The open-source Miro alternative

Miro grew into a broad workspace: boards, workshops, docs, tables, video walkthroughs and a marketplace of apps. livediagram covers the same ground in one document with tabs, and each tab works in one of five modes. Diagram for structure, with arrows that stay attached and re-route as you move things. Draw for freehand whiteboarding with pressure-sensitive markers. Facilitate for running the workshop itself: timers, dot votes, polls and reveals. Illustrate for designed pages: infographics, written documents and slide decks. Plan for boards of cards with WIP limits and swimlanes, beside Sheets with real formulas that can read the cards, and dashboards that bring them together.

Workshops are built in rather than bolted on. A facilitator can run the room with a shared timer, dot-voting, live polls, planning-poker estimate cards, quizzes, a Q&A board and responses kept hidden until the reveal, and templates cover retrospectives, Lean Coffee, town hall Q&A and event storming, including turning a photo of a sticky-note wall into notes. When the session ends, the actions it produced are assigned on the board and the plan picks up on the next tab.

Miro's free tier is real, but it's the top of a pricing funnel: board limits and gated features exist to move teams onto paid seats. livediagram has no paid tier and no plan to introduce one. The hosted version at livediagram.app is free, every user gets every feature, and there is nothing to upgrade to.

That's sustainable because the whole codebase is MIT-licensed and public. If you'd rather not depend on the hosted service at all, you can deploy the same code to your own Cloudflare account: the editor, the API, and the realtime collaboration all self-host, with no license keys and no phone-home checks.

In Miro, creating a board starts with an account, and anonymous guest editing depends on the plan you are on. In livediagram, collaborating is a URL. Anyone can create a document without signing up; a guest’s new document is kept in their browser until they press Share, which syncs it in one step. Whoever opens the link is on the canvas with you, live cursors and all. A link is an Editor, Participant or view-only link (a Participant adds stickies, writes and votes but cannot reshape the board), and it can carry a password or an expiry date when you need it locked down.

The collaboration tools go beyond cursors: leave comments on elements and assign action items to teammates directly on the canvas, tracked together in the Collaborate panel, with optional email notifications. A selection lock shows when someone is editing an element, so two people rarely end up changing the same thing at once.

Diagrams rarely live alone. livediagram imports Mermaid (flowcharts, state and ER diagrams, the diagram-as-code format that lives in READMEs and AI output), Markdown outlines, Excalidraw scenes, draw.io files and Microsoft Whiteboard boards, and exports PNG, SVG, PDF, Mermaid, Markdown, Excalidraw or a portable JSON file. Any share link embeds as a live-updating iframe in a wiki or doc: an editor link embeds an editable canvas, and a participant or view-only link a read-only one.

For programmatic use there is a free REST API with personal tokens and an MCP server at mcp.livediagram.app that lets AI assistants read and edit your documents directly; their edits arrive live, outlined, and undoable as one unit. None of it sits behind a plan.