A Milanote alternative that lives on your computer
Milanote is a polished online whiteboard for creative projects, and sharing a board with a client or a team is where it shines. It runs in the cloud and needs an account; the free plan has a cap on notes and uploads, and the paid plan is a subscription.
Milanote and Maki side by side
| Milanote | Maki | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your boards live | Milanote's cloud | A folder on your computer |
| Account | Required | None |
| Works offline | Online first | Fully, including search and text in images |
| Real-time sharing with others | Yes | No; export a PNG, PDF or board file instead |
| Search | Across your boards | Across boards, file names, notes and the words inside images |
| Big image collections | Uploads count toward plan limits | No limits beyond your disk |
| Price | Free plan with limits, then a monthly or yearly subscription | 30 days free, then $19 once |
When Milanote is the better pick
Stay with Milanote if you collaborate on boards with other people every day, or you want to open your boards in any browser on any device.
When Maki is the better pick
Move to Maki if your boards are mostly for you, you have more images than a free plan allows, you want them on your own disk, or you'd rather pay once than every month. Check Milanote's pricing page for current plans.
Tested with 5,000 images
Milanote counts uploads against your plan. Maki has no such limit, so the real limit is how well the app copes with a big pile on your own disk. We filled one Maki board with 5,000 images and timed it.
| The board | 5,000 JPEGs, 900 to 1,600 px wide, 903 MB in total |
|---|---|
| Open from launch | Under 5 seconds; 1.8 seconds when the files were already in the disk cache |
| Search across all 5,000 | 3 to 14 ms to find matches; about 0.7 seconds from typing to results on screen, including a short pause so it doesn't search on every key |
| Panning into parts not yet opened | 95% of frames drawn in 7.4 ms or less (a 60 Hz screen needs 16.7 ms) |
| Zooming out to the whole board | 95% of frames in 28 ms or less |
| All 5,000 on screen at once | 35 to 60 ms per frame, so about 20 frames a second; the first time, the small previews take about 30 seconds to fill in |
What Maki is
Maki is a desktop reference board for Windows and Mac. You drop in paintings, pose refs, screenshots, Pinterest pins and whole folders, arrange them on an endless board, and find any of them later by typing a word. Maki reads file names, notes and the text inside your images, all offline. There is no account, and your boards stay in a folder on your disk. See what it does or read the guide.
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