Milanote alternatives
Milanote is great on a canvas and a pain as a library. The alternatives worth trying, depending on whether you plan projects, collect references, or both.
TLDR
- Milanote is a canvas. You drag things onto a board and move them around. It’s lovely for planning one project and a pain as a place to keep references for years.
- If you want a canvas, look at Miro, FigJam, or Kosmik. If you want a library you can search, look at Savepad, Are.na, or Eagle.
- Most people asking for a Milanote alternative hit the 100-item free limit, or they’ve got 40 boards and can’t find anything.
Why people leave Milanote
Milanote is good. Like, really good at what it’s for. You open a board, drop in a few images, a note, a link, a colour, and you’ve got a moodboard for a pitch by lunchtime. Designers and agencies love it for client projects, and fair enough.
The complaints are almost always one of these three:
- The free plan runs out fast. Milanote Free holds 100 notes, images, or links in total. A single moodboard eats 30 of those.
- Boards don’t scale into a library. Board 1 is “Brand refresh”. Board 40 is “Brand refresh v2 (USE THIS ONE)”. The reference you need is on one of them, somewhere.
- Search only knows what you typed. It finds your card titles and notes. It doesn’t read the text on the page you linked or the words inside a screenshot.
So the first question is what you actually used Milanote for. Planning a project on a canvas is a different job from keeping a swipe file you’ll dig through for years.
If you want a canvas
Miro is the obvious one. It’s a whiteboard first, built for workshops, diagrams, and a room full of people dragging sticky notes around. It can do moodboards, it just doesn’t feel like it was made for them. The free plan gives you three editable boards.
FigJam is Figma’s whiteboard. If your team already lives in Figma, it’s the least friction. It’s great for rough planning, less great for keeping a hundred images tidy.
Kosmik is the closest to Milanote’s vibe: a visual canvas with a built-in browser, PDFs and videos playing right on the board. Worth a look if you think spatially and want something newer.
If you want a library
This is where most Milanote refugees end up, once they admit they weren’t really planning projects. They were collecting.
Are.na is a calm place to collect things into channels, with a community of people doing the same in public. It’s paid for by its members and has no ads. It’s great for research and slow thinking, less so for a work swipe file with 2,000 ads in it.
Eagle is a desktop app for designers with huge local libraries. Pay once, keep everything on your own disk. If you mostly save image files, it’s a very good deal. It doesn’t do much with links.
Savepad (🔌) is a library where every save shows the thing itself: the ad, the full page, the email, the PDF. Search reads the text inside all of it, including screenshots, and you can filter by colour. It has no canvas at all. If you want to arrange things spatially, it’s the wrong tool.
Milanote alternatives side by side
| Tool | Best for | Free plan | Search inside saves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milanote | Planning a project on a board | 100 items | No |
| Miro | Workshops and big team boards | 3 boards | No |
| FigJam | Teams already in Figma | Yes, limited | No |
| Kosmik | A visual canvas with a browser built in | Yes | Partly |
| Are.na | Slow research, in public | Limited blocks | No |
| Eagle | Huge local image libraries | Trial, then pay once | Image names and tags |
| Savepad | A swipe file that lasts for years | 150 saves | Yes, including text in screenshots |
Prices and limits change, so check each pricing page before you commit. We last looked in October 2026.
How to move your stuff out of Milanote
Milanote exports a board as a PDF, a PNG, or a Markdown or text file. None of those are great for re-importing anywhere, so this is the honest version:
- Export each board as Markdown. You get the notes and the links as text.
- Pull the links out into a CSV, one URL per row. A spreadsheet does this in about two minutes.
- Download the images you uploaded, board by board.
- Import the CSV into whatever you picked. In Savepad that’s Settings → Import and export, and it fetches every page again with a fresh preview. The import docs list every format.
Then drag the images in. That’s the annoying part, no way around it.
So which one?
If you plan projects visually with clients, stay on a canvas. Milanote is still one of the nicest, and Miro wins if it’s a big team. If you’ve realised your boards are really a filing cabinet, move to a library. The swipe file template is a decent starting structure, and the folders vs tags post covers how to sort it so you’re not back at 40 boards in a year.
And if you want the full comparison with Savepad, it’s on the Milanote alternative page. There’s also a longer rundown of every swipe file tool if you want to see the whole field.
FAQ
Is there a free alternative to Milanote?
Yes. Miro and FigJam have free plans for canvases, Are.na is free for a limited number of blocks, and Savepad is free for your first 150 saves. Milanote's own free plan stops at 100 notes, images, or links.
What's the difference between Milanote and Miro?
Milanote is a calm board for creative projects, mostly used by one person or a small team. Miro is a whiteboard for workshops and diagrams with a lot of people in it at once.
Can I export my Milanote boards?
You can export a board as a PDF, an image, or a Markdown or text file from the board menu. Links don't come out as a neat list, so expect to copy the ones you care about by hand.