No other Product Even Comes Close

This tool achieves many problems and is suitable for everyday use, personal use, small groups, and large working groups. Personal Use: visual organization and planning Small Groups: can quickly move ideas into visual representations that make it very easy to share with other people. MURAL's often become the foundation for projects which people come back to time and time again. It is very satisfying to collaborate with colleagues in this way as much of the applications we use day to day are only design for single users. Workshops: MURAL is powerful when put in the hands of a facillitator who can then guide a group of people through experiential learning and discussions which lead to emergent thinking and non-intuitive insights. Visual Documentation: Over the years I have become very proficient as a visual note taker in mural and can listen to speaker or meeting proceed and capture the meeting in a visually engaging way.

Pros

Mural is hands down the most versatile visual communication tool available today. What I love the most is that I can use the tool every day and that its easy enough for most people to get the hang of within a few minutes, allowing anyone to interact in high fidelity.

Cons

The one thing I don't like about Mural is that some people aren't pro users—I wish everyone were =) Also wish that MURALs could be a first class object in GSuite's Drive =)

The Sticky Note of the Future: Great way to collect, organize, and share thoughts

At work, I'm known as the sticky note queen. I always have so many thoughts swirling through my head and need a place to keep them, so I've historically used sticky notes. But sticky notes can only get me so far - they literally don't always stick around, I only have room for so many, my work space feels incredibly cluttered because of them , and there's no easy way to show a relationship between/ amongst the thoughts they represent. I love mural because it's a collective dumping of thoughts onto an online platform. I can create processes, show relationships between thoughts, collect others' thoughts, and organize it all together. It's the sticky note brainstorming tool of the future.

Pros

I love that Mural lets me choose the size of my virtual sticky note, adjust the color, and add text to it, because this helps me organize my thoughts and categorize things as I see fit. I feel I have creative control of how I want to organize my thoughts. I also love the options to use shapes and lines to organize thoughts within a larger framework, which takes the sticky note concept a step further. I also really like the voting mechanism - people can vote on ideas (on sticky notes) and are given a certain amount of votes. Other people can't see these votes until voting has ended, which is a great way to reduce bias and have everyone looking at and choosing from the same ideas. As an organization with lots of remote workers, we use Mural often to collaborate in brainstorming on an online platform. It's our go-to.

Cons

The best way to share with specific people seems to be to send them a link, but in terms of sharing for a wide audience, It's not always straightforward to export the mural itself into a report or another document. I usually have to take a screenshot, which can't always capture everything going on within the mural in question because you have to zoom out so much to capture everything.

The digital whiteboard for the 21st century

Mural has helped our organization up the collaborative and interactive quotient to virtual meetings. It functions similarly to a whiteboard, but in the digital space. No more taking pictures of notes and trying to digitize them later. We just work directly in Mural and can even screenshare to see the space developing and growing in real-time. It helps us organize and align our thoughts as a team, while providing an artifact for later reference.

Pros

Mural is the thing you don't think you need and resist paying for or trying because you just don't need one more digital tool in your life and workflow. Until you experience it and realize you were so wrong. It's the one tool you actually can't live without. The concept is simple: a free space to create with a simple range of options (mostly text boxes and post-it notes). Think of it like a digital whiteboard. Then try to imagine life and meetings without a physical whiteboard. Exactly.

Cons

The range of options for what you can add to a Mural is somewhat limited, but that's a key part of its success. Having too many options would be paralyzing. Once you master the basic controls and options, the sky is the limit for what you can do. Lots of templates are available to help you get started or inspire you with what others have done and the Mural team is always offering support and webinars to help you explore the tool more deeply. One thing that has frustrated new users is getting the hang of controls especially if you are using on a computer (mouse vs trackpad controls are a bit different). But that is easily solved if you can get over your initial discomfort and commit to learning something new.

Nice try but RTB is still better

It works, it's better than not having a digital whiteboard product if you have remote teams working together, but it's not the best digital whiteboard product out there.

Pros

I like the concept of a digital whiteboard, and the collaboration tools are on the spot.

Cons

No infinite canvas, wayfinding for rooms is awful, not enough customization for layouts and colors of things. Too restrictive sometimes on what you can create(like creating "areas" in Real Time Board).

Nothing else like it!

My organization is new to visual thinking, design thinking and collaborative decision making. Mural has been a powerful driver of cultural change. They are constantly on the leading edge of how you can get more from their model and their platform. If you do any design thinking or want to make decisions transparently and quickly...get Mural now. Its more than whiteboarding - it's about thinking out loud!

Pros

Mural is a powerful collaboration tool that can be mistaken as a "virtual whiteboard". Which it is. But doing any collaborative decision making, doing any kind of design thinking, with remote teams is so much better with Mural than any other collaboration tool (webex, teams, etc).

Cons

Sometimes, for some users, there is a slight learning curve. So make sure for those users who are new to the tool, give them some prep work - create a Playground for them and be very intent on how you lock down the Mural so reduce any confusion they might have.