Best Moodboard Apps for Writers

How we evaluated them

We looked at four things: (1) how easy it is to collect images (discovery, saving from the web, drag and drop), (2) whether you can put notes, colors and text next to an image and arrange the board freely, (3) whether the board connects to the rest of your story, meaning your characters, places and notes, and (4) what the free plan allows and whether you can work on a board with other people. Prices change often, so we don't quote them. We checked each free plan's limits on the tool's own pages on November 8, 2026, and the sources are listed at the end. The numbering isn't a score: yazar.io is our own product, so it comes first, but we describe it by the same criteria and list its gaps too.

What writers use a moodboard for

A novel's moodboard often does several jobs at once. It settles how a character looks, keeps a place's light and mood in mind, helps you find the book's color palette, gives a cover designer or illustrator a direction and supplies material for images you'll share with readers. Finding images, keeping them in order and showing them to someone are different jobs, and it's hard for one tool to be the best at all three. That's why pairing two tools often works: one to hunt for images, the other to keep the ones you choose next to the rest of the story.

Whichever tool you choose, one habit pays off: next to every image, write one line on why you picked it. A short note such as 'the ring Mara loses in chapter two' tells you months later what that image is doing in the story.

1. yazar.io Boards; a board tied to your novel's records

In yazar.io, a board is a free-form canvas inside your book, and a book can hold several: one for characters, one for places, one for the book's overall mood. With Add from Book you bring your records (characters, places, organizations and the rest), your notes and your quotes onto the canvas as cards. A character's card arrives with the main image from their record, and when you update the record, the card shows the new details. Relationships in your book (organization memberships, family ties, ownership) appear between the cards as faint lines without you drawing them. So you never upload a character's picture twice, and a detail you change in the book doesn't linger out of date on the board.

You pick images from your device, drag them onto the canvas or paste them. Each one can be shown plain, with soft corners or in a Polaroid frame, and the Polaroid frame takes a short caption underneath. Around them go sticky notes, text, shapes, speech bubbles, stickers and symbols, plus color swatches that show their hex code and can carry a name. You group cards in colored sections, draw arrows between them and label the arrows, and you can sketch freely with the pen. The board saves every change on its own, and the same board opens on the web and in the iPhone, iPad and Android app.

Boards are free for every writer. The images you upload use your plan's image storage: 50 MB on the free plan and 2 GB on Yazar Pro, shared with your records' images. Boards are visible only to you, they're never published on the Shareable Wiki, and the text you write on them is stored encrypted. There are gaps too: there's no image search or browser extension, so you find and add images yourself, and a board can't be edited with someone else or exported as an image or a PDF. If your boards will be image-heavy, keep in mind that 50 MB on the free plan is small next to the 5 GB on Canva's free plan. Once you sign up for free, the Sample Book in your library includes a ready-made board you can open and explore but not edit; to see how it works first, visit the Boards page.

2. Milanote; notes, images and templates on one board

Milanote is a tool for organizing creative projects on visual boards, and it speaks to writers directly: you can start from ready-made moodboard templates for novels and character design (Novel Moodboard, Character Design Moodboard). Drag images in from your computer, search a built-in photo library powered by Pexels, or save images from the sites you browse with the Web Clipper extension. Colors go in as note cards with a hex code, and a YouTube, Vimeo or SoundCloud link embeds video or audio.

Even on the free plan, you and a writing partner can edit the same board at the same time. Besides the web there are desktop, iPhone, iPad and Android apps. The free plan has no time limit, but it stops at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads, which an image-heavy board gets through quickly. Cards aren't connected to your novel's records, so when a character's details change, you update the note on the board yourself. For a closer comparison, see our Milanote alternative page.

3. Pinterest; for finding images

Pinterest calls itself a visual discovery engine, and for finding images it's the strongest tool on this list: a search or a single image leads you to similar ones, and in the mobile app you can search with your camera. With a free account you create boards, split them into sections and save images from the sites you visit with the Pinterest Save browser extension. Private boards are visible only to you and the people you invite, and you can add collaborators to a board and fill it together. The collage tool lets you combine cutouts from images into one composition and add text on top.

Its weak spot is that a board stays a collection of images: most of what you save is other people's content, and there's no place to keep a character's age, backstory or family ties in order. Any board you don't make private is public, which is worth remembering for a book you haven't announced yet. Our piece Is Pinterest enough for worldbuilding? goes into more detail.

4. PureRef; for references that stay on screen while you write

PureRef is a minimal desktop app that gathers your reference images on one canvas. Its own site pitches it at anyone gathering inspiration, making mood boards or collecting references for a painting or a 3D model, and it serves writers well too. You drag images in from your computer or straight from the browser, or paste them, then arrange, align and group them, add short notes and draw on them with a pen if you like.

Its most useful feature for writers is the Always on Top setting: the PureRef window stays in a corner of the screen above the document you're writing, so you can glance at a photo of a place mid-scene without switching windows. A board lives on your computer as a .pur file, and you can export the whole canvas as a single image. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, with no phone or tablet version. With the personal license you choose how much to pay, while commercial use needs a paid business license. It doesn't hold character details or story structure; it's made for looking at images.

5. Canva; for a polished board you'll show to others

Canva is a design tool: it offers ready-made moodboard templates, and you can upload your own photos or pick from its library. If the board is meant for a cover designer, an illustrator or your readers on social media, Canva makes the result look the most finished of any tool here. You can work on the same design with other people at the same time, share it or download it as a PDF. Besides the web there are desktop, iOS and Android apps. The free plan comes with 5 GB of storage, and some templates and images are reserved for the paid Canva Pro. Each board is a separate design file with no link to your book, so Canva is most useful once you know what you want, rather than while ideas are still forming.

6. Miro; for a big whiteboard you share with others

Miro is an online whiteboard with a ready-made moodboard template; you can drag images in from your computer or find them with its built-in image search. Its main strength is collaboration: a writing partner, your editor or a whole team can add to the same board at the same time and leave comments. You can export a finished board as a PDF or an image, though only in low resolution on the free plan. Besides the web there are desktop, iOS and Android apps. The free plan lets you create as many boards as you like, but only the three most recent stay editable, a limit you'll hit quickly if you keep a board per book or per character. Notes on the board aren't connected to your novel's records. Our piece Is Miro enough for worldbuilding? goes into more detail.

In tools you may already use: Notion and Scrivener

If your notes already live in Notion, you can build a board without switching tools. Notion's own suggestion for moodboards is the gallery view: the pages in a database line up as cards, and each card shows the page's cover, an image at the top of the page or one you've uploaded to a Files & media property. Hide the card names and you get a clean wall of images. Because each card is a page, you can open it and write as much as you like about the image, and if your characters also live in a Notion database, a relation property can link the cards to them. The trade-off is that you build the whole structure yourself, and the images sit in a card grid rather than wherever you drop them on a canvas. On the free plan, each image, video or file you upload can be up to 5 MB.

If you write your novel in Scrivener, two things are already at hand. The Corkboard shows each section of your manuscript as an index card, and moving the cards reorders the text. You can also assign an image to a section and show it on the card instead of the synopsis. Images, PDFs and web pages can go into the project as research, right next to your draft. Still, the Corkboard is built for arranging scenes, not for playing freely with images the way an inspiration board is. Scrivener runs on macOS, Windows and iOS.