The No-BS Guide To Virtual Whiteboards (2022-2023)

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Disclaimer: We’re not getting paid by any of the companies featured on this list…but if you’d like to pay us, we’ll gladly take your money and change this disclaimer. However, we won’t change the content of the article, so deal with it :)

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Ah Virtual Whiteboards. A bit of a niche concept a few years ago, a lot has changed in this space and can you believe that people today - from distributed team members to trainers to salespeople and everyone in between - actually use them?

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The good thing about the virtual whiteboard market is that there really are only three tools (if that) that you need to consider. So in this article, we’ll rank the top three players, break down the features that differentiate them, talk a little bit about pricing, and then we’ll wrap it up. Short and sweet. 

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Now before we do that, there are a few standard features that you should expect from any virtual whiteboard that you try today. We won’t mention these later because, for us, they’re table stakes features - you can’t get on this list without them. They are:

• Real-time user collaboration (so we can all update our whiteboard at the same time)
• Multiple whiteboards (this ain't your granddaddy's whiteboard...humans today can’t just have one whiteboard and keep erasing it)
• Communication tools (comments and real-time chat so you can let people know your feedback right in the tool itself)

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So without further adieu, let’s talk about the three best virtual whiteboards in the market today - Miro, Mural and Limnu.

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#1 - Miro 

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We had Mural at #1, and then we swapped it to Miro a few minutes before publishing. Let’s talk about this.

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What we were going to write, before we changed:

Let’s call it like we see it. Miro advertises itself as a virtual whiteboard, but when you look under the hood, it seems like they’re trying to compete with the likes of Figma a lot more than they’re trying to compete with Mural. And hey, this may be exactly what you want to hear! But if you’re the majority of people just looking for a rock-solid virtual whiteboarding app, this is most definitely what you don’t want to hear. Do you really need to brainstorm, plan your strategy, iterate AND design a product with a whiteboarding tool? If not, see #1 and be on your way.

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What we are actually writing:

Miro is just a tick better and a tick cheaper than Mural. The templates are that much nicer, there are that many more of them, it’s just that little bit cheaper than Mural, and the Academy is just that much better. At the end of the day…it was close, but Miro just flat out out-performed Mural across the board.

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Pros

• Miro’s User Interface is just…nicer than Mural. We can’t quite put the point on what it is but just check out some of Miro’s templates compared to Mural’s, and we think you’ll get what we’re talking about.
• Miro has our favorite collection of templates on this list. You can even design a floorplan! 
• The flexibility of the app to be more things to more people. Pitch deck templates, “How do you feel today?” templates, floorplan templates, to do list templates. Miro’s got em and Mural doesn’t.
• It’s 20% cheaper than Mural at the time of this writing.
• The Miro academy is pretty darn good. There are lots of resources.

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Cons

• Don’t fall down the rabbit hole. Miro can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You don’t need all of their features and you don’t need all of their templates. Find out what works for you and use it.
• Not as deep of a Google integration as Mural.
• You can’t chat with sales. You have to fill out a form.
• Less free boards (3) compared to Mural (5).

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Pricing

Miro has a basic free account that allows unlimited members and three boards. You can upgrade to Starter at $8 per month billed annually or $10 when billed monthly to get unlimited boards and a few more features. And of course, the higher-priced Business and Enterprise accounts offer more features. Click here to go straight to Miro's pricing page.

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#2 - Mural

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Mural got beat by Miro. We thought that Mural’s product focus, which is clearly to dominate the online whiteboard market, would prevail…but as we actually got into the details that did not turn out to be the case. Although Mural has a fantastic new integration with Google Workspace that makes it a VERY compelling tool for Google users, that just wasn’t enough to put it over the top.

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Pros

• A “Forever Free” plan that includes 3 murals and unlimited members.
• The most user-friendly interface - it consistently outranks competitors on ease-of-use scores among all virtual whiteboards.
• A really useful Timer feature that allows you to add timers to sessions
• A Voting feature that allows your team to quickly come to a consensus and make decisions
• Integrations with popular productivity tools such as Slack, Dropbox, and the aforementioned integration with Google Workspace

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Cons

• The highest pricing out of the three options ($12 month-to-month or $9.99 per month if prepaid annually)
• A user-interface, academy, and template library that just doesn’t match up to Miro.

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Pricing

Mural has a basic free account that allows unlimited members and five murals. You can upgrade to Team+ at $9.99 per month billed annually or $12 when billed monthly to get unlimited boards and a few more features. And of course, the higher-priced Business and Enterprise accounts offer more features. Click here to go straight to Miro's pricing page.

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#3 - Limnu

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Well let’s be honest here. We needed a #3 and Stormboard just felt too much like a poor man’s Mural & Miro, so we went out on a limb and picked Limnu. Now Limnu is targeted toward teachers and the whole deal is that if you like to “draw it yourself” instead of grabbing and altering a pre-cut shape, then you just might have met your match!

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Pros

• It’s cheap…like $5 per month for unlimited boards cheap.
• They know they're target market (school teachers) and they try to build the best product they can for that target market.

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Cons

• They’re “free trial” expires after 14 days. Strange? We thought so too. 
• If you want support, it’s gonna be either form or email.
• The product resources are laughable (aka not good)
• The entire website and product experience feels very…2005.

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Pricing

Limnu offers a basic free account for people who want to test the product out for 14 days. From there you can upgrade to “Pro” for $5 per month for unlimited boards. And of course, they have a Team, Enterprise and API account for bigger clients. Click here to go straight to Miro's pricing page.

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Our Final Recommendation (aka TLDR)

So, there you have it! If you’re 99% of the population, check out Miro or Mural and be done with it. If you’re a very artistic teacher on a shoe-string budget with low tolerance for good-looking websites, Limnu might be worthy of your consideration as well.

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