Mural Reviews

Mural is the tool that allows you to interact with people from different cultures and ways of thinking/acting.

Pros:

Mural is the tool that allows you to express yourself and what you want to communicate, adapting to your needs and those of others. It is not just a tool, but an important means of synchronous and asynchronous interaction and communication. It can be used both for personal reasons (organising trips, activities, book reviews, study notes) and for professional reasons in teams and to support entire organisations.

Cons:

I really appreciate how user friendly it is and full of templates you can use and customize for any need. Also great is the customer care and IT support.

Extremely intuitive tool for collaborative sessions between hybrid teams

Comments: I love everything about this product. In this new era of Hybrid work model and distributed teams across the globe, Mural provides an efficient way to whiteboard, brainstorm and creatively collaborate in an effective manner. I highly recommend this tool for design sessions, sprint planning, product ideation or project management.

Pros:

My project team started using Mural in last 2 years and it has been remarkably easy to collaborate and brainstorm with the hybrid teams. As a Product owner, the best feature about Mural is the availability of vast collection of templates. It saves a lot of time by picking up a pre-made template and refine it for your meeting/session. Additionally, its UI is super intuitive and easy to use, even for the business users, who are not as technically savvy as your design team members.Mural helps in organizing the complex ideas and concepts. It is extremely easy to share it with team members or clients for approvals.

Cons:

One thing I don't enjoy about Mural is its mobile experience. It is not very intuitive as compared to desktop experience. Its easier to learn the basic features of Mural, in order to contribute or participate in a meeting. however, if you want to use Mural to its full capacity, you will need to learn the complex features via some sort of training/learning material.

Perfect platform for design work sessions!

Comments: Solving design work sessions and visually organizing projects.

Pros:

I'm a designer and given our agency is now WFH, we are all really missing our work sessions, locked in a room looking at a whiteboard, sketching, taping, etc. Mural has let us do that now digitally! Thank goodness! When one of my designers need me to review something, we set up a mural and I can sketch over their designs or leave post-it notes, plug in images for inspiration, anything. It's been such a game changer for agencies and designers.

Cons:

I wish you could expand the artboards more or even have the option to do multiple artboards! There are times when we have huge projects that go on for months and we run out of room. Would love to have that be more flexible!

Excellent tool for ideation and collaborative processes

Comments: At the top of the tools that I use for collaborative process. I compare with other tools as Miro and Lucidchart and Mural is the best for far.

Pros:

The tool includes many functionalities to share ideas and customize boards for almost any king of collaborative process (Design Thinking, Agile Ceremonies, Kanban boards, etc).

Cons:

Maybe simplicity of the tools, when you are using the tool for a long time and get familirez with it, you going to need some strongest functionalities ir order to cover more ideas that come to you during the creation of boards.

Mural is the corporate version of Miro, it feels sluggish and uninspiring

Comments: It's for online collaboration mostly.

Pros:

It does what it says on the tin. You can still manage your way around in the app, it's just that it doesn't inspire much in the way Miro does. Templates are unappealing, fonts are unappealing and it takes effort to adjust everything to your own liking, more than it should.

Cons:

I just really miss using Miro to be honest. Mural has everything Miro has, but in a lesser form. It's like Powerpoint vs Keynote. Powerpoint definitely will get the job done but if you want to have more control or use advanced features you will want to use Keynote. As a designer I miss that in Mural. In that same fashion, Mural also allows you to have more administrative rights over others, just like Powerpoint can force you to use company templates in limited ways.

Excellent planning tool - a bit challenging online collaboration

Comments: Overall, the sessions we have used Mural were very productive and in some cases we were provided with insight (from the guides) that would not be part of our original options. This is an excellent feature that elevates our performance.

Pros:

1. Many templates and guides to use out of the box - excellent! 2. A team can be introduced / onboarded easily, especially with the self-explanatory guides

Cons:

1. The app is heavy for online collaboration when there is an issue with limited bandwidth for example

Good, can be hard to access at the beginning

Comments: I use it for workshop facilitation

Pros:

Best feature is the outline function which allows you to create steps into the MURAL

Cons:

Commands are not intuitive Sticky notes are always the same size shapes can be a bit unflexible

Couldn't work without it

Comments: I couldn't imagine my remote work without it. It truly enables everyone to have a voice and contribute in a meaningful way. I feel like becoming an expert user has transformed my daily work and my contribution to my team. It's seen as a valued skill that has supported my growth.

Pros:

I like the flexibility of the tool to manage my own work, collaborate, or facilitate workshops / sessions. The tool is always evolving and I enjoy trying expanded features and how easy it is to support onboarding others.

Cons:

I wish Mural would pass 508 accessibility standards so that I could make a better case for adoption across my organization in the federal sector.

Much more than just a digital whiteboard

Comments: I use Mural daily with several teams to collaborate, plan, share, and track our work.
I love the increasing integration with tools such as JIRA.

Pros:

User centric design made with customer usage in mind

Cons:

How difficult it is to get our IT department to understand that this is much more than a digital whiteboard like inferior products such as MS Whiteboard

Mural is great for idea generation and share

Pros:

I do a lot of idea generation for patenting purposes. This requires sharing of data and good note taking tool. Mural is really helpful as a blank whiteboard to start on an idea from scratch. the real-time updated from the users makes it really useful to use it during an online group call.

Cons:

Sometimes I have to zoom in quite a bit to look at some of the documents we worked on. It's more like Prezi presentation tool. It give me a headache from time to time.

Great for team building activities

Pros:

Helps remotely collaborate and conduct activities for team building. Also helps refer back in the future.

Cons:

Board becomes tricky to handle when lots of things are added.

Mural is a high quality digital canvas

Comments: My overall experience has been good. Mural offers many good features for organising virtual workshops. I use Mural on a weekly basis and it does help me with facilitating virtual workshops.

Pros:

Mural has many good features for creating digital collaboration frameworks. It allows for many participants to work on the same canvas at the same time. It is a good tool for workshops.

Cons:

Sometimes it is difficult to collaborate on a mural canvas when there are several people making changes at the same time. Objects may move around if they are not locked well and the whole canvas might get messy.

A great way to come up with creative answers to a variety of problems without a lot of meetings.

Comments: We were able to get around a lot of the roadblocks that were getting in the way of our proposed solutions to the issues we were having with the help of MURAL. When everyone is working on the solution, there is no need for many meetings or emails because the method of operations and notes are clearly communicated to everyone.

Pros:

Simple to use, it has a wide range of capabilities to make it useful during the entire process of preparation, planning, and execution. MuRAL's biggest feature is that it has a dependable and easy-to-use interface that team members may tailor to fit their needs. You can interact successfully with people who aren't on your team using MURAL because they don't need an account to be able to do so, and their thoughts can be included on the boards we are working on. It's more easier and more pleasurable to work with MURAL because of the front-end presentation style and pre-made templates. What I like most about our whiteboard brainstorming session is that it allows us to better comprehend the scope of the project and discover creative solutions for any overlaps. As a result, I appreciate that we can categorize our cards and designate certain cards for specific team members to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and I also appreciate how simple it is for me to switch between several boards.

Cons:

Few drawbacks exist; the strength of MURAL will be evident as an integrated system for all operations and meetings within the institution as team members' acceptance of the system and their response to the topics and plans we wish to discuss with it grow.

Looking for an online whiteboard, I discovered much more when I found Mural

Comments: Mural is literally the one software product that I started using for remote learning but continue to use even when teaching in person because I believe it truly supports collaboration, brainstorming, and mind mapping. I actually tried many other products and none of them comes even close to Mural for these purposes, for its ease of use, and for its flexibility.

Pros:

When teachers ask me if I have any go-to tools for remote learning, I always tell them about Mural. During a difficult year adapting to the challenges of teaching online, Mural was a bright spot because although I had only been looking for an online whiteboard, what my students get when they use Mural is so much more. 1) It's easy to use...my students were able to find and use the tools without instructions or guides. 2) It offers many ways to express and connect ideas with a palette of tools and a convenient interface. 3) The facilitator can build custom thinkspaces or choose from a variety of templates, and also decide what elements to lock in place. 4) There are different participation levels, including the "visitor" level which allows anyone with the link to join a collaboration. 5) The "wall" space is giant...I have never run out of space, and easy navigation and zooming provide easy access to the whole space.

Cons:

The only aspect I've found a bit challenging for those new to Mural is that sticky notes or text boxes sometimes pop up in unexpected places. As a facilitator, I sometimes have to roam around and delete unused elements that participants created but didn't find.

A great tool with some improvement needed

Comments: Mural is a great tool, generally speaking I am happy with it. It misses some feature (sometimes basic ones) that would make our work easier and faster especially in the configuration of new murals and organization of large rooms.

Pros:

As a designer I use Mural daily to run co-design workshop with dozens of people. The simplicity of the tool makes it easy to understand and use even for people that are not much into technology. A couple of features I particularly appreciate are the content library (even though should be improved) and the possibility to multiple templates from different companies. Also che call feature looks interesting even though I never used it so far.

Cons:

There are things that needs improvement fast. I'll list a few. 1. Rooms should allow to sort murals in alphabetical order and to have a simple list visualization. Also names should not be cut like they are now (the only way to see the full name is via the tooltip) 2. Rooms and archive in my opinion are not enough to organize murals. It would be way better to have rooms and then the possibility to organize murals in folders inside a room. 3. It should be much easier to change the room/mural permissions. We often have sessions with dozens of people but only a few of them should have the possibility to edit. At the moment there is no bulk way to change the view only/edit permission 4. Grouping elements inside a mural should be enhanced. At the moment you cannot have a group of groups and that makes it harder to keep a logical architecture of the elements in a mural 5. At the moment there is no specific feature to create schemes or diagrams. We really would love that. 6. It would be much easier sometimes to have the possibility to specify the object size manually. 7. Content library needs to be improved to be really useful. Elements needs folders for a better organization.

Nothing else like it!

Comments: 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.

Mural is one of the best collaboration tools you can find

Pros:

We use it for everything, standup, retrospectives, mind mapping, online collaboration and much more. There are a lot of great templates.

Cons:

It is expensive and some templates are tricky to use.

Mural enables easy digital collaboration from novices to pros

Comments: I've been able to grow with mural and explore new worlds of collaboration ... both enhancing face to face workshops and enabling remote collaborators to have equal voices. Support from the mural team to help us explore new ways to effectively collaborate (not just use their software) have been compelling.

Pros:

I really appreciate how easy it is to dive in and get started with little complexity or knowledge. Drop some stickies on an empty whiteboard and you're off ... or play with templates, voting, and other advanced features to drive amazing new collaborations that are only possible in the digital world.

Cons:

In the past, I have disliked the lack of feature parity between web and mobile versions. That has recently improved.

A must have for distributed teams!

Comments: I have hosted entire multi day design sessions and Sprints with complex activities and it's been amazing.

Pros:

It's amazing for facilitating remote meetings and enabling equal participation between people all over the world.

Cons:

User management is the stickiest part. You can deactivate people who become inactive so you aren't being billed for them, but Slack has a nice feature that automatically does that and automatically turns them back on. If you deactivate someone, an admin must manually reactivate them upon request. It's a minor admin slowdown, separate from the actual functionality of the collaboration tools.

Great for Collaboration

Comments: Collaboration. It is great for workshops and sprints. The fact that everyone can see and work on it at the same time is great, especially during remote work

Pros:

The main value of this software is the collaboration aspect. I love that I can bring people together regardless of their tech fluency and with one icebreaker activity, I can get them to use the main functions they will need for the next few hours. The double click for post-its, the "follow me" function, are great. I love that you can paste a URL and it shows a thumbnail of the article.

Cons:

Unless you have certain permissions, it is difficult to change your name. It was random that some people had Avatar names like "Visiting Sheep" and others "Ryan (Visiting Squid)". People were confused why it was not changeable, even though the UI allows you to write before you enter the room. But then it doesn't reflect. It is also difficult to zoom into certain post its if they are outside the main board but on the same screen. Zoom functionality is weird.

Great collaborative tool! Powerful free version!

Pros:

The free version is great to start playing around with. It allows for up to 5 boards with unlimited members. Moving on to the paid version removes the 5 board limitations but still can collaborate with unlimited members which is a huge relief for a startup that is bootstrapping. It has features such as templates which is readily available and you can also create your own templates if you find that the current ones are insufficient. Not a steep learning curve but if you want to master it, you'll need to spend a bit more time learning the shortcuts.

Cons:

More selection of typefaces - currently limited to handful of those, and also no bullets Integration is richer in Miro - Trello, Drive, etc.

Good tool for ideation across teams

Comments: It’s a useful tool for ideation but I prefer it for smaller groups

Pros:

Ultimately this tool is great if you have teams located in different offices and you can’t physically get together

Cons:

There are so many functions available. I find setting up a Mural board can be time consuming and inevitably I forget to lock something down and a user goes rogue and messes something up or moves something they shouldnt

Mural for small teams

Pros:

Mural is similar to many other products but I like it the most because of the simple and clean user interface. Collaboration with team was never that easy and even the shyest people feel free to share ideas.

Cons:

Sometimes when you write too much text to sticky note, it becomes unreadable

Wayfinding is a little weird

Pros:

The mural.ly team is constantly garnering feedback in order to improve the product. While mural is a great concept to digitize the whiteboard, the execution is solid with room to improve. Great selection of icons and stickers.

Cons:

For my peers, I have observed it requires a higher learning curve in order to understand the controls and wayfinding around the board.

Simple - Visual - Powerful

Comments: Mural is the most intuitive and creative ideation software I have come across. No idea can hide if you get your organization on-board. There are low barriers to learning the tool so it is an easy sell.

Pros:

It's a virtual design studio on your computing device (yeah I said that).

Cons:

There have been occasions where I ran out of canvas on multi-day design events. The new, larger ideation space has largely fixed that.