Miro Business, 8 seats → Excalidraw, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Excalidraw saves you $4,836 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$376.77/hrBelow that rate, moving to Excalidraw pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Miro Business.
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 Business $20.00/month × 8 seats, billed annual | $160.00 |
| Every month | $160.00 |
What the escape costs
| Linode Nanode 1GB 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 25 GB disk · 0.98 TB transfer | $5.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 15 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.10 |
| Your time 0.3 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $15.00 |
| Every month | $20.10 |
| Migration, once 4 hours of your time, our estimate | $200.00 |
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 | $139.90 |
| After one year | $1,479 |
| After 3 years | $4,836 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs Excalidraw from $1.80/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Excalidraw their published minimum for this app | $1.80 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $1.80 |
| Migration, once 2 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $100.00 |
| After 3 years, against Miro Business | $5,595 |
At $50 an hour that saves $5,595 over 3 years, against $4,836 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Excalidraw and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Linode box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Miro's templates, frameworks and the meeting facilitation tooling built on top of them
- Infinite-canvas features like voting, timers and Jira integration
- Comment threads and the review workflow around them
You gain
- A static front end that costs almost nothing to run and almost never breaks
- Drawings stored as plain files you can version and diff
- MIT licensing, the most permissive on this site
Read this before you decide
- These are not the same product. Excalidraw is a sketching tool; Miro is a workspace people run meetings in. If your team lives in Miro, this comparison is not for you.
- Real-time collaboration needs the separate excalidraw-room server. The estimate assumes you deploy both.
- There is no Miro importer. Existing boards are recreated by hand or not at all.
Is the project alive?
excalidraw/excalidraw has 134,151 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v0.18.1) 181 days ago. Licence: MIT. 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: “Business For growing organizations and consultants to streamline workflows with AI $ 20 /month per member, billed yearly”.
| Miro pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Linode plan catalogue | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| excalidraw/excalidraw 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.