InVision vs Miro

Where Miro wins

It is not an alternative to Freehand, it is Freehand

On 6 November 2023 Miro announced it had acquired the Freehand app from InVision: the technology, the brand, the customer relationships and the team. InVision's chief executive Jeff Chow went with the deal, becoming Miro's Chief Product and Technology Officer. Freehand capabilities were folded into Miro through 2024, existing Freehand subscriptions were honoured at no extra cost, and migration tooling was provided while it still mattered. If you are searching for a Freehand replacement, you are searching for the company that bought it.

The whiteboard job is genuinely covered

Everything Freehand was used for in practice, workshops, retros, journey maps, sticky-note clustering and the diagram somebody needs during a call, is core Miro rather than an afterthought bolted onto a design tool. That is a real distinction: FigJam and Penpot boards are competent, but Miro is where the templates, the integrations and the facilitation features actually live.

Pricing is straightforward, which is rarer than it should be

Per member, per month, billed annually: $8 for Starter with unlimited boards, $20 for Business, Enterprise quoted from thirty members. Monthly billing costs about twenty per cent more. There is no second meter, no per-board charge and no usage counter that surprises you at the end of a quarter, which is a lower bar than it sounds like across this category.

Where Miro does not compete at all

Miro replaces one of InVision's four jobs. It has no design canvas, no prototype flows, no Inspect equivalent and nothing like Design System Manager, and it does not claim otherwise. Teams that bought Miro as their InVision replacement and then discovered they still had nowhere to put a screen design were not misled by Miro; they were misled by listicles that put the two products in one list without saying which half each covers.

The free tier is also tighter than it first appears: three editable boards is enough to evaluate the tool and not enough to run a team, so treat Starter at $8 as the real entry price. And on this site's central question, Miro scores no better than InVision did: boards are cloud-only, there is no open format and no self-hosting, so your continuity plan is your vendor's balance sheet. That is a perfectly normal trade for a whiteboard, where the artefacts are usually disposable by design, but it should be a decision rather than an assumption.

Practical sequencing after InVision

If you are rebuilding both halves at once:

1. Split the two jobs on paper first. List what you actually used InVision for, then mark each line as whiteboard or design. The split decides your budget, and it is usually more lopsided than people guess.
2. Buy the design tool first. Prototypes and handoff block engineering; a missing whiteboard blocks a meeting. Sequence accordingly.
3. Start Miro on the free tier deliberately. Three boards is enough to see whether your team fills a board or a document, and plenty of teams discover they wanted the document.
4. Accept the dead links. Freehand boards not migrated during 2024 are gone. Reconstruct only the ones people still reference, and delete the links to the rest so nobody wastes an afternoon on them.