Intro: What Actually Happens in Agile Retrospectives
Every two weeks, I sit down with seven other people, each armed with their own tired brain and a coffee that’s gone cold. We open Miro or Mural, depending on the client’s contract (the switch kills momentum every time), and start our retro. Ideally, that’s when constructive magic should happen—but in reality, someone forgets how to duplicate a sticky, the facilitator is screen sharing because half of us ‘can’t find the board,’ and we start by talking about how rushed the sprint was… again.
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The point of a retrospective meeting is to look back at what went well, what didn’t, and what we want to do differently. It completes the Agile feedback loop. But when digital collaboration tools don’t support candid feedback or get in the way of fluid ideation, the session becomes surface-level and repetitive. So I decided to put Miro and Mural side-by-side—not just by features, but by how they behave in real retros with real dysfunctions.
Miro vs Mural Retros in Action: Side-by-Side
A quiet retro is a useless retro. So, I tested both tools across three sprints with two different remote dev teams. Both tools had the same “Start, Stop, Continue” format preloaded, same team size, and same expectations. Here’s how they actually stacked up:
Feature
Miro
Mural
Sticky Notes
Double-click to create works consistently, even when zoomed in. Color customization is quick. People tend to make more notes.
Drag-and-drop feels slower. If team members aren’t logged in, their stickies show up as “Unknown” user which confuses the conversation.
Voting
Clear voter limit control, but one bug: sometimes the voting timer adds random 1-minute extensions without warning.
Fewer vote options, but everyone gets visual confirmation of their count. That helped reduce double-votes on the same sticky.
Templates
Miro has strong built-in templates, but if someone edits a locked object (like a title), it becomes unlocked for everyone. Chaos.
More rigid templates help preserve structure once the retro starts. You can actually import Jira tickets as sticky notes. That’s real context.
Breakout Areas
You can create multiple spaces on one board, but without frames, people get lost. No auto-focus means someone always asks “where am I?”
Sections and guided navigation let facilitators move people as a group. That saves about five minutes per transition.
Ultimately, Miro shines when the group is familiar with it and you want freeform creativity. Mural keeps retros tighter and better anchored when the team is less experienced—though its onboarding feels stiffer. Both tools work, but not always for the same kind of team or vibe.
Templates: Built-in vs Custom Behavior
Here’s where I ran into the first major divergence. In Miro, retro templates feel more flexible but also more fragile. I applied their “Mad, Sad, Glad” board and had folks drag their stickies under each emotion. It worked—until someone accidentally resized the entire grid. There’s no native way to lock group-level frames without plugin hacks (and even those break if a person doesn’t have plugin permissions).
Comparatively, Mural’s templates use pre-set sections. They’re less customizable, but you don’t lose structure. You also get built-in icons (thumbs-up, hearts, warning signs) which lets the team react to each other’s notes without typing. That quick reaction behavior made the mood much clearer in the moment—especially when nobody wants to say outright, “This sprint was a flaming garbage can.”
Also important: importing action items back to project management tools. Miro required a manual copy-paste into Jira. Mural, with its sticky-to-task sync, could pipe things into Jira (or Asana) with about three clicks—though you’ll need to authenticate every user again if they’re switching orgs, which feels clunky.
The bottom line is, Mural is safer for structured retros, Miro is better when you trust your team to freestyle—but both have shortcomings in locking and handoff behaviors.
Collaboration in Real Time vs Async
This becomes the breaking point for distributed teams. Our use case: team members in three time zones, one of whom never attends retros due to childcare hours. With Miro, async feedback is possible—you can duplicate the board, have people add notes on their time, and tag items. But you won’t get clean stage separation (e.g., sorting, grouping, voting).
Mural has a better facilitator-led walkthrough system. I once used it to allow team members to asynchronously respond to a guided sequence: “What frustrated you?”, “What helped you ship something?”, etc. When they were done, I compiled responses into themes. But grouping was a manual process. No AI tagging yet. That would’ve saved time.
This also happens when your facilitator is in a wildly different timezone. Mural’s summary export wraps up the meeting in a readable snapshot PDF that can be emailed immediately. Miro’s export is a full board image file—hard to parse unless you zoom and scroll. We lost details the first couple times.
To sum up, if async retros are your reality, Mural gives you a cleaner review trail, while Miro still feels halfway designed for that use case.
Voting: Weighted Decisions and Confusion Overlap
Here’s something almost nobody talks about: overlapping votes. In Miro, if two people vote on the same sticky at close timing, the sticky flashes then reverts back to showing just one vote. I had to re-run votes more than once because the team didn’t trust the final count. There’s no audit log of who voted what.
In Mural, once voting starts, the interface greys out and you can only interact with voting items. It visually reduces confusion, and the votes attach cleanly with counts. You can even set if it’s anonymous or not. That matters when someone votes three times on a colleague’s negative comment. 😬
One workaround in Miro: use emojis instead of votes. We did this for a retro where ‘official voting’ felt too formal. Everyone added a 👍 or 😕 instead. It was chaotic, and stickies started overflowing, yet the reactions were more human than numbers. If your team prefers emotional-informational feedback, Miro adapts—it just needs facilitation guardrails.
To conclude, Mural wins on structured voting where trust in tools is low. Miro can create looser emotional consensus when the team already buys in.
Use Cases: Different Teams, Different Feedback Loops
I narrowed down their sweet spots based on team type. Here’s what shook out:
Team Type
Best Fit
Why
Cross-functional remote squads
Miro
Canvas freedom and visual links let product + dev + UX co-create feedback flows.
Early Agile adopters in enterprise
Mural
Structured formats help avoid drift and provide shareable proof of progress.
Freelance scrum teams
Miro
No-login guest access doesn’t break flow. Embeds into Notion workspaces.
Distributed teams with low tech literacy
Mural
Clear navigation paths and undo-safe templates lower the cognitive load.
As a final point, matching the tool to the team—not the other way around—reduced retro fatigue more than any other change we made.
Final Verdict: Miro or Mural?
If your retros have become a checkbox activity—same talking points, no action follow-through—neither tool alone will fix that. But the right one can remove half the friction.
Choose Miro when:
You need a creative, flexible workspace where retros bleed into idea co-creation.
Your team knows how to navigate frames and tools without getting lost.
You want integrations with visual docs, like embedding Figma designs in context.
Stick with Mural if:
Structure, focus, and consistent navigation matter more than design freedom.
Your team is either new to digital retros or frequently rotates members.
The value is in exporting digestible summaries and aligning distributed feedback.
Ultimately, you can’t fix team trust with pixels. But you can choose tools that stop getting in the way of honest, actionable retrospectives.
