Mural reviews

Deze tool is echt geweldig. Tijdens de corona pandemie waren we in staat om goede brainstorms te organiseren op afstand. Iedereen in het team dacht dat dit niet kon, maar het tegendeel is bewezen. Iedereen kan post-its plakken, je kunt onafhankelijk van elkaar voten etc. Ik raad iedereen deze tool aan die een goede brainstorm wilt organiseren op afstand.

Het nadeel aan Mural vind ik de user management. Soms zijn er meerdere teamleden ingelogd op hetzelfde account, waardoor je voor elkaar gaat stemmen. Ik zou het fijn vinden als er een signaal werd afgegeven dat er al iemand is ingelogd op het account. Dat ontbreekt nu.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Mural is indeed collaborative ! The fact that you can see what the other person around the world is doing, without sharing screen, is amazing ! Mural is that digital whiteboard with free stickies where you could do anything ! And it comes with so many templates !!

We cannot talk via mural . I’d need another software or tool to do that! Imagine Mural + slack in one !

MURAL helps team members stay connected and collaborate to stay on schedule. The MURAL whiteboard is great for brainstorming and arranging interactive sessions. I adore using emojis, shapes, and colors to develop a workflow model or collect team members' opinions and perceptions on a topic for third-party sharing. I like how MURAL lets us prepare Proto-Personas, Prioritize, and Experience Map with team members. It's expressive, accurate, and describes our issue well. I like MURAL's ability to organize cards into categories and assign cards to team members so everyone is on the same page. I like that MURAL has an intuitive interface that everyone can adopt to quickly, and the presence of several ready-made templates helps prepare the proper form for the topic we're discussing. I particularly like that final renderings may be exported as an image or PDF file for simple distribution.

In all honesty, it's not about finding something you might hate with MURAL, as it's like a magical drawing tablet that enables everyone to share and collaborate in all circumstances and with ease.

1) Ready to use templates (Business, retro)
2) No need to register
3) Easy to use
4) Helpful customer support

UI has room for improvisation

The current UI looks clutter

Need to motivate folks to use Mural

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.

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

I’ve used Mural for over 2 years now to run remote workshops with groups of up to 15 participants. My clients really love it! The best thing about it in my view is that you can build from independent work to group exercises and discussions and using brainstorming and the voting tool to drive decision making and action. I also like that you can invite people to collaborate with you without them having to pay for membership. I’m the Mural expert at my organisation, I’ve created a short course covering all the things people typically want to know about using the tool all Ng with some best practice tips: [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]

The only thing that used to bug me about Mural was the fact that you couldn’t identify participants who joined as visitors (one time collaborators appear as anonymous animals). I noticed recently that visitors can now add their name which is really useful.I expect this change came from Mural user feedback, they do seem to develop the features over time.

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.

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

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.

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.

With this amazing application I can easily insert photo, videos and different multimedia files into one specific folder to have an easy access to them. Another feature that is my most favorite is its integration power that enables me to integrate with all the useful applications of my interest in a very unique way.

For me there is no drawback in it only sometimes the updates give useless errors but otherwise everything is perfectly fine.

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.

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

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.

+ Clean interface, smooth work even on older PC/Browser.
+ Intuitive
+ Great support for larger teams in mind mapping/whideboarding

- Too expensive if compared to competitors

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