"Free" is four different deals, not one

You did not open this page because you dislike Milanote, Miro or FigJam. You opened it because a card was charged again for a board you last touched in March, and the fix that occurs to everyone first is finding the same thing for nothing. That fix exists, more than once, but the word "free" is doing four unrelated jobs across the tools that offer it, and knowing which job you are getting matters more than the number on the page.

Checked against each vendor's own site on 5 September 2026.

Four shapes of free, before the list

Pay-what-you-want. PureRef's download page lets a personal licence cost whatever you choose, including nothing. It is not a trial or a limited tier — zero is a real, permanent option the developer offers.

Released free, no tier above it. Kuadro's own page states it is free for any use, commercial included, with nothing to upgrade into later. What you have today is what there is.

Free because the licence requires it. BeeRef is GPL v3.0. The source is public, so the specific copy of the code cannot carry a price at all.

A capped tier of a paid product. Milanote, Miro, Are.na and FigJam all give away a real but limited slice of a business built to sell you the rest of it — a note count, a board count, a block count, a seat. This is the shape everyone already has and the one this page mostly exists to help you stay on top of.

The eight, sorted by which deal they are

PureRef — pay what you want, personal use

Windows 10+, macOS 10.14+ and Linux. A scene holds whatever you drop on it — images, PDFs — floating above whatever you are painting or writing in, with grouping, notes and grayscale. Commercial studios pay $49 once for three seats or $10 a seat monthly; a single artist working for themselves can choose to pay nothing at all.

Pick it if the job was always "keep this visible while my hands are busy," and you never needed writing or a share link. Full comparison.

Kuadro — free for any use, including commercial

A single portable executable. Every image becomes its own borderless window you can pin, snap and rotate across monitors, saved as a .ref layout that stores paths relative to itself. Its Gumroad listing marks the Mac build officially unsupported, worth testing on your own machine before you build a habit on it.

Pick it if the board is really a handful of windows pinned around a drawing app, and cost was the entire complaint. Full comparison.

BeeRef — free, open source, three platforms

v0.3.3 on its own site, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Move, scale, rotate, crop and mass-arrange images on an infinite canvas, saved as a .bee file — a sqlite database holding the images inside it, extractable with a documented command line even without BeeRef installed.

Pick it if you want a real editable canvas for nothing, and do not mind the file holding copies of your images rather than pointing at the originals. Full comparison.

Milanote, on its free plan — 100 items, 10 uploads

Staying on the tool you already know, just off the invoice. Its plans page caps the free tier at 100 notes, images or links combined, plus 10 file uploads — enough to try it, thin for an actual reference habit, and the writing, sharing and comment tools are still there underneath the cap.

Pick it if the account and the habit are already built, and you only ever open one or two boards at a time. Full comparison.

Are.na, on its free plan — 200 blocks, no card

Its about page lists a Guest tier free to 200 blocks total, browser or its iOS app. A block can sit in several channels at once, which nothing else on this page does, and its member-funded model means the free tier is not a bait for an upsell so much as a genuinely smaller account.

Pick it if following what other people put next to a saved image is part of the job, not just arranging your own. Full comparison.

Apple Photos — free, already on the machine

No install, no account beyond the one already on the Mac, no board format to learn. It manages a library of your own photography well and syncs through iCloud only if you turn that on. It has no board, no floating canvas and no tags shared with anything else — it is a different tool doing a neighbouring job, not a moodboard app wearing a disguise.

Pick it if what you were actually keeping in a paid moodboard tool was your own photos rather than collected reference. Full comparison.

Coii Ref — $19 once, macOS 11 or later

Not free, and this page says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. What $19 buys instead of a subscription is a workspace that never expires and never bills again, plus the one thing none of the seven above do at all: search over the pile of images you already have, before any board gets made.

Pick it if the moodboard was always the small visible end of a much larger folder, and finding the right forty mattered more than arranging them. Do not pick it if you need writing, sharing or a live board with someone else on it — it has none of that. Full comparison.

All eight, on the rows that decide it

What the capped tier is actually rationing

A hundred items or two hundred blocks is not an arbitrary number chosen to annoy you. Milanote and Are.na are both hosting your uploads, syncing them to a phone, and keeping a backup you never think about — none of that is free to run at scale, so the free tier is priced to let you decide whether the tool fits, not to hold a real collection. The moment you outgrow the cap is not a sign the tool is bad; it is the sign the free plan did exactly the job it was built for.

That reframes the actual question underneath this search. It is rarely "which app is free" — PureRef, Kuadro and BeeRef already answer that with no catch at all. It is closer to "am I still paying a business to host pictures I could keep on my own disk," and for a lot of reference habits the honest answer is yes, which is the gap the pay-what-you-want and open-source options on this page were built to close.

What does not survive a downgrade

Dropping from a paid Milanote or Are.na plan back to the free tier does not delete anything retroactively, but going over the cap afterwards will start blocking new items rather than removing old ones — worth checking against each vendor's own current help article before you assume either way, since the exact behaviour is the kind of detail that changes between plans and years. Pulling an export first — Milanote's ZIP, Are.na's channel download — costs nothing and removes the question entirely.

None of the free-forever tools — PureRef, Kuadro, BeeRef — have an account to downgrade from, so this problem does not exist for them at all. That is worth weighing against their smaller feature set: no sharing, no writing, no comments, on any of the three.

What actually moves when you switch

Leaving a hosted board for a free desktop tool is not a like-for-like swap, and the honest version of this page says what changes rather than only what you save. A Milanote or Are.na board is reachable from any browser, on any machine, the moment you sign in. PureRef, Kuadro, BeeRef and Coii Ref all live on one Mac at a time — moving to a second machine means moving a file or buying a second licence, not signing into a website. If the whole point of the paid tool was reaching the same board from a laptop and a phone in the same afternoon, none of the free desktop options solve that, and no amount of searching for "free moodboard app" will turn one up that does, because syncing between devices is exactly the infrastructure a subscription is paying to run.

The other thing that changes is who else can see the board without your Mac. A Milanote link opens in somebody else's browser in two seconds. None of PureRef, Kuadro, BeeRef, Apple Photos or Coii Ref have an equivalent — a file on your machine that nobody outside it can open is not a limitation anyone forgot to build around, it is what "no account" and "no upload" actually mean in practice. Weigh that against the invoice honestly: for boards nobody else ever opens, it is not a cost at all.

Verify the free claim, not just the price

"Free" changes shape often enough that it is worth checking the specific claim rather than trusting a table, this one included, more than a few weeks old. A vendor can move a feature behind a paywall, shrink a usage cap, or retire a free tier entirely with a release note most users never read. Kuadro and BeeRef are the two entries on this page where that risk is close to zero — Kuadro because its developer states there is no tier above free to move things into, and BeeRef because a GPL licence cannot be revoked from copies already released. PureRef's pay-what-you-want model has stayed in place for years, but its own page is still the source to check before you build a habit around zero cost specifically. Milanote and Are.na are the two most likely to adjust a cap over time, precisely because the free tier's job is to convert a share of the people using it, and adjusting the number is the easiest lever either company has.

None of this is a reason to distrust a specific number in the table above — every one of them was read from the vendor's own page today. It is a reason to re-read that page yourself before a decision that depends on a number staying fixed for years, the way "which app do I build a five-year reference habit around" actually does.

How to choose in about a minute

If the itch is pay nothing, forever, no catch, PureRef, Kuadro or BeeRef — pick BeeRef if you want the canvas editable, Kuadro if you want floating windows, PureRef if you want both grouping and grayscale.

If the itch is stay where you are, just under the cap, Milanote or Are.na's own free plans do that honestly, as long as the habit stays small.

If the itch is my own photography, already on the machine, Apple Photos.

If the itch is finding the images I already have, not arranging new ones, that is the one job none of the free tools do, and the trial runs thirty days with every feature, no card and no account.

For the neighbouring searches, the full moodboard round-up sorts by who else needs to see the board, and the Milanote round-up goes further into the one-time-purchase side of this same shelf.