The first thing I noticed when stepping into both Miro and Mural was how much Miro tries to act like a playground—loads of funky cursors flying around in real-time—whereas Mural feels more like a whiteboard someone’s mom would set up for family calendar planning, in a good way.
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Miro opens with a heavier onboarding flow. I was asked to name my company, set my team size, and select use cases. It took a few clicks to get into the first board, and it felt tailored more to corporate setups than personal use. With Mural, I got into a blank canvas pretty quickly. No fluff, fewer click-steps. That might seem small, but if you’re trying to onboard a few dozen folks who aren’t that tech-savvy, one fewer dropdown makes a difference.
In testing this with two remote design teams, Miro’s entry point caused about a 3–5 minute delay during screen sharing sessions just because new users were stuck naming their “team.” One colleague honestly asked, “Do I need to pay something?” halfway through Miro’s onboarding, because of how enterprise-y it felt. Mural, meanwhile, was clear and direct — click, board, done.
To sum up, Miro rolls out with a more polished—but more complicated—start, while Mural keeps the initial steps cleaner, making it easier to onboard larger or non-technical remote groups.
Real-Time Collaboration Tone and Flow
The heart of these tools is in multi-user interactions. I ran stress tests with six team members simultaneously editing our digital Kanban templates across both tools on Zoom. The pecking order became obvious pretty quickly.
Feature
Miro Behavior
Mural Behavior
Cursor Tracking
Everyone sees actual mouse movement with usernames. It can be chaotic or helpful, depending on how busy the board is.
Cursors are optional and hidden by default. Less distracting, more intentional.
Editing Conflicts
Two people can’t grab the same object at once. Users get a slick warning.
Can “tug-of-war” with objects if timing overlaps. No notice, just frustration.
Commenting
Inline, resizable sticky notes; supports emoji reactions. Also allows resolving items, which is helpful for team review.
Comments are modal and structured more like tasks. Feels more like Trello than a conversation.
During a real-time UX strategy session, we had three cross-functional product leads adding mind map branches on a Miro canvas. While it did get hectic, Miro’s cursors helped clarify who was doing what. In Mural, it felt quieter, but we occasionally had overlapping edits that removed sticky notes by mistake. No alerts. One person said, “Wait—where’d my task box go?”
Ultimately, Miro wins for facilitation-heavy, free-flow sessions. But Mural gives a quieter, more focused experience with less cognitive load.
Integrations and Workflow Embedding
An unexpected point of divergence is how these boards talk to other tools. My team uses Notion, Slack, and Google Drive extensively. While both Miro and Mural technically integrate with these, performance and depth aren’t equal.
Miro’s Slack integration lets you receive comment notifications, push a board link directly into a Slack channel, and even preview cards. You can also embed a full live canvas into Notion—not just a static image. This wowed our marketing lead: “Wait, we don’t even have to switch tabs now?”
Mural, by contrast, limits some integrations to enterprise plans. Even with the base version, all we could do was drop a board link into Slack—not push content in real time or trigger notifications. And the Drive integration in Mural was a bit clunky: we uploaded PDFs, but they rendered as background images without selection boxes.
Here’s a quick feature rundown:
Integration Feature
Miro
Mural
Live Embeds (Notion, websites)
Yes, real-time previews
Static images or links only
Slack Message Reactions → Tasks
Possible via Zapier or bot flows
Not natively available
Google Drive Imports
Interactive, drag-and-drop supported
Imported files are static, editing not allowed
In the end, Miro is far more extensible at the toolchain level—especially for hybrid development or content teams that rely on automation triggers.
Templates and Facilitation Tools
Both platforms ship with a large gallery of pre-built templates—think ice-breakers, sprint plans, user journey maps, brainstorming layouts. But the devil is in the execution.
In testing, Miro templates tend to be more design-forward. Fonts are sleek, colors are balanced, spacing is tight. Mural templates feel more functional, but a bit rough—like someone exported them from PowerPoint in 2012.
Where Mural shines, however, is in its Facilitation Superpowers overlay. This includes:
Private Mode: Only you see what’s being edited—great for silent idea collection
Timer: Sets a visual countdown
Summon: All users’ view centers on your cursor
Miro’s “Presentation Mode” tries to replicate this but is more structured like a slideshow than a free-form workshop. Trying to quickly hide sticky notes in Miro involves manually covering them with shapes—we did this during a Lean Coffee session and it felt hacked together.
The bottom line is: Miro looks prettier out of the box, but Mural guides facilitators better during live sessions.
Performance Under Low-Bandwidth Conditions
This wasn’t something I considered until I ran a remote workshop with three users working from coffee shops. Miro, with all its real-time sync and animations, started getting sluggish. Cursor lag appeared, and in one case, a file upload never completed.
We simulated low-speed mode again—using bandwidth throttling in Chrome DevTools—and found that Mural degraded more gracefully. No laggy cursors, and dragging elements didn’t freeze the viewport like it sometimes did in Miro.
However, performance costs came with visual tradeoffs. In low-bandwidth, Mural disables high-res assets and starts buffering sticky outlines. So while it worked better, it visually resembled a wireframe mockup from the early 2000s.
To wrap up this part: If your team includes users on spotty Wi-Fi or mobile hotspots, Mural will run smoother more consistently.
Security, Permissions, and Access Control
One major difference came up when working with external consultants. Miro uses flexible guest editor links—you set the sharing type to “anyone with the link can comment” and you’re good to go. Mural imposes tighter restrictions, even on base accounts.
In Mural, guest access is usually read-only unless granted explicitly via email invite. This blocked us from using Mural in one workshop where external freelancers needed to add ideas live. We had to bump up our Mural plan temporarily just to let them in. Costs aside, it took up time and back-and-forth emails verifying accounts.
Miro also allows more granular access control per board: you can define viewer, commenter, editor—and most importantly, you don’t need a login to access if it’s set correctly. For fast-moving teams with changing roles, this makes a serious difference.
The takeaway here: Mural is better for security-minded orgs; Miro is better for flexible, faster guest involvement.
Final Recommendation: Choose What Matches Team Dynamics
If your team is highly collaborative, visual-first, and comfortable with drag-and-drop tools, Miro has superior real-time interaction, integrations, and customization. Your facilitation will feel less structured, but far more dynamic. It’s especially strong if you integrate with software like FigJam, Notion, or Jira.
But if your remote sessions revolve around structured workshops, predefined templates, and users with limited tech experience—or if bandwidth is an issue—Mural keeps things lean. It’s designed to get out of the way and lets facilitators lead the flow.
The thing to really ask: Are you looking for a digital playground or a shared desk with sticky notes? Because that’s how different these two can feel in practice.
