Figma, Miro and friends are great at whiteboarding — but the board is a wall your agent stares at. brainstorm.spot is the one canvas your coding agent reads and writes over MCP, with every board saved as JSON right in your repo
Repo-native, agent-native. Your agent reads and writes the board over MCP, boards are JSON in your repo, and it runs local-first.
Best-in-class for design and team whiteboarding. Not agent-native, not repo-native — files live in Figma's cloud, not your repo.
A deep, collaborative whiteboard for workshops and planning. No coding-agent read/write loop and no local boards in your repo.
Lightweight, open-source canvases that run locally. No built-in MCP and no agent read-write loop over the board.
The axes are agent + repo capabilities, not feature counts — these are the things that change how you work with a coding agent
| Capability | brainstorm.spot | Figma / FigJam | Miro | tldraw / Excalidraw |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your coding agent reads the boardover MCP | ||||
| Your coding agent writes the boardadds nodes, edits, connects | ||||
| MCP server includedagent-native, not a plugin | ||||
| Unlimited MCP calls on the free planno usage caps or credits | capped | no MCP | no MCP | |
| Boards live in your repo as JSONplain files you own | local files | |||
| Works fully offline / local | ||||
| HTML artifacts render on the boardagent drops working UI | embeds | |||
| Free to run locally | free tier | free tier | ||
| Open-source canvas | ||||
| Sticky notes, frames & connectors | ||||
| Real-time multiplayer cursors | ||||
| Share read-only linksno install to view |
Scroll the table sideways to compare →
When the board lives as JSON in .brainstorm/ in your repo, your coding agent can read what you sketched and write straight back to it — adding nodes, wiring connections, dropping a working HTML artifact onto the canvas. The board stops being a picture of the plan and becomes part of the loop. Everything is local-first and yours: delete the tool, keep the files. That's the gap a cloud-locked whiteboard can't cross.
Open the canvas in your browser, or spin it up locally in one command — free, no account required