Mural

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. However, one of Mural's drawbacks is its lack of support for interactive charts and reports. Miro, Mural's closest competitor among the apps we've tested, is our Editors' Choice winner for collaborative whiteboard software because it is slightly more intuitive, especially for new users. Additionally, it includes a few tools Mural lacks. Their scores differ by only half a point, though, and the choice between them may come down to personal preferences.

How Much Does Mural Cost?

Mural offers four tiers of service: Free, Team+ ($12 per person per month or $119.88 per person per year), Business ($215.88 per person per year), and Enterprise (custom pricing).

The Free plan is more than adequate to try out the app and decide whether it's worth an upgrade. There's no limit to how many collaborators you can invite to join you, but you are limited to having only three murals. You get all the visual collaboration and facilitation feature, except for in-app chat. And you get a full template library.

The Team+ plan includes everything in Free and removes the limit on how many murals you can have. Additionally, this plan includes privacy control for rooms and murals, in-app chat, and email support.

The Business plan includes everything in Team+ and adds a flexible membership model, priority support, the ability for your administrator to set up SAML single sign-on, onboarding training, unlimited guests, and advanced integrations such as Jira and GitHub.

The Enterprise account adds administrator controls and options, access to enterprise APIs, API key management, and other advanced back-end features.

Mural costs about the same as other similar apps. Miro, for example, runs $8 to $16 per person per month. Prezi, an unconventional presentation app, has a bevy of paid plans starting from about $84 per year up to $348 per year (no monthly options), with low-cost plans for educators and students, too.

Many of the best video conferencing services, including Zoom (paid accounts from $15.99 per month), have collaborative whiteboards built in for real-time brainstorming. However, that's different 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.

(Credit: Mural/PCMag)

How Is Mural Different?

While Mural is a fast and flexible app for collaboration, some of its closest competitors give you 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.

(Credit: Mural/PCMag)

Storage and Apps

As mentioned earlier, Mural handles storage for all accounts, with no options to use your own storage. The same is true of Miro and Prezi. While it's convenient for these apps to provide storage, some organizations may prefer—or be required—to handle their own storage. It should be an option for enterprise accounts at the least.

Mural is available on the web and for Windows and Mac. There are also mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android devices, 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, run polls, and set 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.

Getting Started With Mural

To get going with Mural, you create an account with an email address. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a new set of credentials, you can just use your Google or Microsoft accounts instead. 

Inside the app, the layout is straightforward. On the left, a navigation rail provides quick access to your most recent Murals, dozens of templates, or Rooms, which are like folders for organizing your work. Rooms can be private or open for others in your account to join. Also on the left, there’s a button for creating a new Mural, plus any other files that are available to open.

There are also learning resources available in the top area of the screen which are excellent and may help you explore some of the tools that aren't highly intuitive. For example, you must already be co-editing or viewing a Mural to start an audio call with your collaborators. There is no option for video calls. A representative for Mural told us this was a deliberate choice made so as not to detract 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 simplest level of interaction is creating sticky notes on the canvas to jot down an idea. Making those notes in different colors and shapes, resizing them, and changing the point size of the text on them is all easy.

Making sticky notes is so easy that you may often do it accidentally. 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 note 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. We 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 we found them 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 a trackpad user, you can opt for a pinch-zoom and double-finger swipe to pan. 

In exploring Mural, you'll find assets you can pull onto the canvas, such as arrows, lines, shapes, and icons. You can search for images to include without leaving the canvas. You can import them from your device or look online for them, including on Unsplash, Giphy, or in your very own Adobe Creative Cloud Library. Mural also gives you “Tables and areas” (formerly known as frameworks), which are similar to templates (discussed in more detail below), but are treated as objects on your canvas, whereas templates are canvases with objects already on them. An example is introducing a table or grid area.

As handy as that all is, however, the charts, graphs, and tables in Miro are easier to use. 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. The tables you add in Mural are harder to fill in and require extra steps to do so. 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 almost 400 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.

(Credit: Mural/PCMag)

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. However, you do get diagram-style templates in competitor Miro, and they are the focus of flowchart and diagramming software, such as Lucidchart.

As you learn 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 tabletop 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. This is what it sounds like. 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. Another thing you can do is import files from Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.

(Credit: Mural/PCMag)

With Mural, you can integrate other apps and bring some of their assets onto your canvas. Jira and GitHub, for example, doubtless get a lot of mileage for technical teams. 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, though most 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. You can save any canvas as a template of your own. You can also export a specific area of a canvas as a PDF or PNG.

If you want to isolate specific content on your canvas, such as issues from GitHub or Jira or plain text, you export just that part.

AI in Mural

Mural now has an AI integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This lets you use natural language to give commands to Mural, thereby simplifying tasks. It could be useful when brainstorming ideas or summarizing notes, for instance.

Mural AI can help you better visualize your ideas by creating mind maps for you, generating ideas after simple prompts, or finding patterns within your notes. Setting up Microsoft 365 Copilot within Mural takes quite a few steps, however. As with all AI, we caution you to not trust any information that comes from it unless you fact-check it.

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 can do for additional language support is to use a web browser plug-in to translate them.

Verdict: Mural Is Fast and Useful for Team Collaboration

Because it facilitates real-time co-editing and is easy to use, we recommend Mural to teams looking for a tool to support team brainstorming. Mural's templates and features emphasize collaboration and team-building much more than competitors. However, it doesn't give you as much as competitors when it comes to tools and templates for making diagrams and flowcharts. Miro has a few advantages over Mural, including a better set of tools for creating charts and graphs, so it's our Editors' Choice winner for collaboration tools.