MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) from Tactivos (DBA MURAL) in San Francisco is described by the vendor as a digital workspace and visual collaboration tool, designed for creative teams to make the process of design more efficient for distributed teams, working remotely.
$12
per month
Whiteboard.chat
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Whiteboard.chat – an interactive online whiteboard platform designed to support teaching and learning experiences, offering a free tier. Available to educators and students across the USA, the online whiteboard fosters collaborative, immersive learning environments and includes tools for real-time interaction, teachers engage, annotate, and instruct while students actively participate and learn.
$0
supported by ads (teacher boards only, 10 class boards)
Pricing
Mural
Whiteboard.chat
Editions & Modules
Starter
$12
per month
Plus
$20
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Educator Free
$0
supported by ads (teacher boards only, 10 class boards)
Remote Collaboration: In a remote or distributed work environment, Mural shines. It enables teams to collaborate effectively in real-time, bridging geographical gaps and facilitating virtual meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions. Workshop Facilitation: For facilitators leading workshops or team-building activities, Mural provides interactive templates and tools for engaging participants and achieving specific objectives.
Whenever the engineers & architects of my team require a brainstorming session, we normally use a whiteboard, as the enterprise does provide Miro licenses with associated. Hence, a whiteboard comes in handy when troubleshooting or discussing the requirements surrounding an application or technical infrastructure for a project. As it removes the dependency on requesting an additional Miro license, we use it. The board also loads faster than a Miro board.
Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.
The application, although it loads faster even at slower internet connections, and is a good alternative to Miro boards, still requires some more room for improvement. During live sessions, when multiple users contribute to the board, the updates are openly visible to all. Perhaps a privacy feature that hides text, available to the board admin, would allow me to give a rating. Being from an ersecurity background, I think the app also requires a secure sign-up process with MFA.
I like it better than Miro because MURAL's more informal feel makes it encourage conversation and use. Miro also let's you bury too much information "inside" the notes making it really easy to lose sight of important data. I like MURAL better than Lucidspark because of how fast the pages load, especially links within the board. Any app is better than Microsoft whiteboard which is appalling unusable and feature incomplete.
I'd rate it lower than Miro but higher than draw.io and Lucidchart. The other two do not have a real-time collaborator feature for users; they have limited tools for designing and no provision for syncing with third-party apps. While whiteboard. Chat does provide a provision for the creation of JIRA or Azure DevOps tickets directly from a sticky note, like Miro.