Google pulled the plug on Jamboard at the end of 2024, and teams that had built brainstorming habits around it spent the following year scattered across half a dozen replacement tools, none of which felt quite like a drop-in swap. Some of that is just muscle memory adjusting to a new interface. Some of it is that the tools genuinely work differently, built for different kinds of sessions than the sticky-note simplicity Jamboard offered.

By 2026 the whiteboarding market has sorted itself into distinct camps: heavyweight workshop platforms built for facilitators running structured design sprints, lightweight sketch tools for quick technical diagrams, and whiteboards bolted onto existing productivity suites so teams don’t need one more login. This guide breaks down twelve real options, what kind of session each one actually suits, and how to pick without wasting a week trialing tools that were never going to fit your team’s workflow.

What Actually Matters When Choosing

Board persistence is the first thing to check. Some free tiers cap how many boards you can keep active at once, which sounds fine until a team runs three parallel projects and has to archive one just to start a fourth. Real-time sync quality matters more than it seems on a demo call. A whiteboard that lags half a second behind when six people are drawing simultaneously turns a fast brainstorm into a frustrating mess of overlapping cursors.

Export options decide whether work created in a session actually leaves the platform. A board full of sticky notes that only exports as a flat PNG loses all the structure a facilitator spent an hour building. And integration with whatever your team already uses for task tracking or design work saves the extra step of manually copying ideas from a whiteboard into a project board after every session.

1. Miro

Miro is the closest thing to an industry default at this point, with an infinite canvas and a template library covering everything from retrospectives to customer journey maps. Video chat built directly into the board means a facilitator doesn’t need to run a separate call alongside the whiteboard, which cuts down on the constant alt-tabbing that made some earlier tools exhausting to run workshops in. The free tier includes three editable boards, which is enough for a small team but gets tight fast once multiple concurrent projects need their own dedicated space.

Where Miro shows its size is load time on boards that have grown large over months of use. A board with thousands of sticky notes and embedded images can take a few seconds to fully render, especially on a slower connection, which matters if your team works across time zones with uneven internet quality.

2. FigJam

FigJam benefits from living inside the same company as Figma, so design teams that already collaborate in Figma get whiteboarding without switching context or accounts. Stamps, stickers, and a genuinely fun set of drawing tools make FigJam feel less corporate than some competitors, which helps with sessions where you want people to loosen up before a serious brainstorm. Free for individual use, with team pricing that scales reasonably compared to some enterprise-first competitors.

Non-design teams sometimes find FigJam’s toolset skews toward visual polish over structured facilitation. It’s a strong pick for teams already in the Figma ecosystem, less obviously the right call for a sales team running a quarterly planning session.

3. Microsoft Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is the path of least resistance for any organization already paying for Microsoft 365, since it’s included rather than a separate purchase. Deep Teams integration means a whiteboard can open directly inside a meeting without anyone leaving the call, and inking support works particularly well on Surface hardware with a pen. Templates cover common business use cases without requiring a separate template marketplace.

The tool feels noticeably more limited outside the Microsoft ecosystem. Teams mixing Mac and Windows users, or anyone without a 365 subscription, will find fewer of the collaborative extras that make Miro or Mural stand out. For an all-Microsoft shop, though, the zero extra cost and native integration make it hard to justify paying for anything else.

4. Lucidspark

Lucidspark pairs freeform whiteboarding with the kind of structured diagramming Lucidchart is known for, which matters for teams that need a session to produce something more organized than a wall of sticky notes by the end. Built-in voting, timers, and facilitation controls give a workshop leader real tools for keeping a session on track instead of letting it sprawl. Direct integration with Lucidchart lets rough ideas get formalized into proper flowcharts or org charts without re-drawing anything from scratch.

It leans more toward structured business workshops than free-flowing creative brainstorms, so teams looking for the loose sketchiness of Excalidraw won’t find it here. For process mapping and retrospectives specifically, the structure is a feature, not a limitation.

5. Mural

Mural built its reputation on design sprint facilitation, and it still carries that DNA with a template library organized around named methodologies like Design Thinking and Lean Startup exercises. Private mode lets participants work independently before revealing their ideas simultaneously, which avoids the anchoring effect where the first person to speak shapes everyone else’s contribution. Timer and voting tools support the same kind of structured facilitation Lucidspark offers, aimed squarely at enterprise workshop culture.

The pricing sits at the higher end for teams past the free tier, reflecting its enterprise positioning. Smaller teams or informal brainstorms may find the structured facilitation tools more overhead than they need for a quick weekly sync.

6. Excalidraw

Excalidraw’s hand-drawn aesthetic isn’t just a style choice, it makes rough technical diagrams and system sketches easier to read at a glance than the sterile boxes and arrows most diagramming tools produce. No account is required for basic use, which makes it the fastest option for a quick one-off sketch shared via a link. Self-hosting options give privacy-conscious organizations full control over where board data lives, a rarity among the tools on this list.

It’s intentionally minimal compared to the facilitation-heavy platforms above, with no built-in video chat, voting, or templates for structured business workshops. Engineers sketching architecture diagrams or explaining a bug tend to reach for it specifically because it stays out of the way.

7. Canva Whiteboard

Canva Whiteboard’s real advantage is what happens after the brainstorm ends. Ideas sketched during a session convert directly into polished presentation slides or social graphics using the same design tools Canva is already known for, skipping the usual step of exporting a whiteboard and rebuilding everything in a separate design tool. The free tier includes whiteboard access alongside Canva’s existing design features, which is a meaningful bundle for teams that already use Canva for marketing assets.

It’s less suited to technical brainstorming or engineering diagrams, where the design-first tooling gets in the way rather than helping. Marketing and content teams get the most out of the direct line from rough idea to finished graphic.

8. ClickUp Whiteboard

ClickUp bakes whiteboarding directly into its broader workspace platform, which matters most for teams already running projects and tasks through ClickUp. Sticky notes and rough plans on the board can convert directly into tracked tasks without retyping anything, closing the usual gap between a brainstorm and actually assigning follow-up work. For teams outside the ClickUp ecosystem, it’s a harder sell as a standalone whiteboard, since the value is really in that task-conversion integration rather than the drawing tools themselves.

9. Conceptboard

Conceptboard leans into visual feedback and review workflows more than open brainstorming, with commenting and approval tools built for design and content review cycles. Version history tracks changes to a board over time, which matters for teams that treat a whiteboard as a living document rather than a single-session artifact. It’s popular in agencies and marketing teams that need client sign-off baked into the collaboration tool itself.

The learning curve is a bit steeper than more casual tools, and it’s clearly built for a specific review-heavy workflow rather than general-purpose brainstorming.

10. Witeboard

Witeboard strips things down to the bare essentials: open a link, start drawing, no account or setup required. For a quick technical explanation during a support call or a five-minute sketch shared with a client, that lack of friction beats every other tool on this list. It intentionally doesn’t try to compete with Miro or Mural on features, and that’s precisely why it’s useful for the narrow case it targets.

11. Explain Everything

Explain Everything started as a screen-recording and annotation tool for educators, and that heritage still shows in how well it handles narrated whiteboard sessions. Teachers recording explainer videos or tutoring sessions get a combination of drawing tools and voice narration that most general-purpose whiteboards don’t prioritize. Slide-based organization mirrors how a lesson plan actually gets structured, rather than a single infinite canvas.

Business teams looking for workshop facilitation will find it less suited to their needs than Mural or Lucidspark, but for education and training content specifically, it fills a gap the others don’t address.

12. Freeform

Apple’s Freeform ships free on every recent Mac, iPad, and iPhone, syncing through iCloud without any additional account setup for teams already inside the Apple ecosystem. Apple Pencil support on iPad makes it a genuinely good sketching tool for anyone doing visual brainstorming solo before bringing ideas into a team session elsewhere. Real-time collaboration works smoothly between Apple devices specifically.

It falls apart the moment a Windows or Android user needs to join a board, since there’s no web or cross-platform version. For an all-Apple household or small creative team, it’s a genuinely useful free tool. For anything involving mixed devices, it’s not a realistic option.

Matching the Tool to the Session

Structured design sprints and formal workshops fit best with Mural or Lucidspark, both built around facilitation tools like timers and voting that keep a session on track. Quick technical sketches and engineering diagrams belong in Excalidraw or Witeboard, where the lack of ceremony is the whole point. Teams already living inside Microsoft 365 should default to Microsoft Whiteboard before paying for anything else, and design teams already in Figma get the same logic pointing toward FigJam.

Marketing and content teams that need a straight line from brainstorm to finished graphic do best in Canva Whiteboard, while teams that already manage projects in ClickUp get the most value from keeping the whiteboard in the same platform as their task tracking. Educators and trainers recording narrated lessons should look at Explain Everything before a general-purpose tool that wasn’t built for that workflow.

Accessibility and Device Considerations

Browser-based tools like Miro, FigJam, and Mural work from nearly any device with no install required, which matters for external participants like clients who won’t download new software for a single meeting. Touch and stylus support varies significantly. Some tools handle a finger-drawn sketch on a phone screen reasonably well, while others are clearly designed with a mouse and keyboard in mind and become frustrating on a tablet. Screen reader support across this category remains inconsistent, and teams with accessibility requirements should test a specific tool against their actual needs rather than assuming feature parity with the visual interface.

Migrating Old Jamboard Content

Google gave a limited export window when Jamboard shut down, and boards saved during that period exist as static image files rather than editable content in any of the tools above. There’s no automated import path from Jamboard’s old format into Miro, Mural, or the others, so recovering an old board means manually rebuilding the sticky notes and layout by referencing the exported image. For teams with a large archive of historical Jamboard sessions worth preserving, budgeting time for manual recreation of only the boards that still matter is more realistic than trying to migrate everything.

Pricing Once You Outgrow Free

Every tool on this list offers something for free, but the paid tiers diverge more than the marketing pages make obvious. Miro and Mural price per active member per month, which adds up fast for large teams even if only a fraction of people use the whiteboard regularly, so it’s worth checking whether a tool bills for every workspace member or only for people actually assigned editor access. Lucidspark and Conceptboard tend to bundle whiteboarding with their broader diagramming or review products, which can work out cheaper if a team already needs those adjacent tools anyway, but is wasted spend if the whiteboard is the only feature in use.

Annual billing usually knocks fifteen to twenty percent off the monthly rate across this category, which matters for a tool a team plans to keep long-term but is a bad idea to commit to before running at least one real project through the free tier first. Watch specifically for board count limits and guest access restrictions on free plans, since those are the two limits that tend to force an upgrade decision sooner than storage or feature caps do.

Facilitation Habits That Matter More Than the Tool

A surprising amount of what makes a whiteboarding session productive has nothing to do with which platform you’re using. Sessions that start with a clear prompt written directly on the board before anyone joins tend to produce more focused output than sessions where the facilitator explains the goal verbally and lets people start from a blank canvas. Time-boxing individual brainstorming before opening things up to group discussion, something Mural and Lucidspark both build directly into their tooling with countdown timers, consistently produces more varied ideas than group discussion from the first minute, where the loudest voice in the room tends to anchor everyone else’s thinking.

Cleaning up a board immediately after a session, archiving what mattered and deleting the noise, makes it far more likely anyone actually revisits the output later. A board left cluttered with half-finished thoughts from three different sessions becomes something people avoid opening rather than a resource they return to, regardless of which tool it lives in.

Collaboration in Communities

Membership and community platforms built on themes like Reign Theme can link out to whiteboard sessions for group brainstorming or live workshops without needing whiteboarding built directly into the site itself. Training communities running courses through Tutor LMS get similar value pairing a lesson with a linked whiteboard session for visual explanations that a text-based course page can’t provide on its own.

Final Thoughts

No single tool replaced Jamboard cleanly, because Jamboard’s appeal was really its simplicity, and every serious replacement trades some of that away for more capability. Teams that just want a quick shared sketchpad are usually happiest with Excalidraw or Witeboard. Teams that ran structured workshops on Jamboard will find Mural or Lucidspark a closer match to what they actually need, even if the interface takes a session or two to feel natural.

The fastest way to land on the right tool is running one real session with your actual team rather than judging from a features comparison. A whiteboard that looks impressive in a demo video can still fall flat with a specific group’s working style, and the only way to know is testing it against a real meeting instead of guessing from a spec sheet.