Most of what a whiteboard charges for is other people

Miro's price is per member per month, and that is not a criticism — it is an accurate description of what the product is. You are paying for a surface several people can be on at once, with cursors and comments and a facilitator running the session. If that is your problem, buy it and stop reading; nothing on this site does it.

The reason this page exists is that a lot of people open Miro to make a moodboard alone, discover that the free plan keeps only their three most recent boards editable, and start looking for something that is not priced by headcount. If that is you, the rest of this is worth ten minutes.

The numbers, from their page today

Checked against Miro's pricing page on 3 September 2026:

• Free — $0, with unlimited team members. You can create and share unlimited boards, but the three most recent remain editable. Includes 7,000+ templates and 250+ integrations, and a limited trial of their AI features.
• Starter — $8 per member a month, billed yearly. Unlimited editable boards.
• Business — $20 per member a month, billed yearly.
• Enterprise — custom pricing, from 30 members.

Their page notes annual billing saves twenty percent against monthly. Two people on Starter for a year is $192; five on Business is $1,200. Those are just multiplications of their own published figures, and for a team running workshops they are entirely reasonable numbers.

Coii Ref: $19 USD once, three Macs, updates included, thirty-day trial with every feature and no card and no account, macOS 11 Big Sur or later, native on Apple Silicon and Intel. Nothing renews.

Where Miro is straightforwardly better

People, live. Several cursors on one surface, comments, voting, timers, the whole apparatus of running a session with a group in it. Coii Ref has no accounts, no sharing links, no comments and no collaboration of any kind. This is not a gap we are working on; it is a different category of software.

It runs everywhere. The browser is the floor, so Windows, Linux, tablets and phones are all in. Coii Ref runs on macOS 11 or later and nowhere else, which disqualifies us outright for anyone whose team is mixed.

Templates and structure. Seven thousand of them, plus sticky notes, diagramming, frames and the frameworks people actually run workshops from. We have none of that — no templates, no stickies, no shapes, no arrows.

Integrations. 250+ of them on the free tier alone, into the project tools a team already runs. We integrate with the filesystem, and that is the complete list.

A moodboard other people can react to. If the deliverable is a board a client scrolls and comments on, Miro delivers it and a file on your Mac does not. Milanote sits in the same territory with a softer, more visual bias, and is worth a look for exactly that job.

Five real advantages, and the first one is the whole product. A comparison that buried them would fall apart the moment you opened the other tab.

What the free plan's three boards actually mean

Worth being precise, because this is the sentence that sends people looking.

You can make as many boards as you like and they do not disappear — the limit is on how many stay editable, and it is the three most recent. In a workshop practice that is fine; you finish a session, export what matters, move on. In a moodboard practice it is awkward, because a moodboard is a thing you come back to. Four live projects means the oldest one is read-only until you upgrade, and a board from March that you want to add one image to is a board you cannot add one image to.

Coii Ref has no board count at all, and not out of generosity: a canvas is a file in a folder, so limiting how many you could have would mean limiting how many files you could save, which is not a thing an application that writes files gets to do.

The other half, which Miro is not trying to be

Everything above is about the surface you arrange things on. The thing that actually eats an afternoon is finding the eleven images to put on it.

Miro's answer is that you bring them: upload, paste, drag in. That is the right answer for a whiteboard, and it means the tool has no opinion about the four years of material already sitting on your disk.

Coii Ref's answer is that it read them all a week ago. Point it at a parent folder and it indexes what is inside without copying, moving or renaming anything, and writes what it needs — the database, thumbnails, video proxies — inside that same folder:

Then the search, which is where the time goes back:

Keys are type ext tag rating is has no in width height added modified. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. A word the parser does not recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so results keep arriving while you are still typing the question.

None of that needed tagging first. Size, format, folder, rating, added and modified dates are facts the disk already carries, so the index is useful on its first day. Tags are the thin layer you add afterwards, for the things a file cannot tell you itself — mood, client, why you kept it. Saved views store the text of a search and re-parse it on open, so renaming a tag updates every view that mentioned it rather than leaving a stale list.

Video, which whiteboards treat as an embed

Most surfaces that accept a video accept it as an embed: a rectangle that plays when clicked, sourced from somewhere else, and invisible to whatever search the tool has. That is a sensible design for a whiteboard, where the clip is illustrating a point in a discussion.

For a reference practice it is the wrong shape. Here a clip goes through the same index pass as a still, carries the same tags and the same rating, and answers the same query line — type:video ext:mov,mp4 rating:>=4 is an ordinary sentence rather than a separate mode. Each one gets a proxy written at canvas resolution, which is the unglamorous detail that decides whether a board of nine clips scrolls or stutters while nine source files decode at once.

If a real share of what you study is motion — animation timing, camera moves, how fabric falls — that difference is between keeping one library and keeping two, and the second library is always the one that goes stale.

What an index pass does, concretely

"It indexes your folders" could mean almost anything, so: it walks the tree and reads what each file already says about itself — kind, extension, dimensions, EXIF, colour, when it arrived, when it last changed. It writes thumbnails so a grid of fifteen thousand things scrolls, and video proxies for the reason above. All of that goes inside the folder you pointed at. It does not copy a single original, rename one, or move one.

Then it stops walking and starts listening. Filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the database true again, so renaming a file in Finder keeps it the same item with the same rating and notes rather than turning it into a new one, and a folder of new work appears without you asking. A drive that spent a month unplugged reconciles when it comes back instead of starting over.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is the reason the app can be honest about never touching your files: there is nowhere else for anything to go.

The table

The bold is roughly even and that is honest — but read the rows rather than count them. Theirs are all about people and structure; ours are all about a pile of files that already exists. Almost nobody needs both columns equally.

A board that is a file

The part worth checking rather than believing. When you save a canvas here it becomes a .coii-canvas in a folder you picked: pretty-printed JSON naming the files it refers to and where each sits. Open it in a text editor and read it.

Three consequences, in the order people notice them. It is inside the tree you already back up, so it was backed up the moment you saved it — no export step, no reminder to run one. It is text, so it diffs: put the folder in git or any versioned sync and you can see what a direction looked like three weeks ago. And if this application vanished, the folder would be exactly what it is today minus a database and some thumbnails, with the boards still readable.

That last one is not a claim about anybody's longevity, ours included. It is a claim about the format your work is in, which is the only half of the question a reader can actually verify — and against a hosted whiteboard it is the substantive difference, more than any feature row.

What a moodboard practice actually needs

Worth separating from what a workshop needs, because the two get sold as the same thing.

A moodboard is usually made by one person, from material that person already has, and revised over weeks rather than assembled in a ninety-minute session. It needs: a fast way to find candidates, a surface to arrange them on, the ability to come back in March to something started in January, and a way to hand a flattened version to somebody who will never open the tool.

A whiteboard optimises for the session — many people, one hour, structure and stickies and a facilitator. The overlap is the surface, and that is genuinely all of it.

If your work is the first shape, per-seat pricing is money spent on the second shape's features. If it is the second, nothing here substitutes and you should keep Miro.

What Coii Ref does not have

Said flatly so the trial holds no surprises. No accounts, no cloud, no sync, no sharing links, no comments, no collaboration, no mobile app, no browser version. No templates, sticky notes, diagram shapes, arrows or connectors — a canvas holds images and video, not a workshop. No browser extension or web clipper. No PDFs, documents or 3D formats. No automatic tagging and no search by meaning: the query line is literal. No search by colour, though colour is read into the index. And macOS only, version 11 or later.

The network list is two items long: a licence check when you press Activate, and one request at launch read only for its Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check.

Getting a board out of a subscription tool first

If you are leaving a hosted whiteboard, do the boring step before you cancel anything: open each board that still matters and get the images out at full size into a folder on your own disk, named after the project. Do it while the account is live and every board is still editable, not after.

Once those folders exist, one index pass covers them, and everything else on this page follows. The general version of that advice is the same for any service: the first time you try an export should not be the day you need it.

The cost of coming back in six months

The difference that shows up latest, and therefore matters most, is what a board is worth to you long after the project shipped.

A hosted board is worth whatever your access to it is worth. That is not a criticism of anyone's terms — it is simply what "in your workspace" means, and it is why the free plan's three-editable-board rule stings in a moodboard practice more than in a workshop one. If the account lapses, or the team moves tools, or a client relationship ends and the workspace went with it, the arrangement you made is a thing you have to go and retrieve.

A .coii-canvas is worth what the folder is worth, which is the same as what the images are worth, which is something you already back up. Six months later you double-click it and it opens, with the same eleven plates in the same positions, because the files it names never went anywhere. The board and the material it was made of live in the same directory and travel together.

That is a small property with a long tail. It is also the reason the honest recommendation on this page splits so cleanly: pay per member for a surface other people need to be on, and pay once for a library only you need to keep.

What the trial does and does not stop

Thirty days, every feature, no card, no account. On day thirty-one, if you have not bought, one category of action stops — the one that grows the library: registering a new folder, running the importer, starting an index pass by hand. Everything that reads keeps working permanently, including search, tags, ratings, saved views, canvases and thumbnails, and the folder watcher carries on turning filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again. An unpaid copy does not sit there letting your index rot; it simply stops taking on more.

Who should pick which

Miro if other people have to be on the board: live sessions, comments, templates, a mixed-platform team, integrations into the tools the company already runs. $8 per member a month billed yearly is a fair price for that and nothing here competes with it.

Coii Ref if the board is yours alone, the images are already on your Mac, there are far too many of them to scroll, video belongs beside the stills, and you would rather the arrangement be a file you own than a workspace you rent. $19 once.

Neither, if you make three moodboards a year from twenty images each. Finder and a folder are fine, and the moment to buy anything is the first time you cannot find a picture you are certain you saved.

Nearby, if the shape was slightly off: Milanote is the visual, softer relative of a whiteboard and better for client-facing boards; PureRef floats a board over whatever you are drawing in and is free for personal use; Obsidian Canvas is free and saves to a published open format; and if what you want is to be shown references rather than to arrange your own, Pinterest and Are.na are the two ends of that.

Otherwise: the library has the rest of the comparisons, and the trial is thirty days with every feature, no card and no account.