Every price below was fetched from the vendor’s own pricing page on 7 September 2026. Where a page was JavaScript-rendered or ambiguous, we say so rather than guessing.
Two findings that will change how you read every other comparison of these tools: Miro’s free plan is three editable boards, not three boards, and tldraw is not open source despite what its GitHub star count implies.
Three categories that get compared as if they were one
Comparing these on price is meaningless, because they do not do the same job. The distinction is architectural.
(a) True hierarchical mind mappers
XMind, MindNode, MindMeister, Mindomo, Coggle, SimpleMind, Freeplane.
The data model is a tree: one root, parents, children. You type, press Tab, press Enter, and the layout happens automatically. You never position anything. That constraint is the feature — it makes fast capture possible and makes the result convertible into an outline, a deck, or a task list.
Choose one when the thinking is decompositional: exam revision, a book you are structuring, a project breakdown, meeting notes with a clear topic.
(b) Infinite-canvas whiteboards
Miro, FigJam, tldraw, Excalidraw, Whimsical.
The data model is a bag of positioned objects. Nothing is nested; nothing auto-arranges. You get spatial freedom, sticky notes, arbitrary arrows, images, embeds, and heavyweight multiplayer with cursors, timers and voting.
Choose one when the output is a shared session — a retro, an affinity map, a workshop with eight people — rather than a durable artefact.
(c) Note-graph and spatial thinking tools
Heptabase, Obsidian Canvas, Milanote, Scapple.
The canvas is a view over documents. In Heptabase and Obsidian Canvas, cards on the board are real notes that exist independently and can appear on many boards. The spatial arrangement is annotation, not content.
Choose one when you are synthesising a body of reading over weeks and the notes must outlive the diagram.
The practical test: if you delete the diagram, does anything survive? In (a) nothing. In (b) nothing. In (c) all your notes do.
The prices
| Tool | Free tier | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Miro | 3 editable boards, no private boards, no version history, standard-res export only | Starter $8, Business $20 per member/mo billed annually; Enterprise custom, 30-member minimum |
| Figma / FigJam | 1 team, 1 folder, 3 files; unlimited personal drafts | Professional Full $16, Dev $12, Collab $3 per seat/mo |
| XMind | 10 online maps, exports watermarked, limited formats | Pro $4.92/mo, Premium $8.25/mo, both billed annually |
| MindNode | Mind mapping and import/export only — no outlining, notes, tasks, images or styling | Plus $2.99/mo or $24.99/yr |
| MindMeister | 3 maps | Personal €6.50, Pro €10.50, Business €15.50 per user/mo. No monthly billing exists — 6 or 12-month cycles only |
| Milanote | 100 notes/images/links, 10 file uploads, no time limit | Pro $9.99/mo annual or $12.50 monthly; Team $49/mo flat |
| Whimsical | 50 board objects per month (a rate limit), watermarked exports | Pro $10, Business $20 per editor/mo |
| Excalidraw | The whole editor, all exports, unlimited live collaborators, no account | Excalidraw+ $6/user/mo annual for cloud-saved scenes |
| Heptabase | None | Pro $67.43/yr, Premium $134.93/yr, Premium+ $404.93/yr |
| Coggle | 3 private diagrams, unlimited public diagrams | Awesome $5/mo; Organisation $8/member/mo |
| Mindomo | 3 diagrams, 3 export formats | Premium $7/mo annual; Professional $16/mo annual |
| SimpleMind | Mobile only, limited | $29.99 one-time per platform; Mac+Win bundle $54.99 |
| Scapple | Trial | $20.99 one-time |
| Obsidian Canvas | Free, no sign-up, unlimited | Sync $4/mo annual, Publish $8/mo |
| Freeplane | $0, GPL-2.0 | — |
The free tiers, precisely
Most readers of this will never pay, so the details matter more than the paid comparison.
Miro Free is three editable boards. Not three boards total. You can have unlimited boards, but only the three most recently created stay editable — everything older silently drops to view-only. Free also has no private boards at all (every board is visible to your whole team), no version history, and standard-resolution export only. This is the single most misreported number in this category, and it is why so many teams hit a wall in week two.
Excalidraw’s free scope is the widest of anything here. The entire editor, every export format, no account, no watermark, and unlimited live collaborators in an end-to-end-encrypted session. What is not free is persistence: Excalidraw+ at $6 per user per month buys cloud-saved scenes beyond one. Free Excalidraw saves to browser storage and to .excalidraw files on your disk.
XMind free versus Pro is entirely a watermark story. Free gives you 10 online maps and full editing, but exports carry a watermark and formats are restricted. If you only look at maps inside XMind, free is fine. The moment you hand a PNG to another human, you are paying.
Whimsical free is 50 board objects per month — a rate limit, not a stock limit. It is genuinely an evaluation tier, and Whimsical says so.
Coggle’s free tier has a twist worth knowing: 3 private diagrams, but unlimited public ones, with real-time collaborative editing on every tier including free. If your work can be public, Coggle is effectively free forever. That is the best student deal in this article.
MindMeister has no monthly billing at all. Six-month or twelve-month cycles only, which means trying it is a six-month commitment. Free is capped at 3 maps.
Export and lock-in: the section that matters in five years
Tier 1 — plain files, open format, readable by other software
- Freeplane —
.mmis plain XML under GPL-2.0, with decades of installed base. FreeMind, Docear and several converters read it; XMind and Mindomo import it. The safest format in this article. - Markdown + Mermaid — text. Readable in any editor, forever, by anything.
- Obsidian Canvas —
.canvasis a documented open JSON Canvas spec, and the cards are your own.mdfiles in a folder you control. Delete Obsidian and you still have a folder of Markdown. - Excalidraw —
.excalidrawis documented JSON under an MIT editor, and.excalidraw.svgembeds the source so the image is the editable file.
Tier 2 — proprietary format, but on your machine with good export
XMind (zip containing JSON; Markdown, OPML, SVG and PDF export on paid tiers only), SimpleMind (exports OPML and Freeplane .mm), Scapple (exports PDF, PNG, OPML, text), MindNode (OPML, Markdown, PDF, CSV — OPML being the escape hatch to almost any outliner).
Tier 3 — server-side, export is a download not a sync
MindMeister, Mindomo, Coggle, Milanote, Heptabase. All export, and it is workable — but it is a manual, per-map operation nobody actually performs across 300 maps. Heptabase deserves a specific note: your notes escape as Markdown; your spatial arrangement does not.
Tier 4 — highest lock-in
Miro backup files are readable only by Miro; real export is PDF or image, and there is no meaningful path to a competitor. FigJam is the same story with Figma-proprietary files. Whimsical exports images and PDFs, watermarked on free.
A 400-board Miro estate is a strategic commitment, not a subscription. That has nothing to do with Miro’s quality — it is simply what the format means.
The licence check, because it caught us out
- Excalidraw: MIT. Genuinely OSI open source. No 2026 change found.
- tldraw: NOT open source. It ships under a bespoke “tldraw license” — source-available and proprietary. It forbids production use without a paid commercial agreement, forbids interfering with licence-key enforcement, and mandates that the watermark be displayed. Distribution as a standalone product is prohibited, and there is no published price — it is value-based and quoted. If you assumed “on GitHub with tens of thousands of stars” meant open source, this is the trap.
- Freeplane: GPL-2.0. Real open source.
- Obsidian: proprietary freeware, not open source, though the vault is plain Markdown. Its pricing page states commercial use does not require payment and frames the $50/user/year licence as optional support — verify directly before a company deployment.
Note that tldraw.com, the hosted app, remains free for end users. It is the SDK that is commercial.
Offline, collaboration, platforms
Fully offline with files on your disk: Freeplane, Scapple, SimpleMind desktop, XMind desktop, MindNode, Obsidian Canvas, Heptabase (local-first database), and plain Markdown.
Web-first with a desktop wrapper: Miro and Whimsical ship desktop apps that are essentially browser shells and need the network for anything meaningful.
Web-only: MindMeister, Coggle, FigJam, tldraw.com, and Milanote on desktop.
If “works on a plane, works if the vendor disappears” is a requirement, the list is short: Freeplane, Scapple, SimpleMind, XMind desktop, MindNode, Obsidian, plain Markdown.
On collaboration: Miro and FigJam are best in class — sub-100ms cursor sync at workshop scale, threaded comments, granular permissions, presentation mode, timers, voting. FigJam wins on feel and proximity to design files; Miro wins on templates, Jira and Confluence integrations, and enterprise controls. Miro’s 30-seat Enterprise minimum is a real gate.
Excalidraw’s live sessions are end-to-end encrypted and surprisingly smooth, but there are no comments and no permission model — anyone with the link can edit. Coggle has real-time editing on every tier including free, which is a genuine outlier.
Effectively single-player: MindNode, Scapple, Freeplane, Obsidian Canvas, SimpleMind.
| Tool | macOS | Windows | Linux | iOS | Android |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XMind | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mindomo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Heptabase | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Obsidian | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Freeplane | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Excalidraw | PWA | PWA | PWA | PWA | PWA |
| SimpleMind | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Scapple | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| MindNode | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Miro / FigJam / Whimsical | Yes | Yes | Browser only | Yes | Yes |
AI: a credit meter attached to a summariser
Across the category, AI in 2026 is metered credits: Miro gives 25 per member per month on Starter and 50 on Business; Figma gives 500 a month on Starter and 3,000 on Professional; XMind gives 50 total on free, 50 a month on Pro, 500 on Premium; Mindomo gives 50 a month on Premium.
Two features survive contact with real work:
- Turn a document into a first-draft hierarchy. This is the best fit in the whole category, because a document is a tree. XMind’s implementation genuinely works, though it still needs heavy editing.
- Cluster and summarise a wall of sticky notes after a workshop. Miro’s sticky-clustering is the one AI feature here that reliably saves an hour.
Everything framed as “AI brainstorms with you” produces generic output you will delete. Do not let AI credits drive a plan choice.
Two honest exceptions. MindNode routes to Apple Intelligence rather than shipping its own model — no metering, on-device, Apple hardware only. That is honest positioning. And Heptabase’s entire tier ladder is a credit ladder, not a feature ladder: Pro, Premium and Premium+ differ chiefly in AI allowance. That is unusually candid about what you are buying. If you are not doing AI-heavy research, buy Pro.
The text-first alternative
Mermaid ships natively in GitHub, GitLab, Obsidian, VS Code, Notion and most static site generators. Its mindmap type does what a hierarchical mapper does:
mindmap
root((Q4 launch))
Positioning
ICP
Mid-market ops leads
Agency owners
Message test
Pricing
Anchor at $29
Annual discount 20%
GTM
Content
3 comparison posts
1 teardown video
Paid
Reddit
Newsletter sponsorships
Risks
Support load
Migration tooling incompleteThat is twenty lines of plain text. It renders as a mind map inside a pull request. It diffs. It merges. It is greppable. Someone can review a change to your thinking in a code review.
When text-first genuinely wins: the map lives beside code and must be version-controlled; more than one person edits it and you need to see what changed; durability is the requirement; cost must be zero and stay zero; or you want the map generated from data by a script.
When it genuinely loses: when spatial layout carries meaning — Mermaid auto-lays-out and you cannot say “put these two clusters near each other,” which is fatal for affinity mapping. Also live workshops, images and embeds, and maps above roughly 40 nodes, where auto-layout gets ugly and the text stops being readable past depth four.
Freeplane is the under-rated middle path: GPL-2.0, plain XML, runs on Linux, no account, no cap, scripting, conditional styles, LaTeX, and it opens files from 2007. It is ugly. It is also the only tool here that is simultaneously free, offline, open source, cross-platform and hierarchical. If aesthetics do not decide your purchase, Freeplane is the rational default and everything else is a comfort upgrade.
Which one, for what
| Use case | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Solo brainstorming | XMind Pro, $4.92/mo annual | Fastest keyboard capture, cross-platform. The paid tier exists purely to remove the export watermark |
| Solo, Apple-only | MindNode Plus, $24.99/yr | Cheaper and nicer, with on-device Apple Intelligence |
| Studying and revision | Coggle free if maps can be public | Unlimited public diagrams with real-time editing at $0. Otherwise Mindomo Premium at $7/mo |
| Team workshop and retro | FigJam if you have Figma | The $3 Collab seat is the cheapest way to put 20 non-designers on a board. Do not run a workshop on Miro Free |
| Product and UX planning | Whimsical Pro, $10/editor/mo | Flowcharts, wireframes and docs in one tool, legible to stakeholders in a way Miro boards are not |
| Research synthesis | Heptabase Pro, $67.43/yr | Built for “I read 60 papers and need to see the shape of the argument.” Obsidian Canvas is the free equivalent |
| Zero cost | Excalidraw + Obsidian Canvas + Mermaid | All free, open or open-format, offline, no accounts, no caps, no credit meters |
| Open it in 10 years | Freeplane or Markdown + Mermaid | Everything else is a bet on a company |
Questions people ask
Is Miro free actually usable?
For one small project, yes. For a team, no. Three editable boards, no private boards at all, no version history, and standard-resolution export only. It is a trial with no end date rather than a free plan.
Is FigJam free if I already pay for Figma?
FigJam files count against your plan’s file allowance — on Starter that is one team, one folder, three files. On paid plans the Collab seat at $3 per seat per month is the intended way to give non-designers FigJam access without buying Full seats. That is the cheapest per-head collaboration price in this article.
XMind free or Pro?
Free until the first time you export something for another human. The watermark and restricted formats are the entire paywall. At $4.92 a month annually it is the least contentious upgrade here.
Is tldraw free for my product?
No. tldraw.com is free to use, but the SDK is source-available under a proprietary licence that prohibits production use without a paid commercial agreement, requires the watermark to be displayed, and forbids interfering with licence-key enforcement. There is no published price. Excalidraw under MIT is the actual open-source alternative.
Does anything still sell a perpetual licence?
Three. SimpleMind at $29.99 per desktop platform or $54.99 for the Mac and Windows bundle, Scapple at $20.99 one-time, and Freeplane at $0 under GPL. Everything else is subscription.
What runs on Linux?
XMind, Mindomo, Heptabase, Obsidian, Freeplane, and Excalidraw as a PWA. Not MindNode, not Scapple, not SimpleMind. Miro, FigJam and Whimsical are browser-only.
Which AI is worth paying for?
None of them on its own. If you are already choosing XMind or Heptabase, their document-to-map and cross-board query features are real. Do not pick a tool because of AI credits, and do not upgrade a tier solely to get more of them — except in Heptabase, where the tiers are explicitly nothing but credit allowances.
Can I get out of MindMeister?
Yes, it exports. But note there is no monthly billing — six-month or twelve-month cycles only — so trying it is a six-month commitment. Free is capped at three maps.
What we could not verify
- Miro’s monthly-billed prices. The page shows annual rates and states annual saves 20%, but does not display the monthly figures. Do not infer them by arithmetic.
- Figma’s annual-versus-monthly split for the Professional tier. Organization and Enterprise are stated as annual-only.
- A FigJam-specific free file count distinct from the Starter plan’s 3-file limit. Neither Figma page states one.
- XMind’s exact annual charge. The page shows monthly-equivalent prices under an annual discount, not the billed-once total.
- tldraw’s commercial licence price. Value-based and quoted only — no list price exists.
- Whether Heptabase has any free tier or trial. Not stated on the pricing page.
- Scapple’s direct-from-vendor and Windows pricing. The vendor’s buy page returned 404; the $20.99 figure is from the Mac App Store listing.
- SimpleMind’s free-edition restrictions. Listed as “limited functionality” without enumeration.
- Obsidian’s commercial-licence obligation. The page frames the $50/user/year licence as optional support — confirm directly before deploying at a company.
- Any 2026 acquisition or shutdown in this category. Search returned only unsourced listicles. We found no verifiable evidence of one, and we are not asserting there was none.
The short version
- Miro Free is three editable boards, no private boards, no version history. It is a trial, not a free plan.
- Work out which of the three categories you need before comparing prices. A tree, a canvas and a note-graph are not substitutes.
- tldraw is not open source. Excalidraw, under MIT, is.
- XMind’s paywall is the export watermark — free is fine until you share a file.
- Coggle gives unlimited public diagrams free, with real-time editing. Best student deal here.
- Miro and FigJam have the highest lock-in. Freeplane, Markdown+Mermaid, Obsidian Canvas and Excalidraw have the least.
- AI here is a credit meter on a summariser. Two features earn their keep; do not choose a plan for the rest.
- The free stack — Excalidraw, Obsidian Canvas, Mermaid — loses to paid tools only on live facilitation.
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