Interactive Whiteboard for Classroom: 10 Tools Compared

The right interactive whiteboard for classroom teaching depends on one question: do students draw too, or only you? For teacher-led lessons, a free canvas like Excalidraw or FigJam is enough. For per-student boards you can watch live, Whiteboard.fi covers 20 students free and up to 100 on paid plans.

That single distinction decides more than any feature list. A tool built for one shared canvas — the kind design teams use for sticky notes — is a poor fit when you need thirty separate boards to check whether everyone solved the equation. And a tool built for per-student boards feels cramped when what you actually wanted was one big collaborative wall.

The category also shifted underneath teachers twice in two years. Google retired the Jamboard app on 31 December 2024, and all remaining Jams were deleted after the service went view-only that October, according to university IT notices that ran the migration. Then Microsoft set 22 August 2026 as the date personal Microsoft accounts stop being able to create or edit whiteboards, with view-and-export access ending 5 September 2026 and unmigrated content deleted afterwards — business accounts keep working, personal ones don't. If you picked a free whiteboard in 2023 because it came with your Google or Microsoft login, you have now been moved twice.

Table of contents

• What actually changed in 2026
• Four questions that decide your choice
• Interactive whiteboards compared
• The tools in detail
• Running the whiteboard during a live lesson
• Stylus, tablet and touch: what feels like writing
• Free-plan traps to check before your first lesson
• Which whiteboard fits your classroom
• Frequently Asked Questions

What actually changed in 2026

Two shutdowns removed the two whiteboards most teachers reached for by default, and both of them were free because they were bundled with an account teachers already had. What replaced them is a market of specialists: some tools optimise for one infinite canvas, some for a class set of small boards, some for recorded explanations, and some for European data hosting.

The wider pattern is that access to tools is not the same as use of them. LearnPlatform by Instructure's 2026 EdTech Top 40, drawn from more than 12.6 million K-12 users between September 2025 and April 2026, found districts keep access to an average of 3,001 unique digital tools while students and educators actually interact with about four of them, according to the report announcement. Whatever whiteboard you choose has to survive being one of those four — which usually means it opens fast, needs no student account, and works on the device your students already hold.

Four questions that decide your choice

1. Does every student need their own board? If you want to see who understood, you need individual boards on a teacher dashboard. That is a narrow feature set, and it rules out most general-purpose canvases immediately.

2. What is the ceiling on the free plan? Free plans in this category cap one of three things: the number of boards you can edit, the number of participants in a session, or the objects on a single board. Check which one applies to how you teach.

3. Will students join without an account? Every account you require costs you two minutes of a lesson multiplied by your class size, and in schools it can trigger a data protection review.

4. Where does the data live? For public schools in the EU this is not a preference. Hosting location, processor agreements and whether children's work leaves the EU decide what you are allowed to use in the first place.

Interactive whiteboards compared

Prices below are the vendors' published list prices as of July 2026; education programmes usually override them.

The tools in detail

Whiteboard.fi: the only one built for class sets

Whiteboard.fi does one thing the others do not: it gives every student a private board and shows the teacher all of them at once, live. You open a room, students join with a code, and you watch thirty small canvases fill in real time. Its own support documentation puts the session limits at 10 students with no account, 20 on a free registered teacher account, 30 on Lite, 40 on Pro and 100 on Premium. The tool has been part of Kahoot since a 2021 acquisition and remains free at its core tier.

Use it for formative checks — solve this, sketch this, label this — not for a shared collaborative wall.

FigJam: the best free canvas if you can verify as an educator

FigJam is a fast, pleasant infinite canvas with sticky notes, shapes, connectors, stamps and timers. Figma's education programme makes Figma Design, FigJam and Dev Mode free for verified students and educators, which turns a paid product into the strongest free option in this list. Verification runs through a school email address, so plan a few days before term starts.

Miro and Mural: powerful, but priced for teams

Both are excellent infinite canvases, and both cap the free tier at three editable boards — Miro counts boards, Mural counts three editable murals at a time while older ones stay viewable. Miro's education plan is the interesting part: verified institutions get unlimited boards, up to 100 seats and unlimited guest editors, though the verification process is institutional rather than instant.

If you teach project work, retrospectives or anything that lives across weeks, these are worth the setup. For a Tuesday maths lesson they are overkill.

Excalidraw: the fastest path from idea to drawing

Excalidraw is free, opens instantly, requires no login, and its hand-drawn style keeps attention on the idea rather than the formatting. You can share a live collaborative link, export to PNG, SVG or a JSON file, and stop worrying about board quotas. Excalidraw+ adds cloud workspaces, presentation frames and export to PDF or PPTX for $6 per user per month, or $4 monthly with an education email.

For explaining a concept while you talk, this is the lowest-friction option in the category.

Canva Whiteboards: strong if your material is already visual

Canva's whiteboards inherit the template library, which matters when you want a ready-made timeline, mind map or graphic organiser rather than an empty canvas. Canva for Education gives verified K-12 teachers premium features free and lets them bring students in through a class. It is the least "whiteboard-like" of the set and the most "lesson-material-like".

Explain Everything: for recorded explanations

Explain Everything is a whiteboard with a recorder attached: you draw, narrate and produce a short video students can rewatch. The free tier is deliberately thin — three projects, a single slide and one minute of recording — with paid access at $6.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Pick it if flipped-classroom videos are the goal.

Conceptboard and Collaboard: when hosting location is the requirement

Conceptboard is a German product hosted in Germany, with optional IONOS or StackIT hosting and ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications; its free tier allows three active boards with 100 objects each. Collaboard keeps free use to three boards and five participants, and offers European hosting choices including Germany on its higher tiers. Neither is the most fun canvas to draw on. Both answer the question a school data protection officer will ask first.

Whiteboards inside the meeting

Most video platforms now ship a whiteboard, and free tiers typically allow three editable boards. The advantage is real: no second tab, no join code, no lost students. The limits are also real — the board usually lives inside that vendor's ecosystem, features lag behind dedicated tools, and everyone in the room needs an account on the same platform to keep editing later.

Running the whiteboard during a live lesson

Choosing the tool is the easy half. The setup that fails in the first five minutes is the one where you try to draw and manage the call on the same screen.

Share the whiteboard tab, not the whole desktop. Sharing a single browser tab keeps your email, class list and lesson plan out of view, and it is lighter on bandwidth than a full-screen share. If you are unsure how per-device sharing works, our guide on how to share your screen in a video call walks through every platform and device.

Use two devices if you can. Tablet for drawing, laptop for the call. You keep pen input where it feels natural and student faces where you can see them, and you avoid the window-juggling that eats lesson time.

Give students a board only when you need evidence. Individual boards are powerful and slow. Use one shared canvas for explanation, switch to per-student boards for the check, then switch back.

Watch the language layer. In multilingual classrooms the whiteboard is the easy part; the commentary around it is not. Meeyra runs the video lesson in the browser with live AI translation across 42+ languages, so you can narrate the whiteboard in your language while each student follows captions in theirs — with screen sharing, live transcripts and one-link joining, and no install for students or parents. The whiteboard stays whichever tool you chose; the meeting layer stops language from deciding who keeps up.

Record or export at the end. Whatever the tool, the board disappears faster than you expect. Export a PNG or PDF and drop it into your LMS while the lesson is still open.

Stylus, tablet and touch: what feels like writing

Handwriting quality is what separates a whiteboard that gets used from one that gets abandoned after a week.

• iPad with Apple Pencil is still the reference experience, and Explain Everything, FigJam, Canva and Excalidraw all handle it well.
• Pen-enabled Windows laptops and Surface devices work with anything browser-based; Ziteboard specifically optimises for stylus and touch input and charges $9 per month for Pro, or $7.08 monthly billed annually.
• Graphics tablets — the pen-and-pad kind without a screen — are the cheapest fix for a desktop setup and take about a week to feel natural.
• A mouse is fine for structure, bad for maths. Boxes, arrows and sticky notes work with a mouse. Equations, diagrams and corrections on student work do not.
• Physical smart boards in the room are a separate layer: they render your online board fine, but the whiteboard software that ships with the panel is usually better for annotating on top of live content.

If your teaching is text and structure, skip the hardware. If it is anything with symbols, budget for a pen before you budget for a subscription.

Free-plan traps to check before your first lesson

• Board caps count differently. "Three editable boards" can mean three total, or three at a time with the rest becoming read-only. Ask which before you build a term's worth of material.
• Session limits are not participant limits. A tool may allow unlimited viewers but only a handful of live editors.
• Sessions expire. Free rooms in classroom-focused tools are usually temporary, so a room link you put in your LMS in September may be dead in October.
• Student accounts create obligations. Anything requiring student logins needs a data protection conversation in most European schools, and consent handling in many others.
• Export is the real insurance. Both major shutdowns of the last two years ended with content deletion deadlines. If a tool cannot export to PDF or an image, it cannot hold your material.
• Education verification takes time. Free-for-teachers programmes at Figma, Canva and Miro require institutional verification that can take days to weeks.

Which whiteboard fits your classroom

If you need to see student work in real time, Whiteboard.fi is the only tool here designed for it, and its free tier is genuinely usable for a class of twenty. If you want one strong shared canvas and can verify as an educator, FigJam is the best free choice. If you want to open something in three seconds and start drawing, use Excalidraw. If you are in a public school in the EU with a data protection checklist, start with Conceptboard or Collaboard and their European hosting options. If your lessons are template-driven and visual, Canva does more than a whiteboard alone.

For a broader picture of the tools that surround the whiteboard, our roundup of the 25 best teaching tools for 2026 covers quizzing, content creation and classroom management, and our comparison of virtual classroom platforms handles the layer underneath all of it.

Whatever you pick for the canvas, the lesson still runs on the meeting. If your class spans more than one language, start free with Meeyra and let live translation carry the explanation while the whiteboard carries the maths.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free interactive whiteboard for a classroom?

For per-student boards, Whiteboard.fi's free registered account supports 20 students per session and shows every board to the teacher live. For a single shared canvas, FigJam is free for verified educators and students, and Excalidraw is free for everyone with no account required.

What replaced Google Jamboard for teachers?

Google did not ship a direct replacement; it integrated third-party whiteboards into Workspace instead. Teachers mostly moved to FigJam for shared canvases and Whiteboard.fi for individual student boards, with Excalidraw and Canva as free alternatives.

Is Microsoft Whiteboard still free in 2026?

Not for personal accounts. From 22 August 2026, personal Microsoft accounts can no longer create or edit whiteboards, view-and-export access ends on 5 September 2026, and unmigrated content may be deleted. Microsoft 365 business and school accounts are not affected.

How many students can join a free online whiteboard?

It varies by tool. Whiteboard.fi allows 10 students without an account and 20 with a free teacher account; Collaboard's free plan allows 5 participants; canvas tools like Miro and Mural allow unlimited members but only 3 editable boards.

Do I need a stylus to teach with an online whiteboard?

Not for structure-based lessons using text, shapes and sticky notes. For handwriting, equations, diagrams or marking student work, a pen-enabled tablet or a graphics tablet makes the difference between a usable board and an unreadable one.

Can I use an online whiteboard while sharing my screen in a video call?

Yes, and sharing a single browser tab rather than your whole desktop is the cleaner approach. Many teachers draw on a tablet and run the call on a laptop, so pen input and student video stay on separate screens.

Which online whiteboard is GDPR-compliant for schools?

Conceptboard hosts in Germany with ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications, and Collaboard offers European hosting including Germany on higher tiers. US-hosted canvases can be acceptable on school-managed devices without personal student data, but school data protection guidance in Germany treats their use on private devices as high-risk.