10 Best Free Whiteboard Apps of 2026

Canva Whiteboards earns the top spot because its free plan avoids the board cap that limits most rivals. You can create as many whiteboards as you need, each with unlimited space, and invite a team or a class even if those people have no Canva account. Real-time colored cursors show who is working where, and timers, comments and sticky notes with reactions cover the basics of a brainstorm or lesson. Shapes with automatic connectors handle simple process maps, and the board can pull from Canva's wider content library. For schools, Canva offers a school and district managed version that is free for eligible K-12 teachers and students. The trade-offs show up in heavier work. Many templates and elements carry a Pro badge, the canvas has fewer facilitation tools than dedicated workshop apps, and the editor is built for all kinds of design, so the menus are busier than in a pure whiteboard. Canva Pro starts at $14.99 a month on the US App Store.

Excalidraw is the quickest way to get people drawing on the same board. Open the site and you have an infinite canvas with the full editor, no account needed, and you can invite unlimited collaborators by link. The hand-drawn look keeps diagrams informal, which suits architecture sketches, lesson explanations and quick planning. The free tier includes 10 generative AI requests a day, with text to diagram, wireframe to code and Mermaid to Excalidraw conversion, and it exports to PNG, SVG or a file you save yourself. Data is encrypted end to end in the browser, and the software is open source. The catch is storage. The free tier keeps 1 scene in your browser, so you either save files manually or move to Excalidraw+ at $6 per user per month, which adds unlimited scenes and folders on the cloud, sharing with edit or view rights, comments, presentations, voice hangouts and PDF or PPTX export. There is no template library, so structured workshops take more setup.

Freeform is the easiest free whiteboard if everyone involved uses Apple hardware. Apple states that creating, viewing and editing boards and collaborating in real time do not require a subscription, and boards stay in sync through iCloud across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision Pro. Up to 100 people can brainstorm on one board, and you can invite them by email, link or Messages, then start a FaceTime call from the board. The canvas accepts photos, video, audio, documents, PDFs, web links and stickies, and a library of over 700 shapes with alignment guides covers diagrams. Recent additions include Tables and Scenes, which let you save and jump to parts of a board for presenting, and iPhone and iPad users can scan paper documents onto the board. The limits are platform and polish. There is no Windows or Android app, so mixed classrooms are left out, and premium content and AI image features sit behind an Apple Creator Studio subscription.

Miro has the deepest feature set of any whiteboard here, and much of it is available free. The free plan includes unlimited team members, more than 7,000 templates, and Docs, Tables, Timelines, Kanban and Slides that sit directly on the canvas. AI can generate diagrams, tables and summaries using 10 credits a month, and more than 250 integrations connect boards to Microsoft, Slack, Google and Adobe tools. Visitors can open a board from a public link without an account. The free plan's main limit is boards: you can create unlimited boards, but only the 3 most recent stay editable. Free boards are also open to every team member by default, with no visitor or guest roles, so private client boards need a paid plan. Starter costs $8 per member per month billed yearly and adds unlimited private boards and visitor editing. For a team that runs a few active boards at a time, the free plan is generous.

FigJam is Figma's whiteboard, and Figma includes it with every seat on every plan. That makes it a strong free choice for product teams that already design in Figma, since brainstorms, user flows and design files live in the same account. The board supports real-time brainstorming, diagramming with shapes and connectors that snap to the grid, and facilitation for meetings, workshops, stand-ups and retros. The free Starter plan includes UI kits and templates and 150 AI credits a day, up to 500 a month. Its main limit is file count: Figma's help center lists a single team with one folder and 3 files on Starter, so a busy team will run out of room. The upgrade is cheap. A Collab seat on the Professional plan is listed at $3 per month with 500 AI credits, which is the lowest paid price on this list. For teachers or groups that do not use Figma, the seat model and design-tool context add friction.

tldraw is a free, minimal whiteboard that opens straight to a blank canvas in the browser. It is the public face of the tldraw SDK, an infinite canvas engine that other companies license to build their own whiteboards; tldraw says ClickUp modernized its whiteboard for millions of users with it and Padlet used it to ship a new whiteboard. The drawing tools are strong for the price: pressure-sensitive drawing, geometric shapes, rich text, arrows, snapping to shapes, image and video support and image export, plus embeds from YouTube, Figma and GitHub. It works in any browser on desktops, touch screens, tablets and phones, and you sign in only when you want to share a board. What it lacks is structure for group sessions. There are no templates, timers or voting, and tldraw publishes little about storage limits or account features for the consumer site. Its paid offer is a commercial SDK license with a 100-day free trial, aimed at developers rather than teams.

Lucidspark is built for running sessions, not just drawing. Its free plan gives you 3 editable boards with unlimited shapes, freehand drawing, emoji reactions, commenting, basic Visual Activities, Lucid AI, presentation mode and the Gather, Sort and Paths tools for organizing ideas. That makes it a good fit for facilitators who walk a group through a sequence of steps. Teams that already map processes in Lucidchart get a natural pairing, and Lucid offers a 25% saving when you bundle the two. The free plan's 3 board limit is the same as Miro's and Mural's, and the most useful organizing tools, such as tags and assisted grouping, are kept for paid plans. Individual costs $9 per month billed annually and adds unlimited editable boards and premium Visual Activities, while Team at $10 per user per month adds touchscreen whiteboard support and revision history. The 7-day free trial asks for payment details up front and bills automatically unless you cancel.

Mural's free plan is built to get a team started quickly. It includes unlimited members, unlimited murals with 3 editable at a time, all of Mural's visual collaboration tools, open rooms for workspace members and unlimited visitors with view-only rights. For a team that runs a few workshops a month, that covers a lot. The limits appear when you need outside input or more active boards. Visitors cannot edit on Free, so a workshop with clients or students who are not workspace members needs Team+, which adds unlimited editable murals, unlimited visitors with editing rights, private rooms, Mural AI and basic Zoom and Webex integrations. Team+ costs $9.99 per member per month billed annually or $12 billed monthly, and Business at $17.99 adds SSO and unlimited external guests. Compared with Miro, Mural offers a similar free board count with fewer templates published on its pricing page, so it fits best when your organization already prefers Mural.

Whimsical keeps boards and docs in one workspace, which suits teams that turn flowcharts and mind maps into written plans. The free plan is open in some ways and tight in others. It allows unlimited boards, unlimited workspace members, unlimited guests and 10 AI credits per member, and Whimsical says viewers are always free. But you can only create 50 board objects and 50 doc blocks a month, exports carry a watermark and version history covers 7 days. For an occasional diagram that is enough; for a weekly team brainstorm it runs out quickly. Pro costs $10 per editor per month billed annually and removes the object and block limits, removes the watermark and extends version history to 90 days. Business at $20 adds private teams, SAML single sign-on and SCIM. Because the free tier meters content rather than boards, Whimsical works better as a trial of a paid tool than as a long-term free whiteboard.

Zoom Whiteboard makes sense mainly for groups that already live in Zoom. It sits inside the Zoom Workplace app, so a teacher or team lead can open a board during a meeting without sending people to another site. Zoom describes it as a place to map out ideas with sticky notes and shapes, and AI Companion can generate a mind map from a prompt. The free Workplace Basic plan includes 3 editable whiteboards along with 40-minute meetings for up to 100 participants. The weakness is that paying for Pro does not raise the board limit: Zoom's pricing page lists 3 whiteboards on both Basic and Pro, and unlimited whiteboards, custom templates and facilitation tools such as a timer, presentation mode and voting only arrive on Business. Workplace Pro costs $16.99 a month on the US App Store, which is a meetings upgrade more than a whiteboard one. For heavier board work, a dedicated app is better value.