Six infinite canvases on a Mac, and the job each one is actually for

"Infinite canvas" describes a shape, not a purpose, and the six apps below use that shape for six different jobs: a floating reference board, a team whiteboard, a note-taking layout, a client moodboard. Picking by "which one is infinite" gets you nowhere; picking by what you are actually trying to arrange gets you there in one read. Checked 5 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing and product pages.

The shape itself is simple: an infinite canvas is a workspace with no fixed page boundary, where you place things anywhere and zoom to see more or less of them at once, rather than scrolling a fixed-width page from top to bottom. What varies enormously between the six tools below is what you are meant to place on it — pictures, sticky notes, linked documents, or a mix — and who else is meant to be looking at it while you work. Sort by that before sorting by price.

PureRef — a board that floats over your art program

The canvas that started as, and still is, a reference board rather than a whiteboard. Its download page offers a pay-what-you-want personal tier and a $49 one-time studio licence, for Windows 10+, macOS 10.14+ and Linux. Always-on-top, transparency to the mouse, desaturation, alignment tools — everything built around keeping images visible while your hands are busy elsewhere. It is not a whiteboard: no shapes, no sticky notes, no multiplayer, and no attempt to be one — which is exactly why it remains the reference of choice for people who tried a whiteboard tool for this job first and found it fighting them at every step. Full comparison.

BeeRef — the same idea, free and open

A canvas app under the GNU General Public License v3.0, currently v0.3.3 for Windows, macOS and Linux. Move, scale, rotate, crop and flip a selection, add text notes, and hide the title bar for a cleaner always-on-top view. Its own site documents the .bee file as a SQLite database with images embedded inside it — an infinite canvas whose file you could, in principle, read without the app at all. That published format is unusual in this category: most canvas apps, free or not, treat their save file as private implementation detail rather than something worth documenting for outsiders. Full comparison.

Miro — the canvas built for a team meeting

A different job entirely: a shared whiteboard for workshops, retros and planning, with a browser-based canvas plus native apps. Miro's pricing page lists a free plan with three editable boards, a Starter tier at $8 per member per month billed yearly, and a Business tier at $20 per member per month — subscription pricing throughout, with nothing one-time on offer. Pick it if the canvas needs to hold a meeting, not just a moodboard — sticky notes, voting, timers and video calling built into the same window are the actual feature set here, and a reference board is something Miro can technically hold but was never optimised for. Full comparison.

FigJam — Figma's canvas, bundled into its plans

Figma's whiteboard product, included with every seat on Figma's plans rather than sold on its own — so its cost is really Figma's pricing, and there is no version of FigJam you buy once and keep. Strong for sticky notes, voting, and diagramming with a design team who are already inside Figma for other reasons. Like Miro, it lives in a browser tab or a companion desktop shell rather than as a standalone Mac application, which is worth knowing if what you actually want is something that opens like any other app on your dock. Full comparison.

Obsidian Canvas — a canvas inside a notes app

Obsidian itself is free for personal use — "free without limits, no sign-up required" — and Canvas ships as part of the core app rather than a paid add-on; only commercial deployment inside an organisation asks for a $50-per-user annual licence. A canvas here is a .canvas file in your vault, built around linking notes, embedding files and drawing connections between them — closer to a mind map with images attached than a moodboard. Because the canvas lives inside a vault of plain Markdown files, it inherits Obsidian's own sync and backup story rather than needing one of its own, which is a genuine advantage for anyone already keeping notes there. Full comparison.

Milanote — the canvas that wants to be a client-facing board

Boards, notes, images and to-do lists together, aimed at presenting a plan rather than just collecting references. Milanote's plans page lists a free tier capped at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads, with an Individual plan at $9.99 a month billed annually for unlimited use. Shared boards are unlimited even on the free tier, which is the feature that actually distinguishes it here — Milanote is built around presenting a finished board to a client rather than co-editing one live with a team, and its layout tools lean toward that job. Full comparison.

Coii Ref — a canvas that is a file in your own folder

The odd one out among the six: not a whiteboard and not a floating overlay, but a saved arrangement of images and video you have already indexed on disk. .coii-canvas files are plain, pretty-printed JSON in your own folders rather than rows in an account you don't control, so a board survives being opened by anything that reads text, version-controlled in git, or synced by whatever already syncs your folders. $19 once, three Macs, thirty days with every feature. Do not pick it if you want real-time multiplayer or a board that floats above another window — that is Miro/FigJam and PureRef/BeeRef, respectively, and Coii Ref does neither.

The relationship to the rest of the app is what makes this canvas different from every other one on the page: plates on a Coii Ref board are placed there from a library the app has already indexed, tagged and rated, so a board starts from a search rather than a blank surface you drag files onto one at a time. Building one from rating:>=4 tag:lighting and then rearranging the results is a different starting point from opening an empty PureRef scene.

All six, on what the canvas is actually for

The split that actually matters

Multiplayer canvases are hosted canvases. Miro, FigJam and Milanote all need an account and a server to make real-time collaboration work, which is the trade for the collaboration itself — nothing wrong with that trade, but it means the board lives in their system, exported rather than opened natively elsewhere.

Single-player canvases can be files. BeeRef, Obsidian Canvas and Coii Ref all write a document you could read without the app that made it, because nobody else needs write access at the same moment you do. PureRef is the exception in this half: its board is embedded inside the .pur file's own format rather than a documented one.

"Floats over another app" is a different feature from "infinite canvas." PureRef and BeeRef do it; none of the whiteboard tools do, because their canvas is the whole window, not an overlay on somebody else's.

What happens to a board when you stop paying

Worth thinking through before picking a hosted tool for anything you would mind losing. Miro's free plan caps you at three editable boards; go over that on a lapsed paid plan and the rest become read-only until you either delete some or pay again. FigJam's boards live under Figma's own plans, so the same logic applies to a cancelled seat. Milanote's free tier caps notes and uploads rather than boards outright, so a downgrade can leave a board you can view but not add to.

None of that is unusual for hosted software, and none of it is a trap — it is simply the trade a subscription canvas makes, the same way a gym membership makes it. The three canvases with a documented or plain-text file format — BeeRef, Obsidian Canvas and Coii Ref — do not have this problem by construction: there is no plan to lapse, so there is nothing that can lock a board behind a paywall retroactively. A .coii-canvas file made this month opens exactly the same way whether or not the $19 licence is still "current" in any sense beyond having been paid once.

Why images specifically change the calculation

A whiteboard tool optimised for sticky notes and diagrams is not automatically bad at holding pictures — Miro, FigJam and Milanote all accept images just fine — but none of them index what you drop on the canvas the way a reference manager does. Drop forty images onto a Miro board and you have forty images on a board, discoverable only by scrolling to them or remembering where you put them. Coii Ref's canvas differs because the plates on it were already searchable before they became part of a board — the canvas is a curated view into an index, not the only record of what exists. If the job really is "where did I put this specific reference," an infinite canvas without search behind it eventually becomes as hard to navigate as the folder it replaced.

Picking one in a minute

If the canvas needs to hold a meeting, Miro or FigJam, depending on which ecosystem you are already in.

If the canvas needs to stay open while you paint, PureRef, or BeeRef if you want it free.

If the canvas needs to be a file you still trust in five years, BeeRef, Obsidian Canvas, or Coii Ref — the three with a documented, readable format underneath the app.

If it needs to be client-facing and shareable by link, Milanote.

If the canvas needs to start from a search rather than a blank page, and the things going onto it are photographs and clips you have already collected rather than notes you are writing fresh, that is the job Coii Ref is built around and none of the whiteboard tools attempt.

One canvas is rarely the whole answer

It is worth saying plainly that a lot of people end up running two of these rather than picking one: a whiteboard tool like Miro or FigJam for the meetings and planning that genuinely need other people in the room, alongside a personal reference board — PureRef, BeeRef or Coii Ref — for the private work of arranging images while actually making something. The two jobs rarely overlap enough for one tool to do both well, and trying to force a team whiteboard into being your personal moodboard tool, or the reverse, is a more common source of frustration with this category than any single feature gap — they are solving different problems that happen to look similar at a glance.

And if what you actually want is a canvas for images and video you have already indexed on your own Mac, download Coii Ref and try building one board during the thirty-day trial before deciding whether $19 once beats a monthly seat, especially if the meeting-planning half of your work is already covered somewhere else — the two do not need to be the same subscription, or the same app, to both work well.