Miro vs Lucidchart vs Switchboard: Which is right for your team?

Question: What do the automobile, the telephone, and the lightbulb have in common? 

They all started life as sketches on a page. 

Leonardo Da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison knew there are times when an image is worth waaaay more than a thousand words. 

Your team may not be trying to communicate world-changing ideas, but when words fail you, sometimes you just need to sketch it out or draw a diagram. 

Digital whiteboards and diagramming apps like Miro and Lucidchart help teams work more creatively and flexibly—in-person, remote, or hybrid. They’re particularly helpful for visual thinkers or when you can’t share notes. They also mimic the feeling of being in the same place, allowing distributed teams to do more “hands-on,” creative teamwork without sitting through one-sided presentations. 

But while Miro and Lucidchart have a lot in common, their different origin stories have influenced their development and, therefore, which teams, projects, and organizations each is best for. 

This post is an in-depth look at Miro vs Lucidchart and the pros and cons of each. You’ll also discover how to use Miro, Lucidchart, and all your favorite tools in Switchboard to reduce time spent toggling between tabs and tools. 

Less context switching, more productive teamwork. 
Switchboard brings all your favorite tools under one roof, so you can get more done as a team.
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Miro vs Lucidchart: overview 

Before we get into it, here’s an overview of Miro vs Lucidchart.

Ready to dive deeper? Then read on.   

Miro

Miro is an online whiteboard that allows cross-functional teams to brainstorm and work together in real time or async. It offers lots of features for creative visual collaboration, project management, and more productive, engaging meetings. Its wide range of features and templates make it ideal for creative visual thinkers like designers, as well as product managers keeping tabs on long-running projects.   

Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a diagramming tool with a ton of templates and shapes to express complex processes, systems, ideas, or data. Lucidchart lets you design, document, and communicate ideas to improve your products, processes, and workflows. You can use it for anything from software development and business intelligence to organizing your thoughts.

Miro vs Lucidchart: features 

Miro and Lucidchart offer similar features but were originally designed for different purposes: Miro for whiteboarding, Lucidchart for diagramming. Whiteboarding is a spontaneous and informal method of sketching ideas or concepts, while diagramming is about making organized visual representations of concepts in a clear and structured way. This means that, while you can use either for whiteboarding and diagramming, each has more features geared toward one purpose or the other. 

Miro key features 

• Infinite, zoomable canvases 
• Unlimited workspaces and guests (higher-tier plans)  
• Boards you can change, save as files, and easily share with others
• 1000+ Miro and community-made templates
• Create custom templates to scale your processes 
• Image and GIF library 
• 2000+ diagramming shapes 
• Mind mapping 
• Product development workflows 
• Presenter mode to bring people to a specific area of the board and control what they see
• Meeting and workshop features to keep discussions and teams on track and on time  
• Video or audio recordings  
• Sticky notes, comments, and emoji reactions  
• Project management capabilities like Kanban boards and project folders  
• Miro AI to speed up idea and materials generation and note summaries 
• 100+ apps and integrations with visual collaboration tools, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Adobe, etc.  
• Mobile app 

Lucidchart key features 

• Hundreds of proprietary and user-generated templates and diagram examples 
• Shape library with drag-and-drop shapes for flowcharts, org charts, process maps, network diagrams, and more
• Unlimited editable documents and shapes on paid plans
• AI-powered data visualization and data overlay
• Presentation mode  
• Labeled cursors to track team member contributions 
• Export diagrams to various destinations and file types, including PDF, PowerPoint, etc.   
• Secure, real-time collaboration with commenting, sticky notes, invitations, version history, and password-protected publishing and sharing 
• Admin controls and permissions including sharing locations and recipients 
• Integrations with popular apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, or Slack
• Android mobile app 

Miro vs Lucidchart: whiteboard features 

Miro was originally created to visually communicate ideas, so it naturally excels for whiteboarding, brainstorming, and creative teamwork. Lucidchart is primarily a diagramming tool, so its online whiteboard isn’t as powerful. 

The Lucid suite does offer a dedicated whiteboarding tool–Lucidspark–but you’ll need to sign up for that separately or upgrade to Lucidchart Enterprise to access it.    

Miro whiteboard features 

Miro’s infinite whiteboard is the star attraction for users and use cases as diverse as design thinking, storyboarding, or user journeys. Choose from a blank canvas or access the large template library to create anything from wireframes, sprint plans, and pre-filled mind maps. 

Miro has a free-draw pen and a range of basic shapes, icons, and connectors to help you visualize ideas. You can also add images, videos, PDFs, GIFs, sticky notes, etc., as well as group stickers by tag, color, author, and so on to organize ideas and content.

Lucidchart whiteboard features 

Lucidchart offers an infinite canvas, which you can make finite before exporting or sharing your whiteboard to avoid information overload. Even on finite canvases, auto-tilling means your canvas automatically expands if you need more space.

Once you’re up and running, add drag-and-drop shapes, sticky notes, or embed images, videos, and documents. You can also connect shapes to see relationships and auto-generate sticky notes from imported bullet-point lists and group content by type to organize your thoughts.  

Miro vs Lucidchart: diagramming features

Here’s where the tables turn: Lucidchart outstrips Miro when it comes to diagramming, allowing you to create simple and complex diagrams with ease.  

Miro diagramming features 

Miro offers a library of basic shapes, icons, and connectors that you can use to map out processes, journeys, relationships, etc. The template library also has templates for a range of cloud architecture, including AWS, Azure, Cisco, and Google Cloud. 

Miro AI (currently in beta) speeds up diagramming with automated diagram creation and sticky notes summaries. Use it to uncover key insights from data and diagrams, analyze projects and define next steps, or generate images from keywords or phrases. It can even generate code blocks from images or text and translate natural language to programming languages. 

Lucidchart diagramming features 

Lucidchart lets you auto-generate simple or complex diagrams–large and small–at every project or product development stage. An extensive library with hundreds of shapes, icons, and symbols makes it easy to map out complex systems and processes like network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams (EDR), org charts, and more. If you create the same types of diagrams repeatedly, you can save elements to your personal library so they’re always on hand. 

You can also link to your data sources and use AI to auto-create diagrams from live data or add conditional formatting to highlight insights. Then, export your diagrams to a range of file types to share with stakeholders and team members.  

Miro vs Lucidchart: in-app communication

While both Miro and Lucidchart have features for in-app communication and teamwork, Miro wins out thanks to its built-in video conferencing features. This makes it suitable not only for creative work and visualizations but also to get people together to discuss and make decisions. 

Lucidchart has live chat and other collaboration tools but lacks built-in video conferencing. It does, however, allow you to create Lucidchart diagrams in other tools like Slack or MS Teams so you can work anywhere. 

Miro in-app comms

With Miro, you can work on diagrams, workflows, whiteboards, etc. with your team by communicating through in-app video, audio, chat, comments, and sticky notes. Session facilitators can assign actions to team members by using @mentions or the “bring everyone to me” feature to focus the team’s attention on a specific part of the board. Cursor tracking also lets you see who’s doing what at any time. 

Miro’s live meeting capabilities are what really makes it stand out, however. You can use a timer to keep everyone on track and vote on ideas after discussing them in breakout rooms. Emoji reactions and icebreakers also make for more interactive, engaging meetings and presentations. 

If you’re working async, the Talktrack feature lets you record a video or audio walkthrough of the board and leave it for others to catch up on later. 

Lucidchart in-app comms

Lucidchart offers real-time communication features like @mentions, commenting, live chat, sticky notes, and personalized cursors. Invitations let you bring new people in and you can share diagrams with those outside your workspace so they can follow progress.  

When you’re ready to present, just transform your diagram into a slide deck to take into that important meeting. Alternatively, start a new diagram or include visuals in any tool that Lucidchart integrates with, like Google Workspace, Asana, or Microsoft Office. This means you don’t have to leave those tools to create a diagram, which helps reduce context switching.

Miro vs Lucidchart: pricing

Miro and Lucidchart compete closely on pricing, though Lucidchart is cheaper for the mid-tier plan. However, to access a dedicated whiteboard tool with Lucidchart, you’ll need to upgrade to Enterprise to get Lucidspark. 

Both Miro and Lucidchart give you three editable documents or whiteboards on the free plan. However, with Miro you can access the full template library, whereas you only get 100 templates with Lucidchart. Either way, it's more than enough to try it out before committing. 

Miro pricing

• Free version with limited functionality
• Starter: $8/month per user, billed annually 
• Business: $16/month per user, billed annually 
• Enterprise: custom priced 

Lucidchart pricing 

• Free version with limited functionality and attendee numbers
• Individual: $8/month per user 
• Team: $9/month per user 
• Enterprise: custom priced (includes Lucidspark) 

Get more done with all your favorite tools in Switchboard

Miro and Lucidchart are great visual collaboration tools for when you need to put ideas into images, not words. However, because you’ll probably be using them alongside other platforms, you still lose productivity to context switching. This is the mental adjustment you have to make when you toggle from one tab or tool to another, which can “cost” up to four hours a week in total. 

Virtual workspaces like Switchboard solve this by letting you bring all your browser-based apps together in a collaborative canvas—making them instantly multiplayer. 

Just create your always-open, persistent meeting or project room, open up any diagramming or whiteboard platform–Lucidchart, Miro, Figjam, etc.—and start working side-by-side. You can also pull in other apps, documents, and files. The best part is, you can do all of this while communicating in real time with video, audio, chat, polls, and emoji reactions. 

No more clunky screen sharing, no more multitasking or hunting around in different tools to find what you need. Just productive, enjoyable teamwork. 

Let’s say you’re running a project retrospective after launching a new app feature. In Switchboard, you can bring all your cross-functional teams together and pull up the apps they use to track metrics like user feedback, adoption, or bugs. Best of all, Switchboard saves all your files after every session, so you never need to download anything or repopulate the room again. That means you can stay organized and always find the information you need, even between sessions. 

If you’re looking to switch from Miro, you can even use Switchboard’s built-in whiteboard for creative visual and document collaboration.

Miro vs Lucidchart: Have it all with Switchboard 

If Da Vinci, Edison, and Graham Bell were alive today, you can bet they’d be all over whiteboarding and diagramming tools like Miro and Lucidchart. 

Both tools lend themselves well to visual thinking and expressing complex ideas in images, so they’re ideal for creative or technical teams like design, developers, engineers, and product people. You can work with your own team or invite people from other departments to visualize your ideas or collaborate on them further. No need to make anyone sit through a dull presentation or puzzle over written explanations.  

Miro offers a shared space for cross-functional team ideation, problem-solving, and project management. By contrast, Lucidchart has more diagramming features to take complex ideas right through from brainstorming to execution. 

With Switchboard, however, you don’t need to choose between Miro or Lucidchart. Both platforms work in Switchboard’s persistent, multiplayer rooms, as do all your other browser-based apps, documents, and files. This means you can get together with anyone to work side-by-side in real time or make progress async—no matter where you are.  

Less context switching, more productive teamwork. 
Switchboard brings all your favorite tools under one roof, so you can get more done as a team. 
Sign up free