As remote working continues gaining popularity, there is a lot that companies, individuals, and agencies can learn about collaboration tools and how they affect workplace performance. At its core, collaboration is about working with people.
Through collaboration, teams can improve how they work together and solve problems, which fosters innovation, increased success, efficient business processes, and enhanced communication.
Working on shared documents on Google or Microsoft 365, meeting in real-time via Zoom and Microsoft Teams has become the norm.
Workshops that previously relied on in-person interaction to collaborate and share insights can now rely on digital tools to collaborate with teams and clients and strategically execute projects and ideas.
However, one of the most significant hurdles with online workshops is finding a platform to display the visual elements. Two of the most popular digital whiteboards are Miro and MURAL.
Both tools have great features and are user-friendly, but since you can only use one at a time, let’s put them to the test and see which tool is best for your upcoming workshop.
Miro vs MURAL – What are They?
Miro
Miro is a cloud-based collaborative whiteboard tool that brings teams together from all over the world at any time. It is a powerful tool for online collaboration and remote working, allowing you to sketch, build, and share various concepts.
The tool facilitates cross-functional teamwork, from brainstorming and critical planning to managing agile workflows.
Miro was founded in 2011 by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin. The platform has grown to accommodate over 1,000 employees with headquarters in Amsterdam and San Francisco, and hubs worldwide.
This platform has various pre-built templates to inspire you and serve as a starting point for your project work.
Another thing that stands out with Miro is its app integration and connections. The tool can connect you to other virtual working tools such as Slack, Google Drive, Trello, Asana, and Survey Monkey.
It is an all-in-one software with a variety of features and is an excellent option for project managers, individual contributors, developers, and consultants. Since its launch, the software has continued to gain popularity, thanks to its seamless experience.
You can download and use Miro on your desktop, tablet, smartphone, Surface Hub, or access it through the website. If you are a beginner, I recommend you start using the web version, as its app versions offer limited experience, especially on mobile.
Miro has a user-friendly interface. However, it can be overwhelming initially due to the many features present. The good thing is that the tool has plenty of resources, such as videos, documentation, and blogs, to help you navigate its interface.
You can also build your expertise with free courses and live training through Miro Academy.
MURAL
MURAL is a digital whiteboard collaboration space that allows teams to work together in real-time. It also lets teams unlock their genius by taking ideas and insights from a possibility to reality with the support of the tool’s guided methods and transformation expertise.
This platform has over 300 templates to get you started and is packed with resources for hybrid and remote teams.
The device goes beyond simple whiteboarding and allows teams to use templates, frameworks, and advanced facilitation features to make workshops and meetings more productive and engaging.
MURAL emphasizes visual thinking and visual collaboration. The tool was founded in 2011 by Patricio Jutard, Agustin Soler, and Mariano Suarez-Battan in San Francisco, California. It now boasts over 1,000 employees with headquarters in Bueno Aires and San Francisco.
The tool allows teams to create simple but comprehensive diagrams and consolidate ideas in virtual and collaborative spaces. Generally, MURAL is a thinking canvas that you can use to organize ideas in lists, frameworks, flowcharts, and drawings.
MURAL integrates with some common software such as Slack, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams. It is used by businesses worldwide and is well refined to suit the education sector.
The tool is feature-rich and straightforward, making it helpful for teachers and students to come together in a flipped or traditional classroom. With MURAL, students can follow class presentations on their devices and interact with each other.
It can be accessed through a web browser and is easy to sign up and start using, especially if you already have a Microsoft account.
Miro vs MURAL – Getting Started
Miro
You can access Miro through a web browser or in the Miro apps for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Microsoft mobile devices, and Microsoft Surface Hub. Miro handles all the storage for your accounts.
Upon creating an account, Miro provides tips to get you started. You will find videos and text-based files, which introduce you to tools that will be valuable for your collaboration needs.
Its desktop version has a simple interface, and to use the tool, you need an internet connection as there is little support when working offline.
MURAL
MURAL offers a step-by-step guide to help you get on the right foot. The tool is built for
collaboration and while you can learn as you go, take time to check out their learning site, where you’ll find all you need to become a MURAL expert.
Start by creating a mural in your private room, practice navigating around the mural using the navigation settings, and personalize how you move around the tool.
Think of the project you are working on and create rooms for each project. Rooms function like folders on MURAL, which can be private or open. The good thing about MURAL is that there are resources to learn more, so keep checking the learning site.
Miro vs MURAL – Features
Miro
Templates Library
Miro has a library of over 200 pre-made templates to help your team collaborate quickly and efficiently.
These templates are placed in different categories such as meetings and workshops templates, brainstorming and ideation templates, research and design templates, strategy and design templates, agile workflow templates, and mapping and diagramming templates.
The tool also gives you access to templates submitted by its community, where you can discover projects, proven workflows, and frameworks or even publish your own.
Apps and Integration
Miro has a library of apps and integration to advance your collaboration processes. You can add apps to the tool using the toolbar, and you can connect Miro to over 4,000 apps.
The tool allows you to use Jira Cards, Rally Cards, Asana Cards, or Azure Cards to import tasks to your Miro board and embed it in your workflow.
Thanks to its integration with apps like Dropbox, One Drive, Google Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Sketch, the platform allows you to upload files from storage services easily.
Miro has a Chrome Extension called Miro for Google Calendar, which can be helpful when organizing workshops as it gives your invitees access to your Miro board.
Screen Sharing
The screen sharing feature helps teams collaborate in real time. The feature is only available on tablets and desktops. Once activated, the feature enables you to communicate with your team via voice chat and video chat, which appear at the bottom of your screen.
You can plan and brainstorm on project ideas through this feature, where your team joins in and sees exactly what is on your screen. However, during the stream, your team may not use any other features or take other actions on the Miro board unless they leave the stream.
Presentation Mode
Miro allows you to arrange the content on your boards in frames. Frames are just slides for your presentation, and the best way to organize your content on your Miro boards is by arranging frames in presentation mode.
You can easily access the presentation mode by clicking on the presentation icon on the lower left side of your toolbar.
The presentation template design is always ready, while the slide deck provides you with all the features you need to create a presentation that resonates well with your audience.
MURAL
Apps and integration
MURAL integrations allow you to experience seamless workflows with the apps you love. The integrations and apps connect you to existing workflows to help transform ideas into reality. Its integration with Microsoft Teams lets you stay up to date with any changes in your murals.
You can add creative elements to any mural from your Creative Adobe library, securely and centrally automate provisioning and de-provisioning of MURAL members using Azure AD, and link, preview, or embed MURAL on the confluence page using MURAL Smart Links.
Templates
MURAL lets you get started quickly with its pre-built templates. You can access over 300 templates to jumpstart your collaboration task.
The templates are placed into various categories, including agile templates to get your team on the same page, brainstorming templates to help you and your team understand problems and encourage fresh thinking, and icebreaker templates to ignite the team’s spirit, among others.
If you already have a MURAL account, you can access templates within your workspace by clicking on the ‘templates’ icon on the upper left side of your workspace.
Sharing
MURAL provides multiple ways to communicate and connect with your team. The sharing feature enables commenting, quick talk, and chatting using a simple yet powerful hyperlink.
The platform recently introduced a Quick Talk feature to help you jump on voice calls. However, the feature does not include video chatting capabilities.
MURAL’s new updates aim at enhancing real-time collaboration. Moreover, teams or workshop participants can communicate using reactions such as nods, smiles, and laughs to echo immediate feedback you are likely to hear during an in-person session.
Canvas and Layout Tools
MURAL offers you a variety of layout tools and designs to visualize plans, ideas, processes, and strategies. These tools include text, sticky notes, shapes, images, icons, drawings, GIFs, and frameworks.
Sticky notes allow you to quickly add your team’s thoughts, ideas, and feedback. You can use shapes and connectors to build easy-to-follow diagrams to help map out complex workflows.
MURAL has an extensive library of icons to help you create visual stories using symbols. You can also use icons to highlight important areas or sticky notes on your murals before the onset of your project discussions with the team.
Miro vs MURAL- Pricing
Miro
Miro offers multiple pricing options based on the number of users and features. You can get started with the free plan for unlimited team members but with essential attention management.
For a better experience and fuller features, you can upgrade to the Team plan with more collaborative power and unlimited boards for $8 per member per month.
If you wish to offer advanced collaboration and security to your business, then the Business plan is ideal for you at $16 per member per month. All these plans are billed annually.
MURAL
MURAL has various plans to help you solve complex problems and create new ideas with your team.
The platform allows you to get started with your team of unlimited members with a free plan that features three murals, all visual collaboration and facilitation features, and an entire template library, among others.
But if you frequently collaborate with your team and wish to have unlimited murals, we recommend the Team+ plan for $9.99 per month per member.
If you want to incorporate team collaboration with the security of SSO for unlimited members, then MURAL’s Business plan for $17.99 per month per member is ideal for you. These plans are billed annually, however, monthly billing is also available for the Team+ plan.
Miro vs MURAL – Similarities and Differences
Similarities
Miro and MURAL are pretty similar, and you can’t go wrong choosing either of the tools. In addition to being excellent collaboration tools, Miro and MURAL enable users to brainstorm ideas on sticky notes digitally, vote for ideas, cluster them, and run timers.
They both have limitless whiteboards, which you can structure through frames/slides for your online workshops. Both tools are instrumental in serving most of your online collaboration needs to facilitate successful meetings and workshops.
Both Miro and MURAL are web-based tools, meaning you can use them anywhere. You can open Miro or MURAL boards on your phone’s browser. However, phone versions have a small display.
Both tools let you create templates. These templates are placed in different categories, and once you choose a template, you can upload them to the boards and add digital sticky notes just as you would in an in-person workshop.
Templates like Design are present in both tools and can help structure multi-day workshops. Additionally, the two tools offer export mechanisms to help you download partial or complete boards once you collaborate on a template.
Miro and MURAL offer unlimited canvas space, which you can build into slides or frameworks for collaborative tasks.
The tools can also be present, like Keynote or PowerPoint, and they can understand a pasted link to convert it into a widget or a card. Miro can create cards from links and sometimes identifies some links as media and embed them directly.
In the same manner, MURAL makes cards from links. Therefore, when you paste a link to a YouTube video, MURAL adds it as a card that you can click on and launch as a video.
Differences
While Miro and MURAL allow you to create templates to make your meeting and workshop planning easy, MURAL’s templates are simpler than Miro’s.
This makes the MURAL templates ideal for collaborative sessions involving groups that may not be familiar with the digital whiteboard platforms.
MURAL has a ‘private mode’ that only allows facilitators to access specific templates to help in planning and execution. On the other hand, Miro templates have facilitator tips and helper text, making the templates more robust yet complicated.
On the brighter side, Miro has features that allow facilitators to set the starter view on a template or board for smoother onboarding experiences. In summary, MURAL gives you simplicity and speed, while Miro helps you plan robust workshops.
While both tools allow for apps and integration, what sets them apart is the number of integrations each tool offers. Miro has an extensive list of app integrations.
On the other hand, MURAL’s integration list is not comprehensive, but the tool has introduced a couple of updates in the past year, which seem to be setting MURAL up for integration success.
Miro has a friendly, fresh, and crisp interface. Its layout is intuitive, with sharp icons and subtle and smooth animations. Generally, the handling of Miro is good.
On the other hand, MURAL’s interface can sometimes be clumsy, quirky, and with a retro feel to it. Icons on MURAL have a poor contrast level, but the tool still has an array of great keyboard shortcuts.
The board navigator for MURAL works better than Miro’s, as it is too easy to zoom out to the point of not seeing your frames in the navigator. Miro’s icons and menus are more straightforward.
While both tools have separate help sites, Miro wins in offering quality help, including a series of mini-videos demonstrating how to do things.
Miro boards are more predictable and snappier, even when working on large boards with hundreds of widgets. With MURAL, the experience with the boards slows down quickly, especially when there are simultaneous board collaborators and various elements.
Miro also has a higher number of maximum collaborators who can be on a board at a given time. According to Miro, the most extensive session the tool has hosted had 377 users, and regularly, the tool conducts sessions with 200 people.
MURAL recommends keeping the number at 100 concurrent collaborators, beyond which its performance might slow down or increase in performance lags.
Miro vs MURAL – Pros and Cons
Micro
Pros
- Miro allows you to create and innovate tasks faster for more accessible communication, enterprise-grade security, and standardized and centralized communication.
- Miro is a perfect tool for conducting brainstorming sessions with a hybrid or distributed team.
- With collaboration capabilities, Miro lets you empower your development, design, and engineering teams to innovate and align in a platform that makes things possible in real-time.
- With Miro, you can map customer journeys, create concepts, and conduct road map planning to help deliver the right products to customers.
- Miro is a competent tool combining aspects of mind mapping apps, diagramming software, and video conferencing into one great platform.
Cons
- Uploading videos to the platform might take awhile.
- Keeping track and preventing people from making modifications in the wrong places can be challenging, especially when working with large teams.
MURAL
Pros
- MURAL plays a crucial role in the designing phase of a project, thanks to its different framework of defining different personas and scenario maps.
- MURAL is an excellent collaboration tool, which can help you have creative and effective conversations with your team. It is also a great real-time brainstorming and mind-mapping tool, ideal for workshops and sprints.
- It is also ideal for students to work together on an exciting visual project in class or remotely.
- MURAL is intuitively designed for ease of use. The whiteboarding tool is rich in templates you can use for exercises, and everyone can see and work on the board simultaneously, which makes it ideal for remote working.
Cons
- There is a lack of modernization in its functionality, and it seems the tool has not aged with time.
- MURAL has no media library. Therefore, you have to keep on uploading images.
Verdict: Miro vs MURAL – Which is Better?
Overall, Miro comes out as the better tool of the two. It has a significantly bigger community, with a variety of integrations, apps, and templates to choose from.
The tool is also slicker and more innovative, with a better interface that looks well-organized and has a consistent design philosophy, contributing to a great user experience overall.
However, if you are still in doubt about which tool to use, I recommend creating free accounts for MURAL and Miro to compare the tools against each other and see which tools work best for you.
