The open-source Microsoft Whiteboard alternative

Microsoft Whiteboard has not gone away for everyone. Work and school accounts keep it inside Teams and on the web. What has ended is Whiteboard for personal Microsoft accounts and the standalone apps: personal boards became read-only on 25 September 2026, and on 16 October 2026 the remaining legacy boards were deleted and the standalone Windows, iOS and Android apps retired, for every kind of account.

If you used Whiteboard on a personal account, for teaching, family planning, tutoring or your own thinking, you need a new home for the next boards, and for any board you exported before the deletion. Check Microsoft’s own retirement notice for the details that apply to your account.

Whiteboard’s own exports are a flat picture: nothing in them stays editable. livediagram imports a board export instead, the folder of the board’s own edit history, and replays it, so every stroke comes back as data. Each board becomes its own canvas with one whiteboard tab, named after the board and dated as the board, so your library keeps its history.

Pen strokes keep their pressure, so thick and thin stay as you drew them. Black ink on a light board, or white ink on a dark one, becomes the whiteboard’s own ink, so it reads in light and dark. Highlighter stays highlighter, and sticky notes, text, shapes and images keep their place. The board is read in your browser, and the import needs no Microsoft account. When it finishes, it says what changed on the way, such as rainbow ink drawn in pink.

Draw mode is a plain whiteboard, close to what Whiteboard users are used to: pick a marker, draw, erase, add text and shapes. But the same tab can switch to Diagram mode when a sketch needs structure, with shapes and arrows that stay attached as you move things, and the Marker or Sketch finish keeps that structure looking hand-drawn. A canvas holds as many tabs as you need, grouped into folders, and Presentation mode turns elements from any tab into a slide deck.

For sessions, switch a tab to Workshop, the mode for running a room: there are templates for retrospectives, Lean Coffee and town hall Q&A, and a facilitator can run a shared timer, votes, polls and quizzes for the room, with the right answer revealed when the time is up.

A retirement like this is a reminder of what it means to rely on someone else’s product. livediagram is MIT-licensed and its whole codebase is public. It is free with no paid tier, and your canvases export to portable formats, so you are never locked in.

You can also keep a canvas entirely in your browser with Offline Mode, or, once signed in, mirror your canvases to your own Google Drive.