Digital Whiteboard Tools for Online Teaching
You are three minutes into a live lesson, a student asks “wait, how do those two steps connect?”, and you reach for something to draw on. What you grab next quietly decides more than you think. Hidden inside “I need a whiteboard” are two different jobs, and most tool roundups blur them together.
One job is in-the-moment: you sketch, the class watches, and the drawing has done its work by the time the call ends. The other is durable: the board is the deliverable — a mind map students keep editing after class, a term-long project canvas, a shared space that outlives any single session. Pick a tool built for the wrong job and you will feel it as friction: an extra login for 20 students, a canvas you have to screen-share instead of just turning on, or a free plan that locks after three boards right when a new cohort starts.
So the useful question is not “which digital whiteboard is best?” It is “does this board live inside my video call, or on its own?” Answer that first and the shortlist almost builds itself.
The split that actually matters: in-call board vs standalone canvas
An interactive whiteboard, in the classic sense, is a physical touch display at the front of a room. What most online teachers mean today is software — a shared canvas that several people draw on at once. That falls under what computing calls collaborative software: tools “designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals,” including real-time editing where everyone’s changes appear live.
Within that, there are two families. In-call boards ship inside the meeting tool you already run — Zoom, Microsoft Teams. You turn them on without anyone leaving the call. Standalone canvases — Miro, Excalidraw, FigJam — live at their own URL. They are far more powerful, but a student has to open another tab, and often another account. My rule of thumb: start with the board that is already in the room, and only move to a standalone canvas when the board needs to outlast the session. The rest of this guide follows that order.
Teaching live? Start with the board you already pay for
If your teaching happens inside video calls — and if you are still choosing a platform, our roundup of tools for hosting live classes online is the place to start — the lowest-friction whiteboard is the one bundled with your meeting tool. No second invite, no student sign-up, one less thing to screen-share.
Zoom Whiteboard is built into Zoom and, as covered in our guide to using Zoom for online courses, it opens straight from the meeting toolbar. On the free (Basic) tier you can keep three whiteboards editable at a time and share them publicly with no sign-in — which matters when half your students are logging in from a borrowed laptop. Need unlimited boards and version history? The Whiteboard Unlimited add-on starts at about US$2.07/user per month.
Microsoft Whiteboard is the equivalent for the Teams world. You can use it in a browser at whiteboard.office.com with a free Microsoft account, and it drops directly into a Teams call. For a program already standardised on Microsoft 365, it is effectively the “free, already-installed” option, and student work saves to the account they already have.
The catch with in-call boards is persistence. They are superb for the sketch-and-move-on job, but a three-board free ceiling and session-bound sharing make them awkward when the board is supposed to live for a whole term.
When the board is the deliverable: standalone canvases
Reach for a standalone canvas when students keep building on the board between classes, when you are mapping something too sprawling for a meeting board, or when you want a template library doing some of the teaching for you.
Miro — the big collaborative canvas
Miro is the heavyweight: an effectively infinite canvas with 7,000+ templates, sticky notes, voting and timers. The free plan gives you unlimited boards to create but keeps only your three most recent ones editable, and every board is visible to all team members (no guest roles). The Starter plan at US$8/member per month (billed yearly) unlocks unlimited private boards and visitor editing. Best for cohort courses and workshops where group collaboration is the point.
Excalidraw — free, fast, hand-drawn
Excalidraw is the one I reach for most for live explanation. It is open source, runs in the browser at excalidraw.com with no account, and its deliberately hand-drawn look keeps diagrams feeling like thinking-in-progress rather than finished slides. You can share a live collaboration link in seconds, and it converts Mermaid syntax into editable diagrams. The free tier is genuinely “free forever”; Excalidraw+ (cloud saving, folders) is US$6/user per month. Best for one-teacher explanation and STEM sketching where speed beats polish.
FigJam — structured group work
FigJam, from Figma, sits between Miro’s power and Excalidraw’s speed. It is strong for structured activities — affinity mapping, retro-style grids, stamps and voting for quick class polls. The free Starter plan allows three collaborative FigJam files (unlimited personal drafts); the Professional plan is US$5/seat per month for unlimited files. Best if your classes run recurring structured exercises rather than freeform sketching.
At a glance: five whiteboards, side by side
Prices and free-plan limits checked on the vendors’ own pages in October 2026; whiteboard pricing changes often, so confirm before you commit a cohort to one.
| Tool | Free plan | Entry paid price | Live co-editing | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom Whiteboard | 3 editable boards, public share, no sign-in | ~US$2.07/user/mo (Unlimited add-on) | Yes, inside Zoom calls | Live classes already run on Zoom |
| Microsoft Whiteboard | Free with a Microsoft account; web + Teams | Included with Microsoft 365 | Yes, inside Teams calls | Programs standardised on Microsoft 365 |
| Miro | Unlimited boards, 3 most recent editable | US$8/member/mo (Starter, yearly) | Yes, standalone | Cohort workshops, template-heavy sessions |
| Excalidraw | Free forever, no account, browser-based | US$6/user/mo (Excalidraw+) | Yes, share a link | Solo explanation, fast STEM sketches |
| FigJam | 3 collaborative files, unlimited drafts | US$5/seat/mo (Professional) | Yes, standalone | Recurring structured group activities |
If you used Jamboard, start here
If you landed on this page because your Jamboard stopped working, that is expected. Google discontinued Jamboard on December 31, 2024 (announced back in September 2023), citing “the abundance of better, more capable alternatives,” and all Jam data was deleted after that date. Our older walk-through of teaching with Jamboard now reads as history.
For a near drop-in replacement, map your old habit to a new tool: if you loved Jamboard’s simplicity inside Google Meet, FigJam is the closest spiritual successor; if you mostly want a free sketch surface, Excalidraw asks nothing of your students; and if your school has moved to Microsoft 365, Whiteboard is already paid for. Do not pick based on nostalgia for Jamboard’s look — pick based on whether your new board needs to persist.
Who each pick is for — and who should skip it
Choose an in-call board (Zoom or Microsoft Whiteboard) if you teach live and the drawing is disposable. The friction savings — no extra account for students — outweigh the feature gap. Skip it if students need to keep editing the board between sessions; the three-board free ceiling will bite.
Choose Miro or FigJam if group collaboration on a persistent canvas is the actual learning activity, and you can ask students to sign in once. Skip them if you only ever sketch for a minute mid-lecture — you are paying in logins for power you will not use.
Choose Excalidraw if you explain solo and value speed and zero setup. Skip it if you need facilitation extras like voting, timers or a big template library.
One honest caveat: a stylus and a drawing tablet change this calculation more than any pricing tier does. A teacher sketching freehand on an iPad will get more from any of these tools than a teacher fighting a mouse, no matter which logo is on the canvas.
Pick the board that matches how you teach — in the call or on its own — not the one with the longest feature list. Get that one decision right and the free tiers above will carry most online courses a long way before you ever need to pay.
