Miro Starter, 6 seats → draw.io, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, draw.io saves you $856 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$111.99/hrBelow that rate, moving to draw.io pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Miro Starter.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Miro Starter $8.00/month × 6 seats, billed annual | $48.00 |
| Every month | $48.00 |
What the escape costs
| Linode Nanode 1GB 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 25 GB disk · 0.98 TB transfer | $5.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 10 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.07 |
| Your time 0.3 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $15.00 |
| Every month | $20.07 |
| Migration, once 3 hours of your time, our estimate | $150.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $5.00 vc2-1c-1gb · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $5.00 Nanode 1GB · used above
- DigitalOcean $6.00 1 vCPU · 1 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $27.93 |
| After one year | $185 |
| After 3 years | $856 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Real-time multiplayer, which is most of what Miro sells
- Templates, voting, timers and everything built for running a workshop
- Comment threads and the review flow around them
You gain
- The best diagramming tool of the lot, and it is not close for flowcharts and architecture
- Diagrams as XML files you can version and diff in git
- Apache-2.0, and a container that runs on the cheapest box sold
Read this before you decide
- These are different products. draw.io is for diagrams; Miro is for meetings. If your team runs workshops on Miro, this is not a replacement.
- Self-hosted draw.io has no collaboration server. People edit files, not a shared board.
- If you want an infinite shared canvas, read the Excalidraw page instead.
Is the project alive?
jgraph/drawio has 8,863 stars, was last pushed 1 day ago, and last cut a release (v32.5.5) 1 day ago. Licence: Apache-2.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Miro figure is the site's own wording: “Starter For small teams collaborating regularly with unlimited boards $ 8 /month per member, billed yearly”.
| Miro pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Linode plan catalogue | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| jgraph/drawio activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Linode, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.