Microsoft Whiteboard alternatives: what to use as a replacement now the standalone app is retired

Not as a product. Microsoft is retiring the standalone Whiteboard apps and the older Azure-backed board format, while the whiteboarding experience continues inside Microsoft Teams on OneDrive-backed storage. So the honest answer to "is Whiteboard being discontinued" is that the app is, the file format is, and the feature is not.

That distinction decides whether you need to do anything. If your team only ever opened a whiteboard from inside a Teams meeting, almost nothing changes for you and you can stop reading after the export section below. If people on your team launch the Whiteboard desktop or mobile app directly, or if you have boards created before the OneDrive migration, you have real deadlines and real deletion risk.

Microsoft has not published a feature-by-feature comparison of the Teams-based experience against the standalone app, so if a specific capability matters to your team, test it in Teams before September rather than assuming parity.

Microsoft Teams is. There is no new product name and no separate purchase: whiteboards move to OneDrive-backed storage and enterprise users reach them through Teams instead of a dedicated app. Microsoft's guidance for personal account holders is different, since they lose create and edit access entirely on September 25 and are told to move to a Microsoft 365 Business account, export their boards, or pick a different tool.

That last group is the one genuinely in the market. So is a second group that gets less attention: teams who used the standalone app precisely because they did not want to run their thinking inside a meeting client. If Whiteboard was the thing you opened alone at 7am to work a problem out, folding it into Teams is a real downgrade, and it is a reasonable moment to look at what else exists.

Open the board, choose Settings in the upper right, select Export image, then pick high resolution. That is the only export Microsoft builds in, and it is worth being precise about: the product offers an image and nothing else. There is no native PDF export, no PowerPoint export and no editable format. If you need a PDF you print the board to one with Ctrl and P, and if you need it in a deck you insert the exported image as a picture. Do all of it before October 16, 2026, because after that date unmigrated legacy boards are gone and Microsoft is explicit that they cannot be recovered. The full set of routes, including moving boards to Miro and what to do about boards owned by someone who left, is in export Microsoft Whiteboard to PDF, PNG and Miro.

Two practical warnings from anyone who has done a board migration at scale. First, an image export is a picture, not data: sticky notes become pixels, so if the board holds a backlog or a decision log you actually reference, copy the text out into a document while you still can. Second, nobody knows how many boards their organization has. Personal boards created by individual employees are the ones that get missed, because they never appear on an admin inventory and the owner has usually forgotten they exist. Send one all-company message with the October 16 date in the subject line and you will convert a support incident in October into ten minutes of work in August.

There is no PDF option in the product, so you make one yourself. Print the board with Ctrl and P and set the destination to Microsoft Print to PDF (Save as PDF on a Mac), or export the image first and convert that. Microsoft's own export documentation offers a single format, an image at standard or high resolution, and no other file type appears anywhere in the app. Do it before October 16, 2026 for any legacy board, because after that date unmigrated boards are deleted and Microsoft states they cannot be recovered.

Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it. Printing scales the whole canvas onto the page, so a sprawling board that was comfortable to read at 100 percent zoom can come out too small to use, and there is no pagination. If the board matters, produce the file and then actually open it rather than filing it unchecked. The other limit is that an export is a picture: sticky note text becomes pixels, so anything you will later need to search, sort or paste, such as a backlog or a decision log, should be copied out as text into a document while the board is still live.

If the printed PDF comes out blank, which is a common report, it is almost always that the print dialog opened before the board finished drawing its objects. Reopen the board, wait until everything has rendered, then print. If it still fails, export the image and convert that instead, which cannot fail because there is nothing left to render.

If you are an admin rather than an individual, note that the migration tooling for legacy enterprise whiteboards is retired on September 25, 2026, which is earlier than the deletion date and is the deadline that actually constrains you. After it passes, bulk migration stops being an option and anything left has to be exported by hand, one board at a time, by whoever owns it.

Miro is the closest like for like swap, Mural is the best choice if you actually facilitate sessions, FigJam is the cheapest option if you already pay for Figma, and Lucidspark makes sense mainly if you already run Lucidchart. The comparison table above carries the current US prices for each, and the head to head most people actually run is on Microsoft Whiteboard vs Miro, which also covers OneNote and Apple Freeform.

Sort the shortlist by which half of Whiteboard you used, because the four canvases above differ less from each other than the marketing suggests. If Whiteboard was a shared surface during meetings, any of them will do and the deciding factor is what your company already pays for. If it was where a workshop ran, Mural's timers, private mode and voting are meaningfully deeper than the rest and worth the extra couple of dollars per seat. If it was where a designer sketched before opening Figma, FigJam removes a tool from the stack rather than adding one.

There is a fifth answer that the listicles skip, and it applies to more teams than they admit: some of those boards were brainstorms that never finished. We cover the field vendor by vendor on best brainstorming software, and the free tiers of each are broken down on Miro's free plan and FigJam's free plan.

Microsoft Whiteboard did not have a price. It came with the Microsoft 365 license your company already buys, which is why it ended up on so many desktops without anyone evaluating it. Every alternative on this page is a new per-seat subscription on top of the Microsoft bill you keep paying.

Run the arithmetic before the migration project acquires momentum. Ten people on Miro Starter is $960 a year, on Miro Business $2,400. Ten on Mural Team+ is roughly $1,200, on Business about $2,160. Those are not large numbers for a company, but they are new numbers, and they buy a surface that is broadly equivalent to the one you had at no marginal cost. The question worth asking in the procurement thread is not "which whiteboard" but "how many of these seats are for people who opened a board twice last year". Per-member pricing across a whole workspace, which is how Miro and Mural both work, punishes generous invitations harder than any other pricing model. The full breakdowns are on our Miro pricing and Mural pricing pages, and the whole category's numbers sit in one table in what brainstorming software costs.

A whiteboard does two jobs, and they are not equally hard. It holds ideas and arranges them, which every tool on this page does well. And it is where a team is supposed to produce ideas and pick one, which no canvas does at all, because a blank board generates nothing. The board is exactly as full as the room made it.

This is worth thirty seconds of honesty during a migration, since you are about to inventory every board you own anyway. Open the ones you are planning to move. If they are journey maps, org charts, retro columns and architecture sketches, you needed a canvas and you should buy one of the four above without hesitation. If a meaningful share of them are half-finished brainstorms, twenty stickies deep and abandoned, then the tool was never the constraint. Those boards stalled at the same place every brainstorm stalls: the room ran out of genuinely different directions somewhere around idea eleven, nobody wanted to be the person who ranked their colleague's suggestion last, and the board got left open in a browser tab until someone closed it.

Replacing that board with a nicer board produces a nicer abandoned board. It is the one thing a migration is guaranteed not to fix, and a migration is the rare moment when everyone is actually looking at what the old tool produced.

Brainstormer is not an infinite canvas and does not try to replace one. There is no diagramming, no journey mapping and no freehand drawing, so if those are what your Whiteboard boards held, buy Miro or Mural and stop here.

What it replaces is the generating and deciding half. You type the challenge as one sentence and the studio returns around twenty genuinely different directions in about thirty seconds, each tagged with the angle it came from. Run SCAMPER or Six Thinking Hats over the output yourself, with no template to hunt for and no facilitator to book. The same run also lifts out a shortlist: the three strongest ideas across all six personas, each with its reasoning written in plain sentences you can paste into the decision log.

Pricing is per workspace rather than per member: Solo is $16 a month, Pro $39, and Team is $99 for five seats, with unlimited brainstorms and no AI credits to ration mid-session. Plenty of teams end up running both, a canvas for the artifacts and this for the thinking, which is usually cheaper than putting the entire company on a Business whiteboard tier so that four people can facilitate.

Only for a team where every single person is on a Mac, iPad or iPhone. Freeform is a real infinite canvas, it is free with an Apple Account, and Apple's own user guide documents exporting a board as a PDF, which is one format more than Whiteboard ever offered. On paper it looks like the cheapest landing spot available.

It fails on reach. Apple has never shipped Freeform for Windows or Android, and iCloud.com does not carry it the way it carries Pages, Numbers and Keynote, so there is no browser route either. On a mixed US fleet the board becomes unopenable for whoever is on a PC, and the workaround everyone lands on is emailing a PDF, which is a snapshot nobody can edit. There is also no admin console over Freeform board content comparable to what Microsoft 365 gives you over OneDrive, so retention and eDiscovery requirements have no answer.

We compared the two properly, against both vendors' documentation, in Microsoft Whiteboard vs Apple Freeform. If any part of your team runs Windows, the shortlist above is the one to work from, and cross platform whiteboard apps covers what breaks on a mixed fleet.

Short version, by situation.

• You only used Whiteboard inside Teams meetings. Do nothing except check your legacy boards before October 16. Teams keeps working and you save the money.
• You mostly wanted somewhere to keep the thinking. You already own OneNote and it is not being retired. Microsoft Whiteboard vs OneNote compares the two, and what Microsoft Whiteboard is and whether you need it is the shorter version of that question.
• You are on a personal Microsoft account. You lose create and edit on September 25, so export by October 16 and pick something. FigJam on Figma's free Starter plan is the softest landing, and it allows unlimited collaborators on a board.
• Everyone on your team is on Apple hardware. Apple Freeform, which is free and already installed. Check the reach limits first in Microsoft Whiteboard vs Apple Freeform, because a single Windows laptop on the team rules it out.
• You run real workshops. Mural, for the timers, private mode and voting. Our Mural alternative page covers where it wins and where it does not.
• You already pay for Figma or Lucidchart. Use the whiteboard you already own, FigJam or Lucidspark respectively. See Lucidspark versus Miro if you are weighing that one.
• You want the closest thing to Whiteboard, with the most templates. Miro, at $8 per member per month billed yearly. Our Miro alternative page is the honest counterweight.
• Your old boards were mostly stalled brainstorms. Run one challenge through the studio above before you sign a per-seat contract for a bigger canvas.