Wikiboard alternatives: wikiboard.org is suspended
Checked 21 August 2026. We re-check this page monthly.
What we see today
wikiboard.organswers HTTP 503 with a page titled “Service Suspended” and the line “This service has been suspended by its owner.”www.wikiboard.orgstill redirects to the apex, which then returns the same 503.- That message is what a host shows when an account is suspended, not a 404 and not an expired domain. It can be reversed by whoever owns the account, so this is “down”, not provably “gone forever”.
If you had boards saved, they lived in your own browser's storage, not on their server. Clearing site data for wikiboard.org is what destroys them, not the outage.
Start here: wikiboard.net
This is the closest working thing to Wikiboard and the first place we would send you. Search a Wikipedia article and it arrives as a real HTML card on an infinite board; click any link inside that article and the next one opens beside it with a line drawn between them. That is the click-to-spawn-and-connect loop Wikiboard was built around, working today, for free, with no account.
- Cards are real article HTML, not extracted text or a screenshot: scroll it, select from it, follow the footnotes.
- Post-it notes, box-select, connections you draw yourself, a minimap and keyboard shortcuts, which is most of the list Wikiboard users kept asking for.
- Boards have URLs, so a board can be bookmarked, shared, and reached with the back button. Boards are stored in your own browser.
- Wikipedia is fetched by your browser straight from the public MediaWiki API, so no server of ours ever sees which articles you read. Any language edition works.
- Up as of 21 August 2026, checked the same way we checked wikiboard.org above.
Disclosure: wikiboard.net is ours. It is not affiliated with the original wikiboard.org or its developer, and it does not restore anyone's old boards. If you want the click graph, go there rather than staying here — canvas-browser does not draw one, which the table further down says plainly.
What Wikiboard was
A Wikipedia research canvas. You searched an article, it became a node on an infinite board, and clicking a link inside that article opened the next article as a new node with a line drawn back to where you came from. The point was that the path stayed visible: you could see how you got from one article to the one twenty clicks later.
It ran in the browser with nothing to install, no account and no ads, boards were saved locally, and it was explicitly desktop-first. It was built by one developer in the Netherlands, Tinus, in evenings after a day job, and opened to public testing around early November 2025 after about two months of work.
Their own numbers while it was up:
| Date | Active users | r/WikiBoard members |
|---|---|---|
| 5 November 2025 | ~10 at launch | 120 |
| 7 November 2025 | 1,700 | 150 |
| 18 November 2025 | 5,500 | 436 |
Developer-reported, where “active” meant returning desktop users. Over 35,000 articles had been requested by 7 November 2025. An alpha v1.1.0 was announced for February–March 2026 adding PDF upload with highlighting, image upload, YouTube embeds with timestamped notes, groups, accounts and shareable board links.
Coverage while it was live: Fast Company, XDA.
The alternatives, and what each one actually does
wikiboard.net is the one entry that does the thing Wikiboard did — draw your click path as you browse — so it leads the list. Everything below it covers one half of the idea or the other. Pick by which half you wanted.
| Tool | What it gives you | What it is not |
|---|---|---|
| wikiboard.net | Wikiboard’s own loop, working: Wikipedia articles as real HTML cards on an infinite board, and clicking a link inside one spawns the next beside it with a line drawn between them. Post-its, minimap, shareable boards, no account. | Not the original and not affiliated with it. It cannot recover boards saved on wikiboard.org. |
| canvas-browser | Any number of live websites as tiles on one board, each a real browser in a country you pick. Grid layouts, shareable boards, no account. | Not a link graph. It does not draw the path you followed and has no notes. |
| wiki2map | A mind map generated from one article’s own headings and structure. | Maps the article, not your browsing. One article at a time. |
| wikiro | Open-source Wikiboard-shaped app: infinite canvas, Wikipedia nodes, post-its, several languages. Next.js, run it yourself. | A community clone, not the original. You host it. |
| WikiMapper | Offline graph of how strongly articles link to each other, viewed in Gephi. | A research tool for graphs, not a browsing surface. |
| Obsidian Canvas | Local visual notes on an infinite canvas, with Wikipedia reachable through plugins. | Notes first. Wikipedia is not native and there is no browsing path. |
| Heptabase, Scrintal | Cards on a whiteboard for personal knowledge work, with proper structure and search. | Paid, notes-centric, and no Wikipedia navigation. |
| Excalidraw, tldraw, Miro, FigJam | Infinite canvases you can put anything on, including screenshots and links. | Nothing about them is Wikipedia-aware. You draw the map by hand. |
| Tree Style Tab | Your browser tabs as a tree, so the branch you wandered down is visible. | A sidebar of tabs, not a board, and Firefox only. |
| Coggle, MindMeister, XMind | Classic mind mapping with sharing and export. | You type the nodes. Nothing is generated from what you read. |
Shortest answers: wikiboard.net if you want Wikiboard itself back, working, today — that is the answer for most people reading this. wiki2map if you want a map of one article, wikiro if you want Wikiboard's shape in code you host yourself, canvas-browser if what you actually miss is several live pages open next to each other instead of a stack of tabs.
Wikiboard and canvas-browser, side by side
The honest version, feature by feature. Several rows go their way, which is why this is a table rather than a list of our own bullets.
| Wikiboard | canvas-browser | |
|---|---|---|
| Sources | Wikipedia only, with PDF and YouTube announced for v1.1.0 | Any website, and the tile is the working site |
| Your click path | Drawn for you: every link you follow becomes a connected node | Not drawn. You arrange the tiles yourself |
| Notes on the board | Post-it notes, hotkey P, plus rich text later | None |
| Layout | Free canvas, and boards got messy at scale by their users’ own account | Free canvas plus grid layouts: one key for the best fit, or 1-4 columns |
| What runs the page | Article content fetched and rendered into a node | A real remote browser per tile, in a country you pick. Six live at once |
| Sharing | Shareable links announced for v1.1.0 | A board is a link today, and it carries the layout, not your browsers |
| Account | None at launch, accounts announced later | None |
| Price | Free, donations optional | Free |
| Phones | Desktop-first, stated as a limitation | Runs, panels become drawers, still wants a large screen |
| Status today | wikiboard.org returns HTTP 503, suspended by its owner | Up |
Wikiboard's own status is from its public posts and its site while it was up; ours is what the how-it-works page describes and you can check in a minute on the board.
What this site does instead
Canvas-browser is an infinite board of live websites. Each tile is a real browser we run for you in a country you pick, and the page inside it is the working site: you can click links, scroll, sign in, play video. Six tiles can be live at once. Nothing to install, no extension, no account.
Where that lands differently from Wikiboard:
- Any site, not just Wikipedia. Wikipedia in one tile, the paper it cites in the next, the archive in a third.
- Real pages, not extracted text. Wikiboard rendered article content into nodes. Here the tile is the site itself, so anything the site does still works.
- Grid layouts. Press
tand the tiles lay themselves out in the grid that fits them best, or press1–4to force that many columns, so four articles are a 2 × 2 filling the window. This was the top complaint about canvases of this kind, and it is now one keystroke. - Boards are links. A board is the set of sites and the country each one opens from, held in the URL fragment. Sending a board sends the layout; the other person gets their own browsers.
- Nothing is recorded. We do not log which sites you open, and closing a tile destroys that browser with everything in it. What we collect.
What it does not do, plainly: it does not draw a graph of the links you followed, it has no post-it notes, and it does not take PDF or video uploads. If the click graph is the thing you wanted, wikiboard.net is the page to be on, not this one.
Open a board with three Wikipedia tiles →
Three browsers open on Wikipedia, side by side. Search a different article in each, then press 2 for a 2 × 2.
If you want to rebuild it
Wikiboard was two months of evenings by one person, and the content layer under it is free. English Wikipedia holds 7,227,632+ articles and over 5.2 billion words as of 20 August 2026, growing by roughly 500 articles a day, across 364 language editions and about 68 million articles in total.
The parts you would build on:
- MediaWiki Action and REST APIs for search, summaries and parsed content. Summary plus an “open the full article” action is far lighter per node than a full article, and identifying your User-Agent and caching is required etiquette.
- Clickstream dumps, monthly article-to-article navigation counts. This is the dataset nobody in this category uses: it tells you which article readers actually go to next, which is a suggestion engine for the next node without any AI in it.
- Pageviews dumps and Wikimedia Statistics for what is being read, and Wikidata for structured identifiers and cross-language links.
And the gaps its own users kept asking for, which are the specification for a better version:
- Boards get messy fast: groups, stacking, collapse and a minimap.
- Enlarge one article to read it properly, then get back to the board.
- Mobile, which was never supported.
- Sources beyond Wikipedia: web pages, PDFs, local files, video.
- Export that leaves the tool: JSON, Markdown, Obsidian, PNG or SVG.
- Open source, asked for repeatedly.
- Collaboration and share links, which arrived late.
Storage was localStorage or IndexedDB first, accounts later, which is why an outage did not take anyone's boards with it. Canvas layers in this class of app are React Flow, tldraw, Konva, PixiJS or Excalidraw's core; the open clone wikiro runs on Next.js and TypeScript.
Questions
- Is there a working Wikiboard replacement?
- Yes: wikiboard.net does the same thing — search a Wikipedia article, get it as a real HTML card, click a link inside it and the next article opens beside it with a line drawn between them. Free, no account, boards kept in your browser and shareable by URL. It is our own site, it is not affiliated with the original, and it cannot restore boards you saved on wikiboard.org.
- Is Wikiboard down or gone?
- As of 21 August 2026 wikiboard.org returns HTTP 503 with "This service has been suspended by its owner." That is a suspended hosting account rather than a deleted site, so it could come back. There has been no public statement that the project ended.
- Can I get my Wikiboard boards back?
- Boards were saved in your own browser, not on their server, so they are still in local storage for wikiboard.org unless you cleared site data for that domain. There is no export while the site is down, because the site is what did the exporting.
- Is there an open-source Wikiboard?
- The original was not open source, despite repeated requests. wikiro on GitHub is a community-built app of the same shape, on Next.js and TypeScript, that you can run yourself. If you want a hosted one instead of a repo, wikiboard.net is up and needs no setup.
- Does canvas-browser map the Wikipedia links I follow?
- No. It gives you several live websites side by side on one board and leaves the arranging to you. If an automatic graph of your click path is the feature you want, wikiboard.net is the one to open.
- Is canvas-browser free?
- Yes, and there is no account. Six tiles can be live at once, because each tile is a browser we pay to run.
- Does it work on a phone?
- It runs, and the panels become drawers so the board keeps the screen, but a board of several live sites wants a large screen. Wikiboard had the same limitation.