The best digital whiteboard? - Jamboard, Miro or Mural
A comparison of 3 of the most popular digital whiteboards - Jamboard, Miro, and Mural.
What are Jamboard, Miro and Mural?
If five or ten years ago our weekly meetings had a whiteboard and colorful markers at the center of the office where we wrote the school goals, sketched out Venn diagrams, or brainstormed new business ideas…today our virtual meetings have virtual whiteboards. Tools like Jamboard, Miro and Mural are making our team meetings a little easier to manage.
Otherwise known as digital whiteboards or online whiteboards, Jamboard, Miro, and Mural are designed to facilitate collaboration, visual communication, and they can be used in business meetings, educational settings, and creative brainstorming sessions.
Here are 6 features and functionalities typically found in online whiteboards are:
1. Drawing/Writing Tools such as (virtual) pens, pencils, markers, and erasers, which allow users to write text, create diagrams, and sketches. Text can be formatted in various ways.
2. Digital Sticky Notes that can be added to the whiteboard, allowing you to write down ideas, comments, or reminders, just like you would do with the yellow sticky notes we used to get at the beginning of every year.
3. Templates and Backgrounds are offered by many whiteboard applications to help you structure your content and make it more visually engaging.
4. Zoom in and out allows you to see the bigger picture, but also navigate to intricate details of the space. No need for erasing or creating multiple boards. Virtual whiteboards are practically endless.
5. Multi-User Collaboration is perhaps the most practical functionality of online whiteboards. You can join your team in taking notes from all over the globe.
6. Import and Export is possible with most whiteboards. You can bring photos, videos, etc into the board, as well as export the content created in the whiteboard for future reference or sharing.
In this article we introduce and compare the 3 most used online whiteboards - Jamboard, Miro and Mural. Here is how these 3 platforms define themselves:
Jamboard is a digital whiteboard that lets you collaborate in real time using either the Jamboard device (a 55-inch digital whiteboard that works with G Suite services), web browser or mobile app.
Miro is the online workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to dream, design, and build the future together.
Mural is a digital environment designed to make collaboration visual, accessible, and engaging for your entire team.
But what are the differences between the 3 digital whiteboards? Below we compare our experience in using all 3 of them and discuss similarities and differences in 4 main aspects. Consider them before you choose the one that fits your needs better.
Customization
Overall, Miro offers more customization (colors, tool sizes, image manipulation, etc), while Jamboard and Mural are more simplistic.
Miro also offers more specific access control and permission settings than Jamboard and Mural. If you are dealing with somewhat confidential information this is worth keeping in mind.
User friendliness
When you try out all 3 tools, the interfaces are similar. They work with an infinite canvas, where you can place sticky notes, shapes, etc. You can then zoom in and out of the canvas and navigate with your mouse and/or keyboard. There is no clear winner in this category because all 3 tools, despite their differences, are very similar and intuitive. All 3 offer guides, tutorials, and free templates that you can customize based on your own individual needs.
Integration
Jamboard’s strongest point would be the seamless integration with the Google Workspace ecosystem - it is a Google product after all. However, it is important for us to note here that Google doesn't have the best track record for keeping products in their original form (check out killedbygoogle.com for a list of the “Google graveyard”), and it might not be wise to expect indefinite support of the physical Jamboard display (55-inch, 4k display) that they offer in integration with the digital white board.
Between Mural and Miro, the latter is a bit more advanced in integrations overall and has a more advanced API which helps developers build apps on top of it.
Price
Jamboard is free with a Google account.
Miro is free for teachers, although it's limited to 100 users and one team workspace. Students get free access for two years with a student email address.
Mural offers free versions (no time limit), as well as paid plans.
Other notes
Video Conference: Mural offers a feature called Quick Talk, that allows board collaborators to jump on a voice call with each other. Miro offers an in-product video chat for up to 25 participants. The quality isn’t the same as Zoom or Google Meets, but it's workable.
Mind-mapping: One very neat feature that I noticed in Miro is the mind mapping tool, which makes diagrams so much easier than using other tools that these 3 online whiteboards have. Below is a screenshot of this feature in Miro.
How do these 3 tools compare in the classroom?
All the comparisons we introduced above stand true when choosing a digital whiteboard for your (online) classroom as well. However, when discussing their value as educational tools we would add the following additional notes:
All three are great tools for online collaboration between the students, and for instant feedback from the teacher and each other, as any changes are reflected instantaneously. We have seen teachers use these digital boards to check in on how students are feeling (by asking them to place a colored circle on a graph, or choose an emoji among many), facilitate asynchronous discussions (by using sticky notes to group ideas and comments), or homework assignments (by creating their own whiteboard templates). Each tool has an extensive template library to help you get started and inspired.
All three are intuitive and don’t have a steep learning curve, however Miro does offer more features and customization, so we would recommend that for grades 8 and above. Out of the three, Jamboard seems the quickest to learn, thus, we find it suitable even for students of grade 4 and above.
None of the tools are great when it comes to accessibility, specifically related to users of assistive technology or keyboard-only access. It is important to note that Miro seems to be ahead of the others and constantly making improvements. (Find their monthly accessibility updates here.)
To conclude: As you may see, all 3 tools have many similarities, as well as a few features and aspects that might make all the difference depending on your needs. We will leave that choice to you!
If you have tried or will try any of these tools, we would love to hear from you: hello@socratica.com
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