“Best online whiteboard” is a crowded search because the term covers two very different products. One kind is a general collaboration canvas built for teams — sticky notes, diagrams, workshop templates. The other is built specifically for one tutor and one student (or a small group) meeting on a recurring schedule. If you’re tutoring, the second kind will almost always serve you better, even when the first kind is more famous.
Here’s how the actual options compare, as of July 2026.
General-purpose canvases: Excalidraw and Miro
Excalidrawis a free, open-source infinite canvas with a hand-drawn aesthetic. It’s genuinely good for sketching diagrams, and you can self-host it for nothing. What it doesn’t have: built-in video, a persistent room per student, session recording, or anything tutoring-specific. You’d be pairing it with a separate video call and a separate way of remembering which board belongs to which student.
Mirois the market-leading team whiteboard, and it’s excellent for what it’s built for: workshops, retros, brainstorms. For tutoring specifically it’s a heavier tool than you need — pricing is per-seat rather than per-tutor-practice, and there’s no concept of a session, a student roster, or a recording tied to a lesson.
Miro pricing: Free (3 editable boards), Starter from $8/member/month annual, Business from $20/member/month annual — see miro.com/pricing for current rates.
Tutoring-built whiteboards: Pencil Spaces and Lessonspace
Both of these bundle a whiteboard with video calling and are built around the idea of a tutoring session, not a generic workspace. The catch with both is the same one: they charge by the hour.
- Pencil Spaces runs on usage tiers — for example its Basic plan is $19/month for 75 included hours, then $0.70 per hour after that. Heavier tiers lower the per-hour rate but the metering never goes away on its currently-live plans.
- Lessonspace works the same way — its Starter plan is $29/month for 30 included hours, then $1.80 per additional hour, and sessions are capped at 6 participants before per-participant fees kick in.
Verified directly from pencilspaces.com/pricing and thelessonspace.com/pricing in July 2026 — check their current pages before deciding, pricing changes.
Hour-metering is fine if your teaching hours are unpredictable month to month. If you teach a steady roster — the same handful of students, every week — it means your software bill moves in a direction you don’t control.
Where LumenBoard fits
LumenBoard is a tutoring-built whiteboard too — multi-page canvas, live video, real math rendering instead of blurry photos of a notebook — with one difference: the price doesn’t move with your hours. Tutor is $15/month with unlimited sessions, and Tutor Pro ($29/month) adds AI lesson notes, parent recaps, and small groups up to six. There’s also a free tier — two rooms, capped hours — so you can try it with real students before deciding.
How to actually decide
If you only need occasional diagramming and already have a video tool, Excalidraw’s free canvas is genuinely enough. If you run workshops or team sessions beyond 1:1 tutoring, Miro fits better than any tutoring-specific tool will. If you’re tutoring on a recurring schedule and want the bill to be flat regardless of how many hours you teach this month, that’s the gap LumenBoard, Pencil Spaces, and Lessonspace are all trying to fill — and it’s worth comparing the pricing structure, not just the feature list, before picking one.
See the full breakdown in LumenBoard vs. Pencil Spaces and LumenBoard vs. Lessonspace.