Miro's free plan gives you three editable boards. Odinote gives you as many as you want, stores them on your own machine, and costs nothing — because it's open source.
Miro is an outstanding tool for teams — whiteboarding, workshops, retrospectives, enterprise integrations. But it is built and priced for teams, and the free tier reflects that: three editable boards. If you are one person mapping out a game, a novel, a thesis or a product, three boards disappear almost immediately, and the upgrade is priced per user per month.
Odinote takes the parts a solo creative actually needs — the infinite canvas, spatial thinking, connectors between ideas — and removes the ceiling entirely.
| Odinote | Miro (free plan) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | Free tier, then per-user pricing |
| Editable boards | Unlimited | 3 |
| Open source | Yes — MIT license | No |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Works fully offline | Yes (desktop app) | No |
| Where your data lives | Your device (optional: your own Google Drive) | Their cloud |
| Boards nested inside boards | Infinitely recursive | Frames, not true nesting |
| Live multi-user collaboration | Basic (shared Drive folders) | Best in class |
| Integrations (Jira, Slack…) | None | Extensive |
| Mobile apps | Not yet | Yes |
Miro's centre of gravity is the workshop: sticky notes, voting, timers, facilitation. Odinote's centre of gravity is the long-lived personal project — the design document you return to for a year, the worldbuilding bible, the art reference library.
That difference shows up in nested canvases: any board can contain a complete canvas, which can contain more boards, without limit. Instead of one enormous board you pan across forever, you get a tree you can walk into and out of, with breadcrumbs showing exactly where you are.
Open the web version and start dragging nodes onto the canvas. Nothing to register, nothing expiring in 14 days. See the user guide for everything it can do, or read why the project exists.