The best Spatial alternatives

Best for: People who want a canvas other people can see, comment on and work in.

Milanote is the best known board tool of this kind, and the one to pick when the work is shared. Boards hold images, notes, links and files, and they can be published or worked on with other people, which neither Spatial nor Muse attempts. It runs on the web plus Mac, iPhone and iPad, so a board follows you between devices. The free plan is capped at 100 notes, images and links with 10 file uploads, and the individual paid plan is $9.99 a month billed annually. Your boards live in Milanote's cloud, which is the trade if you wanted something local.

Best for: Anyone who wants a canvas today without installing or paying for anything.

Freeform is already on your Mac, iPad and iPhone, and it syncs through iCloud without any setup. You get an infinite board you can draw on, drop files onto and write on, shared with other people through Messages if you want. As a replacement for the canvas half of Spatial it is genuinely capable and costs nothing. What it is not is a library: there is no search across what you have collected, no tagging worth the name, and no way to import from anywhere. Boards are things you make, not a place your saved things accumulate.

Best for: People whose collecting is mostly writing, who want it in plain files that outlive any app.

Obsidian keeps everything as Markdown files in a folder you choose, and its Canvas feature puts those notes, plus images and PDFs, on an infinite board with links drawn between them. It is the closest thing here to the note taking half of Spatial, and it goes deeper: linking, backlinks, and a large plugin ecosystem. It is free for personal use, with a $50 a year commercial licence and an optional sync add-on. The cost is setup: Obsidian is a toolkit rather than a finished product, and the visual side needs assembling from plugins.

Best for: Designers on a Mac or a PC who mostly collect images and want them organised properly.

Eagle is a mature one-time-purchase library for design assets, with folders, tags, colour filtering and a fast browser for very large collections. If the reason you were using Spatial is that you gather visual reference, Eagle does that part with years of polish behind it, and it runs on Windows as well, which none of the Apple-only options here do. It is $34.95 once, covering two devices. It has no canvas to arrange things on and no note taking, so it replaces one half of Spatial rather than both.