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A Miro alternative for architects: Sketch Paper
Miro is the best general whiteboard there is, and an architecture firm that runs workshops with clients, consultants and contractors will keep using it for that. Sketch Paper is not a general whiteboard. It is the roll of trace on every architect’s desk, inside the project: an infinite canvas where the sheets you lay trace over are the real sheets, pinned to their revision, and where a sketch worth keeping becomes a project file in one move. If the thinking you do on a canvas is about drawings, this is the page for you.
Conor McMichael · Architect. Founder, LODE
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What Sketch Paper is
Issued documents are permanent, so the place an architect thinks out loud has to be somewhere else. Sketch Paper is that place, one canvas per project. Lay a sheet of trace over anything, draw on it, lay another over that, and the lower sheets fade with depth the way real vellum does. Fan the stack out and the options sit side by side to compare. Pull one out, restack, reorder, rename. Two people can each work a different sheet of the same stack at once.
The tools are the ones a drawing conversation needs: draw, highlight, an eraser that takes only the swept part of a stroke, shapes with centred labels, elbowed connectors that reroute when things move, arrows, text in four faces, sticky notes, comment pins with threads, frames. Six ink colours, three weights, solid, dashed, dotted and centreline strokes. It is a sketching surface first and a diagramming surface second, which is the opposite of a whiteboard.
Where the two part company
The difference is what a drawing is on the canvas. On a Miro board a sheet is a picture: an uploaded PDF or image, placed, and from that moment unrelated to anything. On Sketch Paper, Place a sheet opens a picker over the current set, and the sheet you place is pinned to the exact version you placed. It never silently updates, and the moment an issuance supersedes or voids it, a badge on the canvas says so: Superseded by ASI 04. You always know when you are tracing history. Why the version matters.
The second difference is where a sketch goes when it is worth keeping. A Miro board is its own destination. Sketch Paper is upstream of the record: Save region to Files names the region, tags it Sketch, Coordination or Working, and lands it in project Files as an image marked as saved from Sketch Paper. From there it behaves like any project file. Attach it to an RFI, include it in an issuance, send it on a transmittal. The move is one-way by design: the record never links back to the canvas, because the canvas is working space, with no versions, no history and no sheet numbers.
The third difference is who is in the room. Sketch Paper is for members of the project. There is no guest link to the canvas; a consultant or a client who needs to see a sketch sees the saved file, on the record, through a share link with an access log. That is a deliberate limit, and it is the first reason a firm keeps Miro: the client workshop happens somewhere clients can draw.