5 visual collaboration tools to inspire your teams

When photographer Martin Heit discovered he could write on film negatives with a Sharpie and then wipe it clean off in the 1950s, he realized the potential applications for teaching and office work. And so the whiteboard was born*—a wipe-clean alternative for interactive brainstorming and knowledge sharing. 

Today, we still rely on visual collaboration tools and jotting down notes to shape our best ideas and bring the brainstorming and ideation process to life. And if your teams often work online, you need to know how to recreate the feeling of spitballing ideas around a physical whiteboard.  

Fortunately, virtual visual collaboration tools are designed to do just that. They let you create a collaborative space to develop ideas wherever you are. Best of all, unlike whiteboards, you’ll never have to erase anything because you need more room. 

With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of the five best tools for visual collaboration, taking into account features, pricing, and who they’re best for. We’ll also explain how visual collaboration involves more than just whiteboards. 

Collaborate visually with everything in one place. 

‍Work side by side on apps, docs, and files with your team in Switchboard rooms that save your progress.

Sign up free

What to look for in a visual collaboration tool    

Physical whiteboards help you communicate and share visual ideas with lots of color, so you want to look for online visual collaboration tools that offer a similar experience. These days, however, there’s more to visual collaboration than just whiteboards. Let’s take a look at what to look for in visual collaboration software: 

• Multiplayer experience: This means you can all work on things rather than just passively watching others share their screen. 
• Expansive canvas: You need enough space for everyone to contribute their ideas and keep them organized. 
• Saves your work in one place: So you never lose the next big idea again. Sections and labels will also help you stay organized. 
• Multimedia collaboration capabilities: Look for tools that let you add and share video, audio, and visuals. 
• Multichannel communication: Look for features like chat, polls, surveys, and emoji reactions to boost participation and engagement and make communication easier. 
• AI assistant: These can help you get started when you’re short on inspiration, as well as take the grunt work out of manual tasks like summarizing notes and ideas after the session. 
• Templates: These will give you a starting point for creative thinking and designs.  
• Diagrams: So you can express complex ideas or processes visually.  
• Labeled cursors: So you can easily see what team members are working on and who’s contributing to what. 
• Lets you access everything you need in one place: This saves unproductive context switching between tools and tabs and ensures you’re always working from a source of truth.
• Integration with existing tools and workflows: This lets you pull in data and information from other tools so you have everything at your fingertips. 

5 best tools for online visual collaboration  

Visual collaboration tools have come a long way since the 1950s. From whiteboards to interactive screens to virtual whiteboards that allow in-person, hybrid, and remote teams to work together as if they were in the same room. These tools let you create and edit together in real time, visualize complex concepts, and communicate in context. They also offer better security than writing “do not erase” on a whiteboard and hoping for the best. 

Here are the top online visual collaboration platforms to keep your teams connected, engaged, and focused to improve teamwork.  

1. Switchboard

Switchboard is an online collaboration platform where you can lay out all of your work side by side. You can share ideas, give feedback, and make decisions in interactive rooms for projects, dashboards, and meetings. The expansive canvas in each room gives you space to visually organize and share applications, files, and documents. You can work in the room by yourself or teams can flip on video to meet in the place where all their work is ready to go.

Switchboard is the best platform for sharing and discussing work. Whether you're planning projects, tracking metrics, or reviewing client work, Switchboard brings people, applications, and conversations together in one place. 

People use Switchboard to visually organize and share work. For example, you could make a Switchboard room for a project and then drag, drop, and organize all the tools and files you need on the room’s canvas. Websites, applications, images, videos, PDFs, sticky notes – they all can be used side by side in a Switchboard room, so you’re not limited to just whiteboard tools. 

When you share the room with others working on the project, they have access to everything in one place: apps, docs, files, and the latest comments, so you’re always communicating in context. With everything for your project in a shared space, you can work together in real time or move work forward on your own schedule between meetings. 

Best of all, all other visual collaboration tools work inside the room, so you don’t have to choose between them. 

Features: 

• Expansive canvas to add browser-based apps, websites, PDFs, and images
• Sections to organize content
• Built-in whiteboard and whiteboarding tools including sticky notes, shapes, notepads
• Apps including timer, voting, polls, icebreaker generator, and open questions
• Multiplayer browsers that support any website or web-based application, so you can work side-by-side on anything—without sharing screens 
• Room recording so people can catch up on meetings or leave video notes for each other 
• Presentation mode, to get people to focus on your view
• Comment threads on any image, video, or sticky note in a room so you can communicate in context 
• Switchboard AI, which can answer questions and generate summaries of room activity
• Audio and video conferencing 
• In-room chat
• In-app support
• Up to 200 rooms for projects, meetings, and more
• Up to 500 members and unlimited meeting guests
• Up to 300 GB storage per workspace
• App for macOS and Windows‍

Pricing:

• Free: Includes limited features, rooms, and members, as well as up to 40 minutes for video calls (ideal for very small teams or individuals).  
• Pro: $15 member/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members; plus Switchboard AI and additional storage.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

When you sign up for free, you get access to all Pro features during your trial. After that, you can choose to keep your Pro plan or move to the free plan with limited features, rooms, and members. 

Best for:
Switchboard is ideal for highly collaborative teams in any department that want a better way to stay organized and collaborate visually in–and in between–meetings. 

2. FigJam

Figma’s digital whiteboard, FigJam, helps you connect the dots on multiple projects. You can interact with your team through emotive hand cursors, dot voting, stamps, sticky notes, voice calling, and drawings. It’s an easy-to-use tool that lets you create streamlined flow charts, workflows, and mind maps with markers, shapes, arrows, and connectors. You can also choose from a variety of templates for small to large projects and companies. 

FigJam features that allow you to switch between real-time and asynchronous working include notifications to tell you when someone is active in your workspace so you can jump in and start working together. Also, comments, highlights, and sticky notes for task assignment or asynchronous input.

Key features: 

• Simultaneous editing, drawing, writing 
• Customizable templates and color palettes  
• Drag and drop elements
• Mind mapping and diagramming 
• Digital whiteboard 
• Animated labeled cursors, emoji reactions, shapes, stamps
• Voting 
• Audio conversations 
• Sticky notes, comments
• Cloud-based storage  
• Video, image, file, and Figma design import
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited functionality and participant numbers
• Professional: $3/month per user
• Organization: $5/month per user
• Enterprise: $5/month per user

Best for: ‍

Creative teams like design or engineering that need a robust tool for ideation, brainstorming, and creative visual collaboration. It’s especially suitable if you’re already using Figma.  

3. Conceptboard 

Conceptboard is a secure virtual whiteboard that lets you upload and work on files and create concept and mind maps with your team in real time. You can also easily share boards with clients or external parties with password-protected file-sharing capabilities. With mentions, sticky notes, and sketches, Conceptboard also lets you communicate and get approvals in context.

Key features: 

• Editable boards 
• Infinite canvas
• Simultaneous editing, drawing, and writing
• Pre-built template library 
• Animated labeled cursors
• Ability to import images, PDFs, videos, and files 
• Annotations, chat, comments, sticky notes
• @notifications and email alerts  
• Board approval workflows 
• Audio calls and presentation mode 
• Project folders 
• Timer 
• Live moderation 
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited functionality and attendee numbers
• Premium: $6/month per user
• Business: $9.50/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced (includes Lucidspark) 

Best for: 

Design and innovation teams that need versatile tools for online collaboration, brainstorming, design thinking, and product development.

4. Mural

Mural is a virtual whiteboard that lets you collaborate visually with your team through unlimited canvases, voice calls, sticky notes, icons, gifs, and images. Invite coworkers to your shared project or board and guide them through visual concepts with detailed instructions to get everyone on the same page.  

Key features: 

• Infinite and resizable canvas options
• Simultaneous editing, drawing, writing
• Icons, gifs, images
• Sticky notes, chat, annotations, comments
• Mapping and diagramming 
• Create and publish custom templates 
• Labeled cursors 
• In-app timer 
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited functionality and attendee numbers
• Team+: $9.99/month per user
• Business: $17.99/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Best for: 

Design, innovation, DevOps, and agile teams that need to visualize ideas and work items during brainstorming, design thinking, product development, or agile ceremonies like sprint planning and retrospectives. 

5. Lucidchart 

Lucidchart is a virtual diagramming tool that lets you visualize complex processes, map out data, and overlay important metrics on diagrams. You can collaborate with your team through in-editor chat and real-time co-authoring and populate diagrams with content from channels like Slack, Google Workspace, and Asana—so you’re always working from a source of truth. 

Key features: 

• Templates and shapes libraries 
• Simultaneous editing and writing 
• Mind maps and diagramming 
• Automatically generate diagrams from your pre-existing data 
• Data import, linking, and overlays 
• Shape-specific comments and in-editor chat
• Sticky notes 
• Labeled cursors
• Presentation mode 
• Email and link sharing 
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited functionality and attendee numbers
• Individual: $9/month per user 
• Team: $10/month per user 
• Enterprise: custom priced 

Best for: 

Creative and distributed teams that need to visualize complex data and relationships. 

Visual collaboration tools: The whiteboard for the 21st Century 

If inventor Martin Heit could see what his 1950s whiteboard has evolved into, he’d be proud of how far it’s come. From smudged ink on film to a widely used digital tool, the whiteboard has a long history of empowering people to share and collaborate on ideas visually.   

Today, visual collaboration tools like Switchboard, FigJam, Mural, Conceptboard, and Lucidchart give you a creative, interactive space to do this online, tapping into the feeling of in-person brainstorming around a whiteboard. 

These tools offer great visual collaboration features, but Switchboard goes one step further by letting you pull in any type of content, not just a whiteboard. You can share and work on anything from websites to video, apps, and data side by side in its permanent rooms. So you have everything you need at your fingertips to come up with the next big idea. 

Collaborate visually with everything in one place. 
‍Work side by side on apps, docs, and files with your team in Switchboard rooms that save your progress.
Sign up free