FigJam is where a board gets made. Not where it gets kept.

If the board exists because people are looking at it together — a kickoff, a crit, a workshop where five of you push stickies around for an hour and then decide something — use FigJam. It is included with every Figma seat, the free Starter plan costs nothing, it opens in a browser tab next to the design file, and no offline app is going to beat it at the thing it is for.

Buy Coii Ref if the moodboard is the small visible end of a much larger problem: eleven thousand images already sitting in folders on your Mac, and the board being only the forty you finally chose. $19 once, macOS only, and every canvas is a plain file in your own folder. This page is about that split, because most people searching for a FigJam moodboard alternative are not unhappy with FigJam. They have hit the point where the board is finished and there is nowhere sensible for the other ten thousand nine hundred and sixty images to live.

What FigJam costs today

Checked on Figma's own pages on 3 September 2026, because a comparison written from memory is a comparison that is wrong by the time it ranks.

FigJam is not sold separately. Figma's FigJam page states that it is included with every seat on every plan, and the pricing page lists four of those: Starter at no cost, Professional at $16 per month for a full seat, Organization at $55 per month for a full seat billed annually, and Enterprise at $90. Professional also sells a dev seat at $12 and a collaborator seat at $3, and both of those carry FigJam too — which is genuinely the cheapest way into a paid Figma team if the board is all you want.

The number that matters if you are staying free is in Figma's Starter plan overview: the single team folder holds three FigJam files, three combined Design and Sites files, and three Slides files, with version history kept for thirty days. Drafts, however, are unlimited. So a free FigJam moodboard habit is not really capped — it just lives in drafts rather than in a team, which is fine while you work alone and stops being fine the moment the thing needs to be shared and kept.

Coii Ref is $19 once, with updates included and nothing that renews. Three machines on a licence. Thirty days of trial with every feature, no card, and no account to make. macOS 11 Big Sur or later, and that is the whole platform list — see below, where it counts against us.

Where FigJam is simply the better tool

Other people. FigJam is a multiplayer canvas and Coii Ref is a single-machine app. There are no cursors, no stickies, no voting, no timer, no comment thread, no link you send anyone. If two of you need to be on the same board at the same time from two cities, this comparison is already over and the answer is FigJam.

It is where the work is going anyway. A moodboard in FigJam sits in the same file browser as the design file it will become. Nobody exports anything; you copy board contents straight into Figma Design and carry on. If your output is screens, that adjacency is worth more than any organisational feature on our side.

It runs everywhere. Browser, desktop app, and an iPad app for FigJam specifically. Coii Ref runs on macOS 11 or later and nowhere else. The code builds elsewhere, but a platform that has not shipped signed and tested builds is not a platform, so if you are ever on a Windows machine, a Linux box or a borrowed laptop, that row is a straight loss for us and no amount of file-format argument repairs it.

It takes media on any plan. Figma's help article on placing images, video and GIFs lists PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, WEBP and GIF for stills and MP4, MOV and WebM for video, and says the feature is available on any team or plan. That is a wider format list than people expect from a whiteboard, and it means a FigJam board of film references is a real thing rather than a workaround.

It absorbs other whiteboards. Figma's import and export article documents bringing in boards from Miro, Mural, Lucid and Google Jamboard, plus CSV as tables and PDF. If you are leaving a different whiteboard, FigJam will take your history across. Coii Ref imports from refern and from nothing else.

Templates, widgets and plugins. There is an ecosystem. We have none of that and are not building one.

That is five or six things a page written by our marketing department would have quietly skipped. They are the reason FigJam is used by millions of people and the reason this page is not trying to talk you out of it.

The gap is not the canvas. It is the archive.

Here is the thing FigJam does not do, stated plainly so you can decide whether it applies to you: a FigJam board knows about the images somebody put on it, and nothing else.

That is not a flaw. It is the correct design for a whiteboard. A jam is a session; a session has a beginning and an end; what was not dragged into it does not exist. But a reference practice is the opposite shape. You collect for years. You save a photograph of a stairwell in 2023 and you need it in 2026 for a reason you could not have predicted, and the only way you will ever find it again is if something has been quietly reading the folder it landed in.

Coii Ref is the reading part. You point it at the folders you already keep — they stay exactly where they are, nothing is copied, moved or renamed — and it reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, writes thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies inside that same folder, and then gives you one line of search across the lot.

That is the query a designer types the morning of the kickoff. Sixty-two images that are already in the Brand folder, already tagged one of two ways, wide enough to project, and carrying a note from whenever you first saved them. In FigJam the equivalent step is remembering, opening Finder, and dragging — which works fine at forty images and stops working somewhere around a few thousand.

The query line takes AND across keys and OR inside a comma list, with no parentheses, because grouping is what makes a query impossible to autocomplete or draw as deletable chips. A word it does not recognise becomes free text instead of an error, so the grid never stops returning rows while you are still typing. Save that text as a view and it is re-parsed every time you open it, which is why renaming a tag does not break a saved view: there is no stored membership list to repair.

The table

Rows we lose are marked as losses. You would find them out in the first ten minutes anyway, and finding them out on your own is worse.

A board that is a file

A Coii Ref canvas is Something.coii-canvas — pretty-printed JSON, saved in whichever of your own folders you chose to put it in.

You can read it in a text editor. You can put it under version control and see what changed between Tuesday's board and Thursday's. You can write a script against it without asking us for permission or an API key. And because it lives in the project folder rather than in an app's storage, whatever already backs up that folder has already backed up the board.

The honest version of the comparison is this. Figma's own documentation is clear about what leaves a FigJam board: images in PNG, JPG and PDF, stickies and tables as CSV, and a copy into Figma Design. Those are perfectly reasonable exports for a whiteboard, and Figma is a company nobody sensible is betting against. But an export is a photograph of a board, and the board itself is an object in somebody else's system. Ours is an object in yours. That is not a prediction about Figma — it is the difference between something you can verify with cat and something you have to trust, and for a moodboard you intend to still have in 2036, the verifiable one is worth something.

This is the same argument the Obsidian Canvas comparison has to concede, incidentally, because Obsidian's canvas is also a plain file in your own vault. Against FigJam the argument stands; against Obsidian it does not, and that page says so.

Video, which a whiteboard treats as a placement

Both apps take video, so the table row is a draw and the behaviour underneath is not. FigJam places an MP4, MOV or WebM on the board and plays it there.

In Coii Ref video is the same kind of thing as an image the whole way through. It is indexed on the same pass as the stills. It carries the same tags, ratings and notes. It sits on a canvas beside photographs. And it is reachable from the same query line — type:video ext:mov is a filter, not a mode you switch into. Proxies are written at canvas resolution beside your files so a board made mostly of clips scrolls like a board made of photographs rather than stuttering.

If half your references are footage — motion work, edit references, anyone collecting film stills next to the shots they came from — that is worth testing against your own material during the trial rather than taking from a table.

What it costs to keep both

The recommendation, for most people reading this, is both. They are not competing for the same half hour.

The workflow that actually happens: the search line finds the shortlist in the morning, you drag those forty files into a FigJam board because the meeting is at eleven and three other people need to point at things, the meeting produces a direction, and then the direction goes back into a .coii-canvas in the project folder where it will still be legible when the client asks for a second round in March. Nothing is exported from anywhere. The images were files the whole time.

The switching cost is close to nothing, which is the useful part. Coii Ref never takes ownership of a file, so you can index the folders you already have, use it for a fortnight, and delete it having lost precisely nothing — your originals were never moved and never rewritten. The only trace is a database, a thumbnail cache and a set of proxies inside the folder you pointed at, which you can delete by hand.

What Coii Ref does not have

Worth stating in a block rather than scattering through the page, because arriving for a feature that is not there wastes your evening.

No collaboration of any kind — no shared board, no comments, no cursors, no link you send a client. No account and no cloud, which means no sync between your machines except whatever you already use for folders. No browser extension, so saving an image from a web page is something you do the way you always did, and Coii Ref picks it up once it is on disk. No automatic tagging and no search by meaning; the search is literal, over what is already true of the file. No templates. No mobile app. No PDF or document support — images and video. And no Windows or Linux release.

If several of those are load-bearing for you, refern is the app in this category that has most of them, runs on three platforms, and is $35 once. That page is written properly, meaning it concedes most of the feature axis.

The trial, and what actually stops

Thirty days, every feature, no card, no account. What is unusual is the shape of the end, so it is worth stating rather than leaving as a surprise.

At day thirty-one one category of action stops, and it is growing the library: registering a new folder, running the importer, and starting an indexing pass by hand are refused until you buy. Everything that reads keeps working permanently — search, tags, ratings, notes, saved views, canvases, thumbnails — and the folder watcher keeps running too, so a file you rename in Finder next spring does not quietly turn the index into a liar. An unpaid copy does not hold your work hostage. It stops taking on more.

Every outbound connection the app can make is two kinds of request: a licence check when you press Activate, and one at launch read only for its Date header, so that winding the clock back does not mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. That is a shorter list to defend than a browser-based tool can offer, and if you work somewhere that audits outbound traffic it may be the row that decides this.

Who should pick which

Stay in FigJam if the board is a conversation; if people other than you edit it; if it is going to become a Figma design file next week; if you are ever on a machine that is not a Mac; if you want templates, plugins and an iPad; or if three team files and unlimited drafts are simply enough for how you work.

Add Coii Ref if the images on your boards are a small selection from a much larger collection you already keep in folders; if you have ever failed to find something you knew you had saved; if you want ratings, tags and notes attached to the file rather than to a card on one board; if your references include video and you want it searched like everything else; and if you want the composed board to be a file you can open, diff and back up like any other file you own.

Neither, honestly, if you have four hundred images. Finder and a folder are the right tools until scrolling stops working, which usually happens somewhere north of ten thousand files or the first time you cannot find something you are certain you saved.

If a whiteboard is genuinely what you want and FigJam is not it, Miro is the other one people weigh, and Milanote is the one built for creative boards specifically rather than for workshops. If your instinct is to keep the moodboard next to the project notes instead, the Notion galleries comparison is the one to read, and PureRef is the free tool that floats over your canvas while you paint — a different job from all of these.

Otherwise: the library has the rest of the comparisons and the migration guides, download it for thirty days with no card and no account, and the price only becomes a question after that.