Miro vs Mural vs Switchboard: Which is best for visual and team collaboration?

Running a skilled team of diverse talent means some of you will be visual learners who do their best work when freehand writing or drawing, not passively watching a presentation and waiting to contribute. 

No matter what your strengths are, sometimes you just need to draw an idea by hand. But even when you’re all in the same office, you can’t leave your best “aha!” moments on paper or physical whiteboard, where they’re at risk of being wiped or thrown away. 

Digital whiteboards like Miro and Mural mimic the feeling of being in the same place and allow for more spontaneous interactions. This lets your teams work together more creatively and flexibly—without worrying about anyone seeing confidential project plans or cleaning all your ideas away at the end of the day. 

But not all tools are created equal so, if you’re weighing up Miro vs Mural, read on for a deep dive into how they stack up against each other. You’ll learn the pros and cons of each tool, and what kind of teams, projects, and organizations they’re best for.

You’ll also discover how to use Miro or Mural–and all your favorite collaboration tools–inside Switchboard and slash time lost to multitasking and app switching. 

Want the feeling of brainstorming around a whiteboard with your team? 
Switchboard lets you create a space where ideas can flourish, no matter where you are. 
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Miro vs Mural: Overview

Before we dive in, here’s an at-a-glance view of Miro vs Mural.

Let’s take a look at what all those check marks actually mean.  

Miro

‍Miro is an online whiteboard that allows cross-functional teams to come together to brainstorm, collaborate in real time or async, and run more productive meetings. It has a ton of features for visual collaboration and project management that let you bring people together to co-create and improve team productivity. As well as being good for visual thinkers, it’s suitable for varied tasks like workflow management over long-term or large projects. 

For example, an engineering team could use a Miro board to plan, gather requirements, and create use case diagrams to visualize how users will interact with the software.

Want more examples of collaboration to inspire your teams? Check out our recent post.  

Mural

‍Mural helps you collaborate with your remote or hybrid team through resizable canvases, sticky notes, comments, icons, gifs, and images. You can invite your coworkers to your shared project or board, guide them around it, and even hide unfinished aspects of your project so they don’t get distracted. 

If your team is using Mural, they get a variety of editable templates and can use wireframes to lay out user interfaces, among many other uses. 

Now you know the basics, let’s see how Miro and Mural compare on features. 

Miro vs Mural: Features 

When it comes to whiteboarding, Miro and Mural offer very similar features for creative thinking, brainstorming, and idea visualization. However, Mural is more geared toward visual collaboration and design thinking, which may make it a better bet for creative teams. 

Miro offers both real-time and async collaboration for cross-functional teams. Its much larger template library also caters to a broader range of use cases, from planning to prototyping to promotion. 

Miro features 

• Infinite, zoomable canvases 
• Unlimited workspaces and guests on higher-tier plans 
• Editable, exportable, shareable boards 
• Library of 1000+ Miro and community-made templates and frameworks, as well as the ability to create your own templates for more scalable processes 
• Image and GIF library 
• 2000+ advanced diagramming shapes 
• Mind mapping tools
• Product development workflows 
• Ability to bring people to a specific area of the board, follow what they do, or hide elements they don’t need to see
• Meeting and workshop features for content management, agendas, breakout rooms, voting, timer, video and audio chat, etc. 
• Video or audio recordings 
• Emoji reactions, comments, and sticky notes  
• Ability to organize boards in project folders 
• Project management tools including Kanban boards and Jira cards 
• Miro AI (beta) to speed up idea and materials generation and note summaries 
• 100+ apps and integrations with visual collaboration tools, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Adobe, and more 
• Mobile app 

Mural features

• 365 editable templates plus the ability to create custom templates 
• Unlimited workspaces and guests on higher-tier plans 
• Editable, exportable, shareable boards
• Infinite resizable canvases
• Simultaneous editing, drawing, writing
• Icons, gifs, and images to express complex ideas visually 
• Sticky notes, comments, and text to add ideas and action items
• Voice calls to discuss ideas in real time 
• Mapping and diagramming to quickly and easily visualize flows, maps, processes, hierarchies, etc.  
• Flexible editing and viewing permissions to control who you collaborate with and what they can access
• In-app timer 
• Private mode to hide individual contributions and prevent groupthink 
• Integrations with 40+ popular collaboration tools like Asana, Trello, Dropbox, and Slack 
• Mobile app 

Miro vs Mural: Templates 

Customizable templates are where these digital whiteboard tools come into their own. Let’s say a company’s product manager needs to keep track of tasks and statuses over a long-running project. They can use a Kanban board template to manage tasks and workflows visually, from backlog to completion. Along the way, they can also bring cross-functional teams together for visual sprint planning to allocate tasks and define goals.

Miro has better out of the box templates, but mural's templates are easier to customize. However, Miro scores slightly higher on pretty much all fronts in aggregated G2 reviews. 

Miro templates

Miro has over 1000 high-quality templates in its library, including those created by the “Miroverse” community. Templates cover almost all use cases and techniques you can think of, from meetings and workshops to flowcharts, design thinking, UX design, and everything in between. 

‍Whatever you need a template for, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find it in Miro. On the downside, some users complain that templates lack flexibility and customization options.

Mural templates

Mural offers over 365 editable templates (at the time of writing), from design sprint planning to brainstorming to project retrospectives and user journey maps. Like Miro, it also has agile templates to improve workflows and task management. There are even energizers and icebreakers to help build more connected teams and get them in the mood for teamwork. 

Users generally praise the variety and quality of Mural templates and find them easy to customize. However, some wish there were more of them, especially for certain very specific use cases.

Miro vs Mural: In-app communication

During product development, leadership teams periodically need to get together with product, UX, or graphic designers to review design mockups or interactive prototypes. They like Miro for this as it offers more in the way of in-app communication, as well as built-in features for meetings and decision making. 

By contrast, Mural’s in-app communication features are more geared toward real-time visual collaboration.  

Miro in-app comms

Miro lets you create agendas and use a timer to keep your meetings on track. During the session, you can communicate through in-app video and audio, comments, and digital sticky notes. Emoji reactions also make for more interactive presentations. When it’s time to make a decision, you can put people in breakout rooms to discuss before using the voting app. 

Team members couldn’t make the meeting? No problem. The Talktrack feature also lets you record a video or audio walkthrough of your board and leave it for others to catch up async.

Mural in-app comms

Mural also offers collaboration features like sticky notes, comments, text, and voice chat. It doesn’t have in-app video conferencing but does integrate with Zoom. It’s primarily for visual collaboration, however, so you may find it falls short if you’re trying to run all your meetings in the app.

Miro vs Mural: Pricing 

Miro and Mural compete very closely on pricing, with Mural only slightly more expensive. With Miro, you get unlimited guests and workspaces on a Business plan. However, you’ll need to be on an Enterprise plan to enjoy the same features with Mural. 

Both give you three editable whiteboards on the free plan and access to the full template libraries, so you can try them 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 

Mural pricing

• Free version with limited functionality
• Team+: $9.99/month per user, billed annually  
• Business: $17.99/month per user, billed annually 
• Enterprise: custom priced

Do more with your digital whiteboards–and your team–with Switchboard

Miro and Mural are both great tools that boost productivity, collaboration, and innovation, but there’s no getting around the need to have a bunch of other platforms open as you work. This context-switching causes us to lose around four hours a week—but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Switchboard is a visual collaboration platform that organizes all the browser-based apps and tools your team needs into persistent meeting and project rooms—and makes everything multiplayer. 

That means you can open up any whiteboard platform–Miro, Mural, Figjam, Lucidspark, etc.–in a room with no need for integrations. Pull in all your other apps, documents, and files to work on them side-by-side with your team and communicate in real time with video, audio, chat, polls, and emoji reactions. All without sharing screens or digging around in different tabs to find what you need.  

If you’re looking to switch from Miro or Mural to keep costs down, you can even use Switchboard’s built-in whiteboard without losing functionality.  

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. No more email threads, no frustrating Slack searches, and no more unproductive multitasking. 

Here’s a visual overview of other ways Switchboard makes whiteboard apps better.

Miro vs Mural: With Switchboard, there’s no need to choose  

Whether you’re running cross-functional projects or just brainstorming, you need to cater to different working styles. Some people express themselves better in visuals than words, so discussing complex matters like wireframes in a video call just won’t cut it. 

That’s where digital whiteboards like Miro and Mural come in. They bring people together for more interactive, creative teamwork—and ensure your progress is saved for next time.  

With more templates and advanced options, Miro is better for cross-functional project collaboration and productive meetings. Mural, however, is considered easier to use for visual collaboration, so it’s a good option for creative teams, workshops, or small group challenges.

Whichever whiteboard you choose, you can use it alongside all the browser-based apps, documents, and files you need in your persistent Switchboard project room. Get a creative, interactive space to collaborate in real time or async and save your progress for next time—so you can pick up where you left off. 

Want the feeling of brainstorming around a whiteboard with your team? 
Switchboard lets you create a space where ideas can flourish, no matter where you are. 
Sign up free