Mural is a collaboration app for team brainstorming and mind-mapping. You use it to make virtual canvases and whiteboards where a team of people can draw, add notes, pin images and files, and otherwise interact with one another in real time. We like its broad file support and excellent templates, too. Among Mural’s drawbacks, however, are its price—which is on the high side—and missing support for interactive charts and reports.
How Is Mural Different From the Competition?
While Mural is a fast and flexible app for collaboration, some of its closest competitors offer more than just a virtual whiteboard space and have special differentiating features.
For example, Prezi is not only a collaborative brainstorming tool, but also a deluxe presentation app. In fairness, you can use Mural for presentations, but it’s not as full-featured as other software in that category. Another example is Visme, which includes a rich set of templates for designing digital marketing assets, in addition to collaborative canvasing features. There is also very capable and specialized mind-mapping software, such as Mindomo, and flowchart and diagramming software, such as Lucidchart and Draw.io. People tend to use mind-mapping and flowchart software differently than whiteboarding software, but there is some overlap.
Miro, Mural’s closest competitor among the apps we’ve tested, is our Editors’ Choice winner for whiteboarding and collaborative canvassing software because it is slightly more intuitive (especially for new users); it includes tools for making interactive diagrams, charts, and tables, which Mural doesn’t have; and it costs a little less. Still, Miro and Mural’s scores differ by only half a point, and the choice between them may come down to personal preferences.
How Much Does Mural Cost?
Mural has two membership plans for teams of up to 50 people, plus an Enterprise offering for larger groups. Mural offers a free 30-day trial of its software, but there is no permanent free account level. You also have to sign up for a paid membership to access any of the content you made during the trial period.
The Starter membership ($16 per person per month, or $144 per person per year) includes all the core features of Mural and places no limits on the number of Murals (canvasses) you can make. Subscribers to this tier can invite Visitors via a shared link to anonymously view or edit a single canvas, too. Visitors don’t have to create an account to access the file.
The Plus plan ($240 per person per year with no option to pay monthly) includes everything in Starter as well as priority support, additional learning resources, and a SAML single sign-on (SSO) option. The Plus account also lets you invite Guests, which differ from Visitors. Guests are collaborators whom you invite into your Mural group and get their own accounts. You can give Guests access to view or edit whatever Rooms (including private ones) and files you choose.
The Enterprise account, which has custom pricing, adds centralized controls in a customer dashboard, the ability to make custom templates, self-serve SSO options, and other standard enterprise-grade features. Enterprise accounts have access to API endpoints to de-provision users, and some customers have access to the activity logs API as well. No other API access is offered at this time, though a Mural representative says the company has plans to expand API endpoints for other uses in the future, such as provisioning and SCIM.
For all accounts, Mural handles storage and there is no option to use your own storage resources at this time. Miro and Prezi do the same. While it’s convenient for these apps to provide storage, some organizations may prefer to handle storage. I think it should be an option for enterprise accounts at the least.
Mural is available on the web and for Windows and macOS systems. Mural offers mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android devices too, but they aren’t quite as fully featured as the desktop and web apps. For instance, while you can view and edit Murals, create stickies, draw, and run polls and timers, you don’t get every feature for adding content to your canvas. The mobile apps are more than sufficient for viewing content and participating in a brainstorming session, but if you’re doing heavy-duty work with Mural, you’re better off using one of the desktop or web apps.
How Do Mural’s Prices Compare?
Mural costs about the same as other apps for mind-mapping, diagramming, and collaborating. Miro, for example, is only slightly cheaper at about $10–$16 per person per month. Mind mapping app Mindomo costs around $5.50–$13.50 per person per month. That’s also a little less than Mural, but still in the same ballpark. Mindomo uses a sliding scale, so large teams may pay an even lower per-person rate.
The collaborative diagramming app Lucidchart starts at $5.95 per month for a single person, while Pro and Team accounts cost between $9.95 and $24 per person per month, with discounts for paying annually. Prezi, the unconventional presentation app mentioned earlier, offers too many plans to mention, but to get the best features, you end up paying between $180 and $228 per person per year.
Many of the best video conferencing services, including Zoom Meeting (paid accounts from $14.99 per month), have collaborative whiteboards built-in for real-time brainstorming. That’s different, however, from being able to save, reuse, and build out your canvases, the way you can with Mural. Microsoft Teams is another messaging app that integrates with a collaborative whiteboard experience.
Getting Started With Mural
To get going with Mural, you create an account with an email address. If Mural detects a Google account during the signup, it will ask if you’d rather authenticate using Google than create a separate set of login credentials.
Inside the app, the layout is straightforward. On the left, a navigation rail provides quick templates, learning resources for using the app, your favorite Murals, and Rooms, which are like folders for organizing your work. Rooms can be private or open for others in your account to join. The main section of the interface includes a button for creating a new Mural, plus any other files that are available to open.
The learning resources are excellent and may help you explore some of the tools that aren’t highly intuitive. For example, you must be co-editing or viewing a Mural to start an audio call with your fellow collaborators. There is no option for video calls, although a representative for Mural said that was a deliberate choice to not detract users’ focus from the canvas. Competitor Miro offers both audio and video calls. There’s also a feature for drawing frames around content on a canvas to group and label it; you can get a sense of this feature from many of Mural’s templates, but it’s hard to learn how to use it correctly without the tutorial.
Creating and Editing a Mural
Mural’s design makes it easy for people to jump into a canvas either alone or with others and quickly create and contribute. The very simplest level of interaction is to create sticky notes on the canvas to jot down an idea. Making those notes in different colors, resizing them, and changing the point size of the text on them is all really easy.
Making sticky notes is so easy that you may find yourself doing it accidentally and often. Stickies show up by default when you double-click the canvas. Here’s what happens, especially in the first few days of getting acquainted with Mural: You try to select an item to move it or multiple items to group them, for example, or double-click an item to edit the text on it, and you accidentally create a sticky note. It might also happen while you’re trying to pan or zoom, depending on what other apps you’re accustomed to using. Once the rogue sticky is on the canvas, you have to select it to delete it. Over the course of testing Mural for about a week, the problem with stickies never subsided. I didn’t have this same problem with the competing app Miro because it uses two different cursors for panning (hand) and selecting items (arrow). Over time, most people who use Mural regularly will become accustomed to its controls, but I found it an annoying hump to get over.
Mural does let you change the input actions for panning and zooming to make it more user-friendly for trackpad or mouse use. For example, if you’re on a trackpad user, you can opt for a pinch-zoom and double-finger swipe to pan.
When you explore Mural, you’ll find assets that you can pull onto the canvas, such as arrows, lines, shapes, and icons. You can search for images to include without leaving the canvas. Mural also gives you frameworks, which are similar to templates (which I discuss in more detail below), but are treated as objects on your canvas, whereas templates are canvases with objects already on them. An example of a framework is a monthly calendar.
Something Mural doesn’t have that Miro does are charts, graphs, and tables. In Miro, these are objects that you can add to your canvas and customize. For example, Miro lets you drag a sample chart onto your canvas and populate it with data. The data resides in cells, making it easy to update them. Mural doesn’t include those kinds of assets. With Mural, you can upload a custom image of a chart or graph and even save it to reuse on other canvases, although that leaves you with a static image.
Working With Mural’s Templates
Mural has more than 200 templates across a variety of categories, such as Agile, Brainstorm ideas with your team, and Plan a sprint or project. For example, there’s an Agile template called Weekly Team Retrospective where team members track what went well during the previous week, what could be improved, and otherwise reflect on their work progress. There’s a Customer Experience Journey template for brainstorming about the customer experience, a common activity for both marketing and project development teams.
Nearly all the templates are designed to be used interactively with a team. They focus on brainstorming, idea generation, thinking through problems, and team building. For the most part, Mural’s templates are not sample diagrams, like a template for a mobile app design. You do get diagram-style templates in competitor Miro, however, and they are the focus of flowchart and diagramming software, such as Lucidchart.
In the process of learning how to use Mural, these templates are quite helpful in suggesting not only what kind of files you could create, but also how to interact with your team members while making them. For example, a series of templates designed as icebreaker activities contains instructions for going around the virtual canvas and inviting participation; they have the feel of virtual table-top games.
One template that I played with in testing asked for each team member to place a marker on a world map to show where they live. Another activity on the same canvas asks each team member to share their first job and add a note about the best and worst parts of it.
Collaborating in Mural
When you collaborate in Mural, everyone with access to a canvas can view, contribute to, and edit it in real time. Real time means real time. These interactions happen fast, which is one of Mural’s greatest strengths.
There are permission levels for managing collaborators, including view-only permissions, as mentioned in the pricing section. In addition, canvases can have Facilitators. A Facilitator is something like a meeting host. This person can, for example, turn on a timer to limit how long people add content to the canvas before discussing it. Facilitators can also view canvas Outlines, which are notes that go along with sections of your canvas, similar to how a presenter of a presentation might have presenter notes.
Another feature in Mural designed to improve collaboration is the ability for a Facilitator to Summon people. It is what it sounds like: Other collaborators are summoned from other parts of the canvas to be closer to the Facilitator. It prevents collaborators from getting lost or distracted when the Facilitator wants them to focus on a specific area of the canvas. If that’s not enough, the Facilitator can also Take Control, which is to say, lock the canvas quickly to all collaborators and temporarily turn them into view-only participants.
File Types and Integrations
Mural supports a long list of file types that you can upload and add to your canvas. All common image files work, including animated GIFs. You can add not only major office files (such as DOC, XLS, PPT) but also PDFs and ZIP files. If you add a link to a canvas, Mural generates a preview image. You can also add links from YouTube and watch videos right on your canvas.
With Mural, you can integrate other apps and bring some of their assets onto your canvas. Two that get a lot of mileage for technical teams are JIRA and GitHub. There are integrations for Adobe Creative Cloud to pull in art assets, as well as Slack for notifications. If you use Microsoft Teams, there’s an integration for Windows devices that allows you to share and view Mural canvases to that app. Mural offers additional integrations too, though most of them must be routed through Zapier.
Mural supports exporting your canvas and the items on it, too. You can turn an entire canvas into a PDF or PNG, or snag some code to embed it on a web page. You can also download a ZIP file of all the files the canvas contains. And you can save any canvas as a template of your own. You can also export a specific area of any canvas as a PDF or PNG.
If you have specific content on your canvas that you want to isolate, such as issues from GitHub or JIRA or plain text, you export just that part.
Accessibility and Language Support
Mural has accessibility initiatives that at this stage appear to be in a healthy state of progress toward meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines compliance. The most recent self-audit, which the company makes publicly available on its website, indicates areas where compliance has been met and lists specific features of Mural that require updates to become compliant.
As for language support, Mural’s interface and support pages are currently available only in English. The best you could do for additional language support is use a web browser plugin to translate them.
Fast and Useful for Team Collaboration
Because it facilitates real-time co-editing and is fairly easy to use, we recommend Mural to teams looking for a tool to support team brainstorming. In its templates and features, Mural emphasizes collaboration and team-building much more than its competitors. It doesn’t offer as much as competitors, however, when it comes to tools and templates for making diagrams and flowcharts.
Miro offers a few advantages over Mural, including a cheaper price and a better set of tools for creating charts and graphs, so it earns our Editors’ Choice distinction, rather than Mural.
