Alternatives to Mural

One of many solutions for visual collaboration, Mural provides all the features you’d expect for hybrid collaboration and digital whiteboarding. But depending on your use case, technology ecosystem, and budget, it may not be the right choice for your team. In this guide, we’ll explore the best Mural alternatives, including ratings, pricing plans, as well as notable features and integrations

Alternatives to Mural

• Whimsical
• Lucidspark
• Miro
• FigJam
• Boardmix
• Confluence whiteboards

What is Mural?

Mural is a visual work platform commonly used for brainstorming, design thinking, and workshop facilitation. Rated 4.5/5 on Capterra, Mural’s robust facilitation tools make it a top choice for enterprise leaders and consultants who need to guide groups through planning sessions, client workshops, and status meetings. It provides best-in-class meeting controls to keep participants engaged and focused, including:

• Facilitator Superpowers™: Gives session leaders control of a meeting’s flow, so they can guide participants through a session
• Private Mode: Allows participants to see their own sticky notes but not what others are typing
• Voting Sessions: Enables anonymous voting on specific objects

Beyond its standout facilitation tools, Mural offers AI capabilities and templates to help improve communication, collaboration, and productivity. Notable integrations include GitHub, Jira, Lumen5, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.

Users can sign up for a free plan with a limit of three editable boards or opt for a paid plan at one of three levels: Team+, Business, and Enterprise.

What makes for a good Mural alternative?

While Mural shines in the category of facilitation, it comes with a steep learning curve for new users. To help identify suitable Mural alternatives, we focused on competing platforms that offer comparable facilitation tools, AI capabilities, templates, integrations, and pricing plans but that also support enhanced team collaboration.

We prioritized three core pillars during our search:

• Alignment: Can the tool quickly organize a chaotic brainstorm into a structured plan?
• Ease of entry: Is the barrier to entry low enough that a guest or a cross-functional partner can jump in and contribute within seconds?
• Enterprise offering: Does it offer the security and administrative controls required by large-scale organizations without sacrificing speed?

While every team has different needs, the best Mural alternatives typically share a few characteristics:

• Free plans: An entry point that allows you to test the waters with meaningful, editable projects before committing to a paid license
• Template libraries: Pre-built frameworks for everything from retrospectives to user journey mapping, so you never have to start from a blank canvas
• Facilitation tools: Features to keep meetings focused and productive

Key takeaways

Mural alternatives list

Whimsical

Best for product managers
Capterra rating: 4.7/5
Pricing: Free, paid individual and team, and enterprise plans available

Built to enable the quick creation of visuals, Whimsical is used by product managers and engineers who want to create professional-looking flowcharts and wireframes faster than they could with more complex design tools.

Notable features include:

• Drag-and-drop editor: Allows users to drag and drop images, icons, widgets, or other components
• Integrated content: Combines mind maps, wireframes, and flowcharts into a single, unified product 
• Snap-to-grid default: Aligns items automatically to the grid to ensure clean, professional layouts

Notable integrations include Figma, GitHub, Notion, and Slack

Pros: Capterra reviewers say Whimsical’s drag-and-drop functionality is smooth, making the tool easy to use and simplifying the creation of high-quality presentations. They also cite the product’s visual aesthetic as “beautiful” and “clean.”

Cons: Some users report that boards with a large number of items are slow to load, and styling options such as fonts and colors are too limited for corporate use cases.

Lucidspark

Best for remote and hybrid teams
Capterra rating: 4.7/5
Pricing: Free for up to three editable boards. Paid individual and enterprise plans available

Available as a standalone product or as part of the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite, Lucidspark 
was designed to maximize connection, collaboration, and creativity for teams working from anywhere. It’s commonly used for ideation, planning, meeting facilitation, and more.

Notable features include:

• Facilitator Tools and Controls: Helps keep participants on track and following along with capabilities such as a timer, laser pointer, private mode, the ability to follow collaborators, breakout boards, and more
• AI capabilities: Enables users to generate ideas from prompts, automatically sort ideas to find key themes, and summarize content on boards
• Visual Activities: Allows for the creation of interactive activities to gauge team sentiment, ensure alignment, and make decisions faster

Notable integrations include Atlassian (Confluence and Jira), Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, and Zoom.

Pros: Lucidspark is highly rated for its collaborative features, including the ability for team members to work together on the same board in real time or asynchronously. The platform is easy to use, offers robust integrations, and provides an extensive library of pre-made templates. 

Cons: The free version is limited to only three editable boards, which some users find restrictive.

Miro

Best for brainstorming and group work
Capterra rating: 4.7
Pricing: Free for three editable boards. Paid individual to enterprise plans available.

An AI innovation workspace, Miro provides a free-form canvas where dispersed teams can brainstorm, plan, and execute projects. It’s commonly used by teams in tech, marketing, and consulting.

Notable features include:

• Interactive Presentation Mode: Delivers high-level engagement and flexibility for presenting boards to teams
• Talktrack: Records interactive video and audio walkthroughs of a Miro board to guide viewers through content asynchronously
• Focus mode: Provides a distraction-free, full-screen view that hides surrounding board elements

Notable integrations include Azure DevOps, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

Pros: Miro is highly regarded for its robust template library, “limitless” workspace, polished UI, and large support community.

Cons: Some new and non-technical users find the interface overwhelming compared to similar competitors. Others report frustration with zoom controls and navigation.

FigJam

Best for product designers and UX/UI teams working within Figma
Capterra rating: 4.8/5
Pricing: Free, paid individual and team, and enterprise plans available

An online collaborative whiteboard tool, FigJam is part of the Figma ecosystem. It bridges the gap for Figma users between the brainstorming process and the design process, which happens in Figma.

Notable features include:

• Stamps and emotes: Provides instant feedback and reactions for more interactive collaboration in live and asynchronous settings
• Audio conversations: Enables users to record verbal explanations of ideas or collaborate spontaneously
• Widgets and plugins: Uses custom interactive objects that respond to user interactions or pull data from external sources

Notable integrations include Asana, Figma, Jira, Linear, and Slack.

Pros: Users love that they can copy and paste components and designs seamlessly between Figma and FigJam without any loss of data or formatting. It also includes fun features that feel interactive and social.

Cons: FigJam lacks deeper capabilities, auto-layout options, and advanced project management integrations offered by competitors.

Boardmix

Best for content creators
Capterra rating: 4.2/5
Pricing: Free for three editable boards. Paid individual and enterprise plans available.

An AI-powered collaborative whiteboard platform, Boardmix is built for power users who want to generate complex visuals via prompts rather than manual drawing. It helps streamline digital sketching, product design, and more.

Notable features include:

• AI integrations: Supports the use of AI prompts for brainstorming, image generation, and diagramming
• Infinite canvas: Enables users to keep adding visuals and ideas to their canvas without having to switch tabs
• Detailed template library: Provides a wide selection of templates to help speed up research and brainstorming

Notable integrations include Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Zoom.

Pros: Beyond the platform’s time-saving AI integrations, users value its visual organization features, such as the ability to save elements to a personal resource library and the auto-calculation of distances between objects to keep boards looking polished.

Cons: Boardmix has a smaller support community and offers fewer enterprise integrations than competitors.

Confluence whiteboards

Best for development teams using Confluence
Capterra rating: 4.5/5
Pricing: Included with Confluence. Atlassian offers both free and paid plans for Confluence

A digital whiteboard built directly into Confluence by Atlassian, Confluence whiteboards are designed for structured documentation. It’s the perfect tool for development teams already using Confluence.

Notable features include:

• Native wiki embedding: Integrates external content directly into Confluence pages for easy context
• Smart sections: Empowers users to make collaboration sessions more efficient by performing bulk actions
• Smart links: Transforms basic URLs into interactive elements like cards, embeds, and lists

Notable integrations include Jira, Smart Links, and Trello.

Pros: Confluence whiteboards provide a seamless experience for Atlassian users and are free for existing Confluence customers. The standout feature is the smart Jira integration, which allows users to convert sticky notes to Jira issues.

Cons: Some reviewers report a steep learning curve, saying it requires significant time to understand the navigation and admin permissions.

Finding the best Mural alternative

Among the six visual collaboration platforms compared above, the best overall Mural alternative is Lucidspark. It provides comparable capabilities for meeting facilitation, generative AI, availability of pre-made templates, and support for a broad range of use cases.

For power users seeking capabilities skewed more toward AI-driven image generation than facilitation, Boardmix is an emerging competitor gaining traction for its aggressive AI integration. Like Mural, Boardmix also provides a workspace with an infinite canvas and a library of pre-made templates.

Learn why Lucidspark is the best overall Mural alternative for visual collaboration. Go now