Mural Reviews

Mural is ideal for creating mind maps and very easy-to-use flowcharts. The number of pre-designed templates it has is endless. It allows the anonymous entry (without registration) of many people to a board to work on it. It offers a limited free version that allows you to create up to a maximum of 5 boards. (more than Miro, for example) Previously the tool only offered a trial version for 30 days.

It has few integrations developed for external applications.
The clip art gallery is limited but also supports the user's own images.

I love how easy Mural makes the process of visual 'mind-mapping' among remote co-workers. If we want to do an exercise, for example, that requires virtual 'sticky-notes' for brainstorming process improvements, Mural facilitates this process seamlessly.

Mural does take a little time to get up to speed on using it. You can definitely jump right in on some of the basic features, but to use some of its more advanced features (keyboard shortcuts, for example), it will take some time to learn them.

Easy to access, and get everyone onto the platform. Fun animal names were a nice touch. The interface has improved over time but is fundamentally flawed.

Was a glorified whiteboard. For the price we would pay to support the business, Mural would do little more for us than to provide a simple whiteboard to put down ideas and discuss. Although this is nice to get ideas out there - it lacks the ability to create structure and keep things organized over time. Would find ourselves consistently looking for information as it was lost - not sure how we could've implemented the software in a valuable way in the long term.

Mural is the thing you don't think you need and resist paying for or trying because you just don't need one more digital tool in your life and workflow. Until you experience it and realize you were so wrong. It's the one tool you actually can't live without. The concept is simple: a free space to create with a simple range of options (mostly text boxes and post-it notes). Think of it like a digital whiteboard. Then try to imagine life and meetings without a physical whiteboard. Exactly.

The range of options for what you can add to a Mural is somewhat limited, but that's a key part of its success. Having too many options would be paralyzing. Once you master the basic controls and options, the sky is the limit for what you can do. Lots of templates are available to help you get started or inspire you with what others have done and the Mural team is always offering support and webinars to help you explore the tool more deeply. One thing that has frustrated new users is getting the hang of controls especially if you are using on a computer (mouse vs trackpad controls are a bit different). But that is easily solved if you can get over your initial discomfort and commit to learning something new.

I love that I can send anyone a link to a MURAL board and within 5 minutes they're totally comfortable using it. Yet beyond its simple on-boarding experience is a lot of flexibility that supports a wide variety of use cases.

There are some small interaction details reduce elegance: I'm not crazy about how its arrows/lines connect to notes/shapes. And it's hard to have a consistent typographic hierarchy, because text scales with shapes, and there's no other way to control type size.

Mural is the tool I've always been looking for to visualise concepts and create conceptual maps. But it is not only this, it can be a presentation tool, you can make infographics with it, you can easily and rapidly create artwork that does not need the use of Photoshop or Illustrator. It's the tool everybody should use to present ideas to the customers. What I like most of Mural is the ease of use, the millions of icons you have and can personalise with colour and the fact that you can drag and drop text, links, videos and gifs.

Few options could be improved to make it even better. For example you cannot decide the size of text therefore when you enlarge text boxes you loose track of the size. There is no option to create simple tables yet, deciding the number of columns and rows. There is no media library so you have to upload every time images instead of choosing from a library or copy and paste them from another mural. Alignment sometimes is not very accurate.

Mural is awesome! The thing I love the most about mural is that it allows os to visualized our work and projects in a virtual space, and many people can access it and work from it at the same time.

It was hard to learn at first. If you are trying to get a team on board with using Mural, or a new member of the team, it can be very challenging to get them to learn. Specially if you are asking them to lead a full design session or activities that need to take place on the Mural. It takes time to get used to it.

Ease of use - almost like having a real whiteboard in the room, easy to access by non-members

Like any software, getting people unfamiliar with it to be comfortable collaborating can take some effort.

This software amazes. As a displayed thinking practitioner - I have long awaited the day where paper and pen could finally be matched by digital capability. We are at the dawn of that age. Too often these tools output look like something made in Microsoft Paint. Not the case here. It's elegant is display, intuitive in UX and powerful in import (templates) and export (data) . Integration and side by side use with Office 365 suite seems flawless.

Integration of stylus based writing is needed. Some other competitors offer the ability to transform one's handwriting into functional text which is lacking here. Having a stylus input option to create a "sticky note" and use your own handwriting would be next level for this product.

This tool allows teams to take the complicated, organically generated, unsorted data that can come out of brainstorming or workshops and arrange it into something meaningful. It creates a standard language for teams to express this info.

It's quick to learn and easy to use, and allows for the right type of expression for any info set.

Administrating a team could be done better. It's too easy to invite more team members than your plan pays for. This is because the button to share a mural to an email address (which adds a team member) is easier to get to than the link to share anonymously. Fortunately there is a 30 day grace period for these mistakes.

I find Mural more intuitive to use and less buggy than other whiteboarding tools. The app especially syncs quickly so you can use an ipad and pencil to write on the whiteboard, and have it projected through a desktop to a conference room or virtual meeting. I also like that the white boards are infinite (or at least as far as I can tell). Even though the number of free boards is limited to three, you have tons of space to work with in each one.

I don't love the provided templates; I typically end up using my own for simplicity.

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).

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.

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

It is expensive and some templates are tricky to use.

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.

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.

The software works really well. Even when collaborating with many other users simultaneously, the "Facilitation Superpowers" are a convenient set of tools.

I started using Mural on the trial version, and when the trial expired, they locked me out. I had to contact the support team, which gave me a few more days to export a PDF version of my murals. They claim to have a "free forever" version now. But I haven't tested it yet.

Canvas style whiteboard in the cloud with the right tools on-board to collaborate in a visual manner.
Mural Community to share ideas

Drawing tools not optimised for sketching but already improved a lot

Mural has been great especially for brainstorming and collaborative activities during covid and with non co-located teams. It’s an intuitively designed easy to use virtual whiteboarding tool that comes with templates that you can use for exercises that you might want to run. Particularly great for usage for design thinking sessions or activities where you want everyone to participate.

It does take a few uses to get used to how the tool works and the zooming in and out functionality doesn’t always work as you want it to. It can be hard to know what size sticky notes you should use. But after a few tries it gets pretty easy to use.

We have tried and tested a few different versions of the learning portfolio. Using Mural as a learning portfolio is one of the most effective ways I have found that students can capture their learning and experiences. It is a non-linear way of demonstrating how our learning is multifaceted and interconnected. It allows students to be ultra creative in how they represent and capture their skill acquisition. It is rare that students in science are asked to be creative. Having this creative outlet allows students to express themselves in a different way!

The zooming in and out can be a bit challenging, but multiple versions get saved in case you wish to go back...

Mural has allowed me (a member of a virtual team) to advance our organization's use of Human-Centered Design techniques without always having to bring the group into an in-person meetings. Because of the savings in cost / time due to virtual work, it more than pays for itself, AND it helps to keep the teams connected and brainstorming together.

It can take a little while for teams to get used to it and come up to speed on how to use it most effectively.

It is really good for brainstorming, you can visualize the ideas on post-its and you if you are the host you can move them to organize them

It is not super easy to zoom the post its, I would also see more templates for different dynamics. It has lots of potential to be use for different activities like Customer Journey Map.

For all of my creative brainstormers, Mural is the place to kick off new and existing product development. I love that Mural offers different templates for people to get started from where they are. The templates help those with a learning curve move quicker, and then that SME is able to help the team start using the software and not feel intimidated.

I can't think of a single thing I dislike about Mural. It's easy, efficient, and has been around for a long time.

While Murals primary deals with User Interface and Wireframes design, I feel we could handle requirements end to end - right from calling out navigations, add rules and User journeys to it.

One would be need some of amount of instruction or training to pick this tool, self learning process is little time taking.

The templates that are widely available in Mural are very functional and intuitive. Our team was able to adapt to the new normal of working from home thanks to Mural's agile boards/kanban boards to discuss our day to day tasks.

It can take quite some time to get used to. The sticky notes are a hit or miss sometimes since by default when you put in a note the sizing is very small. The overall symmetry and look of Mural could use some work so that it can be much more organized

Really easy to pick up this tool and use it broadly with client teams, doesn't require app download which is great as some companies have app restrictions. Easy navigation that even non tech-savy people could quickly adapt too

Can be difficult to use on a tablet - not as intuitive

The main strength in my opinion is the ease of use and interaction that the tool allows.
It also allows you to easily collaborate and share your ideas, not forgetting the graphic presentation.

Initially I had some "visual" difficulties in the sense that the work area is very large so it was dispersive to see everything.