Milanotevs
FigJam
FigJam: Free online whiteboard for teams
Milanote
Board-based visual workspace for creative planning, free up to 100 items for the whole account
As of 30 August 2026, Milanote has a free plan and paid plans start at $9.99/month. An infinite board where notes, images, links and files are arranged by dragging rather than by outline. Softwr lists it under Productivity.
Overview
What Milanote does
Milanote is a board-based workspace for visual thinking, made by an Australian company. A board is a canvas on which notes, images, links, files, to-do lists and hand-drawn sketches sit side by side and are positioned by dragging, and boards nest inside other boards to give a project structure. It has a web clipper for collecting references from the browser, mobile apps for capture, templates for moodboards, storyboards and briefs, and sharing with comments. The free plan does not expire and is not feature-limited; it is capped at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads across the entire account. What distinguishes it is that it is deliberately unstructured. Notion and Airtable push you towards databases, properties and views, which is the right model once you know what you are building and the wrong one while you are still deciding what a thing should look like. Milanote's model is the pinboard, and it holds that position rather than growing into a project tool. Designers, art directors and writers choose it for exactly that reason, and the same choice is why it stops being the right tool as soon as the work becomes a schedule. It is bought by designers, agencies, writers, marketers and students, usually as individuals whose colleagues join later. The trade-off is twofold. The free plan looks generous and is not, because a hundred items across the whole account is a few weeks of one properly worked visual project, and when you reach it the tool stops rather than degrading. And what you build is an arrangement, which is precisely what does not survive an export: you can take out the pictures and the words, but not the thing that made the board worth having.
What people use it for
- Moodboards and visual references for a branding or design project, gathered from the web and arranged for a client review.
- Storyboarding a video or planning a shoot, where the whole sequence needs to be visible at once.
- Structuring a book, script or long article by physically moving sections around until the order works.
- A shared board where a small creative team reacts to work in progress without the overhead of a project tool.
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Milanote.
- The free plan caps the entire account at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads rather than capping per board, so one properly worked project exhausts it and the tool stops working rather than degrading gracefully.
- The value of a board is its arrangement, and arrangement is the one thing export does not carry, so a PDF gives you a picture and a text export gives you the words while nothing reconstitutes the board in another tool.
- Pricing is per person and the tool spreads naturally to reviewers and clients who only look and comment, so a team plan ends up covering people who never create anything.
- There is no database layer, no properties, no filtering and no dependency tracking, so a project that starts on a Milanote board has to be re-entered somewhere else the moment it acquires owners and dates.
- Offline support is minimal, so a board full of references is effectively unavailable without a connection, which is a real problem for a tool aimed at people who work on location and in meetings away from a desk.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Milanote
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- MilanotevsCoggle
Coggle: Simple, Fast, and Powerful Mind Maps. Just Coggle it!
- MilanotevsMindManager
MindManager: Visualize your path to success
- MilanotevsMindMeister
MindMeister: Mind mapping made easy
Pricing
What Milanote costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- 100 notes, images or links
- 10 file uploads
- Unlimited shared boards
Individual
$9.99 /mo
- Unlimited notes, images or links
- Unlimited file uploads
- Unlimited shared boards
Team
$49 /mo
- Unlimited notes, images or links
- Unlimited file uploads
- Unlimited shared boards
- Up to 1,050 team members
Capabilities
Features
Infinite board canvas
Arrange material by dragging rather than by list or outline order
Mixed content
Notes, images, links, files, to-do lists and sketches on the same board
Nested boards
Boards inside boards to give a project a structure
Templates
Starting points for moodboards, storyboards, briefs and campaign plans
Web clipper
Collect images and references from the browser straight onto a board
Shared boards with comments
Unlimited shared boards even on the free plan
Mobile apps
Capture on a phone and arrange later on a larger screen
Free plan
100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads for the whole account, with no expiry
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
How long does the free plan last?
Indefinitely. It is limited by quantity rather than by time: 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads for the account as a whole, so it ends when you hit the cap rather than on a date.
Can I export a board?
You can produce PDFs and images of a board and extract the text, but the spatial arrangement is not portable, so nothing you export reconstructs the board in another tool.
Is it a project management tool?
No. There are no dates, dependencies or workload views. It suits the thinking phase, and the work has to be handed to a tracker once it becomes a plan.
Do collaborators need paid accounts?
Shared boards are unlimited even on the free plan, and the paid question is about who creates rather than who looks. Confirm the current plan terms before rolling it out to a client's team.
Keep looking
Where to go from Milanote
- Milanote alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Milanote pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Milanote badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Productivity softwareThe full category
- Best Productivity softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Productivity software for
Compare Milanote with
- MindMeister
- Coggle
- MindManager
- tldraw
- Xmind
- FigJam
- Google Slides
- Microsoft OneNote
- iLovePDF
- Mimestream
- Pitch
- Gamma
- Granola
- Habitica
- iA Writer
- Lazy
- LibreOffice
- Google Workspace
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Free, then €4.76/mo12 researched notesMicrosoft's free-form notebook, free with a Microsoft account and synced through OneDrive
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Open source13 researched notesEverything you need to get work done, all in one place
From €6.8/mo13 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Milanote, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Milanote
Milanote alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Milanote pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Milanote
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Milanote badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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