addresses. If you need clean mood boards for client presentations, Milanote is the most visually polished option. If you're already in Figma, FigJam keeps everything in one ecosystem. If you manage downloaded assets locally, Eagle is purpose-built for that. And if you need better link organization, Raindrop.io is the most capable bookmark manager available.
Many designers use two or three of these tools together. Bookmarkify for saving and studying live web references, Figma and FigJam for design and brainstorming, and Raindrop.io or Eagle for organizing the broader collection of resources and assets. The key is matching each tool to the specific phase of your workflow rather than forcing one platform to do everything.
Miro's free plan limits you to 3 editable boards. Paid plans start at $8/user/month (Starter) and go up to $20/user/month (Business). For designers who primarily need brainstorming and workshop facilitation, Miro delivers strong value. For designers who primarily collect and organize visual inspiration, the investment is harder to justify when purpose-built alternatives exist at lower price points or with free tiers that better serve creative workflows.
Bookmarkify saves websites as live, interactive previews that you can scroll through and click on. It offers six view modes including mobile preview for studying responsive designs, and a Design Analyse feature that extracts fonts, colors, and assets from any saved site. Miro has no equivalent to any of these features — web references in Miro are limited to static screenshots or link embeds.
Yes, and this is the workflow many designers are adopting. Use Bookmarkify for the research and inspiration phase — saving websites, organizing references by project, analyzing design details. Then use Miro (or FigJam) for the team collaboration phase — workshops, sprint planning, and group decision-making. The tools complement each other because they serve different stages of the design process.
Freelancers managing multiple client projects benefit most from Bookmarkify (for organizing web inspiration by client with tags and canvas views), Raindrop.io (for cross-platform link management), or Milanote (for creating client-presentable mood boards). The choice depends on whether your primary need is studying live web references, organizing links, or creating visual presentations.
Several alternatives offer meaningful free tiers. Bookmarkify's free plan includes Grid Mode and 12 bookmarks. FigJam is free with up to 3 shared files. Raindrop.io offers unlimited bookmarks for free. Pinterest is entirely free. Are.na has a limited free tier. For most individual designers, these free plans cover the core workflow without requiring a paid subscription.
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