Miro and Mural basic concept and layout
If you’re jumping into digital whiteboards for the first time, both Miro and Mural will feel like an infinite canvas that lets teams collaborate in real-time or asynchronously. But once you click around for a few minutes in each one, you’ll notice different vibes — not just visually, but in how they’re structured to guide users into productive behaviors.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Miro throws you into a fully open canvas with a left toolbar that mirrors design tools like Figma or Illustrator. You get shapes, connectors, sticky notes, mind maps — all within easy reach. The default canvas feels like freedom, but sometimes that sprawl backfires on new users who don’t know where to begin.
In contrast, Mural is more presentation-structured. There’s a heavy emphasis on templates and frameworks from the start. When you open a new mural, you’ll often be asked what type of collaboration you’re doing — things like “brainstorming,” “retrospectives,” or “affinity mapping.” That prompt funnels users into prebuilt frameworks, which can speed things up for teams who don’t want a blank page.
| Feature | Miro | Mural |
|---|---|---|
| Canvas approach | Freeform, infinite space | Template-driven with zones |
| Starting experience | Open canvas | Guided template selector |
| UI familiarity | Like design tools | Like slide editors |
In terms of learning curve, Miro can feel more overwhelming at first, since it throws high flexibility your way — especially if you don’t have a facilitator leading your session. Mural’s structure gives novices a safer path, but power users might chafe at the constraints when they want to think with less friction.
To sum up, Miro equips you with raw tools while Mural offers interactive templates upfront for quicker ramp-up.
Live collaboration features face off
Both platforms boast real-time collaboration, but Miro’s style focuses more on being a playground, while Mural leans into structured movement. In a team setting, that difference matters when everyone’s jumping in together.
In Miro, you can literally see everyone’s cursor moving simultaneously — with avatars labeled so you know who’s doodling in which corner. The follow-me feature (activated by right-clicking someone’s name) feels seamless, especially during workshops where a facilitator is walking people through different zones. The issue comes when there’s dozens of cursors flying — it gets chaotic fast. There’s a “hide collaborators cursors” option, but people rarely know it exists.
Mural’s version of live cursors feels more restrained. People show up with initials, but by default it doesn’t explode with motion. Instead, it emphasizes group tasks using Facilitation Superpowers® — actual features like timers, voting sessions, and summon. With the Summon tool, one person (usually a facilitator) can pull everyone’s screen view to a specific area of the board without navigating individually. That’s extremely useful during retros or voting moments.
Team voting in Mural is straightforward, with private vote counting, clear voting limits, and even timed voting rounds. Miro has voting too — but tucked inside the Activities menu, and it’s clunkier when participants forget where to find it.
During our content sprint experiment across four teams, Miro became hard to manage during co-creation when no one was leading. People dropped stickies everywhere. In the same setup with Mural, the voting phase went smoother, but the creation phase dragged a bit due to pre-structured areas being too rigid.
Ultimately, Miro gives more real-time motion, while Mural leads smoother organized sessions with built-in facilitation tools.
Integrations and automation possibilities
This is where the gloves come off, especially for workflow nerds. Behind the flashy canvas layers, both tools vary wildly in how they connect with productivity ecosystems.
Miro lets you integrate with popular tools like Jira, Google Docs, Asana, Slack, and Notion — not just corny embeds, but actual two-way syncing (in some cases). We tested Jira cards on a client workspace: dragging the card onto the board pulled basic metadata. But after 5 minutes, it desynced, unless refreshed manually. There’s still no persistent 2-way linkage yet.
On the scripting end, Miro’s API is developer-friendly but fairly raw. Zapier supports it, but triggers are limited — most revolve around new boards or items. Webhooks exist but aren’t available on some lower plans. It’s great if you build workspaces constantly, but harder for agile automations like “when sticky note color changes, alert Slack.”
Meanwhile, Mural’s workflow integrations feel neglected. Zapier triggers are minimal. You can hardly automate anything cleanly — most of our Mural Zaps failed when trying to extract sticky content. There’s no good webhook support (as of our last check), and running scheduled exports into other platforms required manual CSV download each time.
For example, in one hybrid sprint setup, we needed to copy daily input notes from whiteboards into Notion. Miro enabled API-based scraping on a schedule. Mural gave back a jammed JSON with no parsing formats — and worse, it duplicated the content randomly when multiple people edited text at once.
As a final point, Miro has the edge by miles in automation compatibility, although you’ll still bump up against API rate limits or format quirks.
Use case suitability for teams
Choosing between Miro and Mural really comes down to team type and moment. Here’s how they play out across four different collaborative styles we tested internally and with clients:
| Team Scenario | Better With Miro | Better With Mural |
|---|---|---|
| Design Sprint | Free sketch space, frame nesting | Clarity-focused templates |
| Agile Retrospective | Votes hard to track | Facilitation tools shine |
| Classroom Learning | Too abstract for new users | Guided activities rule |
| Remote Brainstorming | No structure aids creativity | Voting mode simplifies flow |
We also noted that Mural’s templates often funnel thinking into “what should happen next,” like a very structured teacher. Miro gives space more like a whiteboard in a garage — it’s messy but creative. So depending on whether your team needs constraint or chaos, you’ll lean one direction.
To conclude, Miro fits ambiguous ideation, while Mural aligns with guided sessions and beginners.
Performance quirks and technical limitations
This part isn’t sexy, but it counts in practice. Especially when you’ve got ten people live in a workshop and something hiccups mid-slide.
In larger boards, Miro loads slower — anything with tons of objects or embedded widgets creates a loading spiral. At one meeting, it took over 30 seconds for a complex board to render on LTE. Once it’s cached locally, it flies — but that first load can derail meetings.
Mural, on the other hand, preloads smaller portions of boards and offers simpler layers. That makes it faster on weak connections, but we hit a weird bug where dropping in too many images caused freezing in Firefox. A session with five people sharing screenshots ended up needing four restarts until we switched Chrome.
One especially annoying moment with Miro involved missing undo history. A collaborator deleted a cluster of objects, and we couldn’t undo it — turns out they were created by someone else, and only that person had the valid undo connection.
In Mural, when someone accidentally resizes a group zone, the contents get scrambled. Worse: the undo only rolls back your local view, not the group-wide state, so things vanish mid-explanation.
Ultimately, both suffer when complexity ramps up, and neither one is 100% stable under stress — but for raw layering and object density, Miro handles more without crashing.
