A moodboard is at least three different jobs wearing one name

The search "moodboard app" covers a workshop whiteboard, a client presentation, a private wall of references, and a personal collection that happens to end in a board — and almost nothing that ranks for the phrase says so before selling you on one of the four. This page sorts by which job is actually yours, because the honest answer to "which moodboard app" depends entirely on who else is looking at the board and what happens to the images after it is finished.

Every price below is checked against the vendor's own page on 5 September 2026.

If other people have to be on the board

Miro — free for 3 editable boards; $8/member/mo billed yearly

Its pricing page lists Free at $0 with unlimited members but only three editable boards — older ones stay viewable, not editable — Starter at $8 per member a month billed yearly for unlimited editable boards, Business at $20, and custom Enterprise pricing from 30 members. Real-time cursors, comments, 7,000+ templates and 250+ integrations.

Pick it if the board is a live session with several people in it, and per-seat pricing is a fair trade for running workshops rather than a cost to avoid. Full comparison.

FigJam — free on Starter; otherwise part of a Figma seat from $16/mo

Figma's own FigJam page states FigJam is included with every seat on every plan, and its pricing page lists Starter at no cost, Professional at $16 a month for a full seat, Organization at $55, Enterprise at $90. Starter's team folder holds three FigJam files, though drafts are unlimited. It takes MP4, MOV and WebM alongside stills, on any plan.

Pick it if the board is heading into a Figma design file next, or you want the widest media support of anything on this page. Full comparison.

Milanote — free to 100 items; $9.99/month billed annually

Its plans page lists a free tier of 100 notes, images or links plus 10 file uploads, an individual plan at $9.99 a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly, and team plans from $49. Boards hold writing and to-do lists as well as images, built specifically for creative work rather than workshops, and can be shared with a link.

Pick it if the board is a client presentation with notes on it rather than a live session — softer and more visual than Miro or FigJam, and built for exactly that. Full comparison.

If you want a board with no account attached

PureRef — pay what you want, personal use

Its download page offers a pay-what-you-want personal licence — you can pay nothing — with commercial tiers at $49 once for up to three studio seats, or $10 a seat monthly, $8 billed yearly. Windows 10+, macOS 10.14+ and Linux. A scene floats above whatever you are painting in, with grouping, notes, hierarchy and grayscale.

Pick it if the board's whole job is being visible while your hands are busy, and nobody else needs to see it. Full comparison.

BeeRef — free, open source, three platforms

Its site lists v0.3.3 under the GNU General Public License v3.0, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Move, scale, rotate, crop and mass-arrange on an infinite canvas, saved as a .bee — a sqlite database holding the images inside it, extractable with a documented command even without BeeRef installed.

Pick it if you want an always-on-top board and full canvas editing tools for nothing. Full comparison.

Kuadro — free for any use, including commercial

Its own page describes it as released as is, free for any use including commercial. Every image is its own borderless window across your monitors, saved as a .ref layout. The Mac build is marked officially unsupported on its own Gumroad listing, worth testing on your machine before you rely on it.

Pick it if the board is really a handful of windows pinned around a drawing app rather than a single composed canvas. Full comparison.

If the board is really a curated feed with other people's material on it

Are.na — free to 200 blocks; $7/month or $70/year

Its about page lists a free Guest tier to 200 blocks, Premium at $7 a month or $70 a year for unlimited blocks, and $120/yr Supporter. Member-funded, with no advertising business, by its own description — the board here is a channel, and a block can belong to several at once, which none of the other tools on this page do.

Pick it if the point of the board is following what other people put next to a thing you saved, not just arranging your own images. Full comparison.

If the moodboard is the small visible end of a much bigger pile

Coii Ref — $19 once, macOS 11 or later

Ours, the same length as the rest. Every board above starts from images you upload, paste or drag in — the tool has no opinion about the folders you have already spent years organising. Coii Ref's opinion is the opposite one: it indexes what is already on your Mac and searches it before a board ever gets made.

Drag the results onto a canvas and it is a .coii-canvas file, pretty-printed JSON, saved wherever you put it — no upload, because there was no server to upload to. Video is indexed the same way as stills, same tags, same query line, with proxies at canvas resolution.

Pick it if you have thousands of images already on disk and the actual bottleneck was finding the forty that belong on this board. Do not pick it if the board needs to be shared, commented on, or made with a team: it has none of that, and Miro, FigJam and Milanote all do. Full comparison.

All eight, on the rows that decide it

What each one actually costs over three years

Prices in a table read the same whether they are annual or one-time, so here is the arithmetic done plainly. Three years of Miro's Starter plan for one person, billed yearly, comes to roughly $230. Three years of a Figma Professional seat comes to about $576. Three years of an individual Milanote plan, annual billing, is roughly $360. Are.na's Premium tier over the same period is $210. PureRef, Kuadro and BeeRef can all be zero. Coii Ref is $19, once, for the same three years and every year after it.

That comparison is only fair between tools doing the same job, which is the whole argument of this page: paying per seat for Miro or FigJam is buying real-time collaboration, and there is no local substitute for that at any price, so the three-year number is not evidence against them. It is evidence against paying a team price for a board nobody else ever opens, which is a narrower and more common mistake than picking the wrong app outright.

What a board actually needs to survive

Every tool on this page answers the question "what happens to this board in three years" differently, and it is worth asking before you build a habit around any of them rather than after.

Miro and FigJam's boards live inside a workspace tied to a seat; stop paying and access to what you built goes with the seat, though both publish export paths for images and, in FigJam's case, a copy into a Figma design file. Milanote documents PDF, PNG, Word, Markdown, plain text and ZIP exports, with home boards excluded and single-page limits on the visual formats. Are.na publishes a channel download and a documented API, genuinely better answers than most hosted tools give. PureRef, BeeRef and Kuadro all save to a file on your disk already — a .pur, a .bee, a .ref — so the question barely applies to them, though a .bee embeds copies of your images inside itself rather than pointing at the originals. Coii Ref's canvas is the same idea taken furthest: a .coii-canvas is plain JSON naming files that were never copied anywhere, so the board and the pictures it names live in the same folder and travel together.

The question that actually sorts these eight

Not "which is best" — ask who else opens the board, and the list splits cleanly. If the answer is several people, live, it is Miro or FigJam. If it is one client, later, with notes, Milanote. If it is nobody, ever, the remaining five split again by what you are boarding: other people's material you are curating, which is Are.na; a handful of images visible while you work, which is PureRef, BeeRef or Kuadro; or a shortlist pulled out of a much larger library you already keep, which is what Coii Ref is for and the four above are not built to do at all.

Where the eight actually overlap, and where they don't

It is tempting to read a table like the one above as eight competitors for one job, and that is the wrong way to use it. Miro and FigJam compete with each other directly — same job, same shape, genuinely a choice. Milanote competes with both of them only at the edges, for people who want the creative bias without the workshop apparatus. PureRef, BeeRef and Kuadro compete with each other and almost nobody else, because floating-canvas software is its own small category with its own single question: does it stay out of your way while you work. Are.na is not really competing with anything else here — its job is connection, and nothing on this page offers an alternative to that specific thing. And Coii Ref competes with none of the seven, because it is the only one answering "what do I already have," which is a question every moodboard tool on this page assumes has already been answered before the board gets made.

What none of them are

Worth stating once rather than repeating eight times. None of these is a photo editor. None replaces a dedicated catalogue for a large library of mixed formats — PDFs, fonts, design documents — the way Adobe Bridge or Eagle do; a moodboard tool's job stops at the board, and a real library sits upstream of it. And none of them is a backup: everything above writes to an account or a file, and neither is a substitute for your own copy existing somewhere else too.

How to choose in about a minute

Team, live session: Miro or FigJam, and pick FigJam if the work is already heading into Figma.

Client-facing, with writing: Milanote.

Curated feed of other people's finds: Are.na.

Floating over your work, free: PureRef or Kuadro.

Editable canvas, free, open source: BeeRef.

A library first, a board second: Coii Ref, and the trial runs thirty days with every feature, no card and no account — long enough to index a real folder tree and see whether the shortlist step is the one you were missing.

For the narrower searches this page sits above, the Pinterest round-up is written for artists leaving a feed rather than a whiteboard, and the Milanote round-up goes deeper on the one-time-purchase side of this same list.