Digital Whiteboards are not new to have come to light, as their use and collaboration grew even higher during the WFH era. But now that the WFH era put on pants and is hailing a cab to work, Zoom has launched whiteboards, a collaborative tool within its domain to help people interact creatively during Zoom meetings. As a UX designer, I use whiteboard applications pretty much every day at work, and need them to plan better, visualize ideas, and often present options to users, so naturally, I was intrigued about Zoom’s new addition. So, today I’ll be comparing one whiteboard application I use on the daily, Miro, and Zoom Whiteboards. But here’s where it gets interesting: I’m testing both on a touch interface, i.e. my iPad Pro.
I’ll be breaking this blog down by functionality so it’s easier to compare, but a small early spoiler is I was pleasantly surprised by Zoom’s whiteboards.
The Toolbar: Zoom
Zoom’s toolbar is pretty standard for a whiteboard, so I was quite pleased with what I saw:
The whiteboard comes with pretty standard functions as you can see on the left (forgive my handwriting) such as Select, Pen, Shapes, Line/Connectors, Texts, Sticky Notes, Images, Eraser, Undo/Redo, and Pages.
If your team wants to get some basic collaboration work done that gets later transferred into a detailed, comprehensive version, this toolbar can get your job done.
The Toolbar: Miro
The Miro toolbar is quite extensive compared to the Zoom toolbar, as you can see on your right.
From top to bottom you can see some familiar functions, such as Select, Text, Sticky Notes, Shapes, Connectors, Pen, Comments, Redo/Undo… But there are a few things that make Miro boards a more flexible solution: Templates, Frames, “More Actions” and Documentation Panel. We'll look at them more closely further in the article.
Miro offers the flexibility to your team to be comprehensive with your whiteboards, whether be it creating mind maps or something as complex as a service blueprint, Miro has you covered.
Winner: Miro
It is a bit obvious at this stage as Miro provides you more options to play with along with the ability to make your board as extensive as you want, the sky is really the limit! Although it might be an unfair advantage at this stage considering Miro has been in the market for longer than Zoom, maybe we'll see Zoom catching on pretty quick!
The Pen: Zoom
The pen provides 8 colors and 3 weights for use, and you can switch between pencil-thin to Marker thick. You can also switch between Pen or Highlighter, where you have the same color options.
On use, the pen is fairly decent, has minimal latency, and flows well; though a bit wonky on weights. Writing with the thinner pen provides the least amount of latency between the stroke and the input, and the thicker marker provides higher latency between stroke and input, but they are well under a range you can ignore.
Though the highlighter really sent my pen out of whack: strokes were going just about anywhere and I couldn't control the screen. Also even touching the screen set off the pen, which was not a pleasant experience.
The Pen: Miro
Miro's pen is flexible in picking your weights and colors and customizing them according to your personal use. You have three pens, and, you can customize all three to your liking. However, you cannot add more than three presets. There is also a highlighter option, but the highlighter sadly only has three colors to choose from.
Now coming to latency which seems a standard high across all three pens, regardless of the thickness you choose, the same goes for the highlighter. If you are looking for the pen to paper experience with Miro, you might be disappointed.
Though there's one great feature that Miro has added with pens is Smart shapes; you can draw something resembling a circle and Miro will convert it into a perfect circle.
Winner: Miro
If you can overlook the latency issues with Miro, I think the pen in Miro is a standout; it provides a wider range of colors with a customizable thickness on three pens and Smart shapes. It may be lacking on highlighter colors, where Zoom takes the cake, but overall the experience was much better, considering Zoom's highlighter made my strokes "zoom" across the board.
Unique Feature: Zoom Pages
About last week as I was working on Miro, I thought to myself, "wouldn't it be nice if Miro had pages?"
Lo and Behold, Zoom answered.
You can create up to 12 pages within a single whiteboard, which means you have 12 whiteboards within a single whiteboard. That is a staggering 36 boards you can create within the free plan. Though an added note: Zoom whiteboards only offer 25MB of cloud storage, so if you use high res images, zoom may not be the call for you.
Comparatively, Miro has three free boards where you can use the space almost infinitely, though three boards can be limiting if you use whiteboards on a daily.
Unique Feature: Miro Frames
If you've used any prototyping tool or any adobe tools recently, you must love frames. They are perfect to keep your work on track, create sequences, and even be handy in presentations on a whiteboard.
You can create any number of frames within your project, lock the content, fill them with any color of your choice and even export them as an image.
Winner: It's a tie
It really depends on your usage. If you are a heavy whiteboard user and you do not need to do complex planning or wireframing within your whiteboard, Zoom is a great option. You have a good number of boards within the free plan, and the tools are great for collaboration. On the other hand, if you want to solve complex problems on your whiteboard, Miro is the answer. The number of boards may be less, but the versatility within one board is quite extensive.
The Pricing: Zoom
The Zoom pricing is built-in with their meeting plans on Basic, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Free whiteboard is pretty standard with 3 editable boards, but you might be hindered by the 25MB cloud storage. You can however get unlimited whiteboards as an add-on for $24.90/year/license to your current zoom plan.
The Pricing: Miro
Miro's pricing is built around its boards, and it can be as cheap as 0$ with unlimited team members but limited boards (3 boards) with access to templates and the basic features. The Team plan to bill at $96/member annually for a team plan where you can access unlimited boards, projects, custom templates, and private boards. The Business plan however comes in at a whopping $192/member annually, and is also promising a "meetings" function within the board soon!
Winner: You decide!
Again, depends on your usage! Do you want easily accessible templates ready for use within your board, or do you want to use your board for light showcasing on a Zoom call, it's up to you! Miro is a lot pricier compared to the add-on that Zoom whiteboards offer, but they provide you with extra features as well for complex collaboration.
Extra Features: Miro
In this section I would just like to highlight some of my favorites within Miro that I use quite extensively, it does not necessarily give an edge to Miro over zoom, but since Zoom whiteboards are quite new, they might implement these features in the long run.
Templates
Templates are one of the best things to have happened to whiteboard tools in a long time. They save you a ton of time pondering how to plan for workshops or collaborative sessions yourself, you can just pull them from Miro's list. They can be dragged into the interface or you can add them from the list, prefilled or blank.
They have several great options ranging from S.C.A.M.P.E.R. , to customer touchpoint maps to dot voting.
Documentation Panel
The documentation panel comes with three tabs within Miro, namely Frames, Comments, and History.
Since I have already discussed Frames, let us move to comments.
The comments tab lets you track comments within the file, though to actually leave a comment you may need to select the "comment" option from the toolbar.
History is an option that I really like; If you are a part of a larger team, you may find it difficult to track changes during open collaboration. History helps you in understanding who made changes and where making monitoring changes and even saving versions of a board easier.
More Actions
More actions and Templates are the two functions in Miro that really take the cake for me; the versatility of your tool becomes limitless and you're able to create almost everything at your fingertips, including inserting iframes, tables, google images and it even lends to a wireframe library for your access. If that wasn't enough, you can even add more applications to your repository.
Thank you for reading my experience in using these tools, it's always great to see new tools come to life, and I'll continue sharing my experience using them as well! You can try both on the links below:
Zoom: https://zoom.us/download
Miro: https://miro.com/signup/
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