Bluescape is a cloud-based, software as a service company based in Silicon Valley, CA, that provides a digital whiteboard of the same name.
$10
per user, per month (10-50 licenses)
Mural
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) from Tactivos (DBA MURAL) in San Francisco is described by the vendor as a digital workspace and visual collaboration tool, designed for creative teams to make the process of design more efficient for distributed teams, working remotely.
This digital version of a pin-up space is absolutely an improvement to my workflow. The input is so robust. What you do with it is where the magic happens. This program is best suited for team collaboration. It helps to discuss how/where the team will contribute information to it--whether that is discussing the templates or a plan of action. Otherwise, the workspace can tend to get messy. I like the idea of having a presentation mode, where some of the markups could be hidden. The idea of a working session with consultants or clients sounds appealing, but at the same time, there is a desire for a cleaned up, clear shareout.
Remote Collaboration: In a remote or distributed work environment, Mural shines. It enables teams to collaborate effectively in real-time, bridging geographical gaps and facilitating virtual meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions. Workshop Facilitation: For facilitators leading workshops or team-building activities, Mural provides interactive templates and tools for engaging participants and achieving specific objectives.
We have uploaded Ceros, PowerPoint, renderings and website links to our wall for new client presentations and they are always impressed with the technology.
Ceros is a pretty robust program that has links and different touch points and customers love clicking and scrolling through information posted.
We use one wall to post all of our customer boards so we can quickly jump into a different board and show new ideas or companies that we have done business with with a few quick swipes.
Chat function is less than ideal. It is easy to lose track of a conversation or a comment. We find making comments on the workspace turns out to be more effective.
Mentions--it would be nice to be able to assign groups within the people added to the workspace. Sometimes it'd be nice to do a quick mention with out having to do @everyone or type several names in (@person1, @person 2, etc.)
Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.
I've only used the Google one and the Microsoft one, and those have pretty limited features in comparison. The canvas size being huge is a great asset to me because nothing sucks more than when you literally can't fit your ideas on the canvas. Also the speed it updates and how easy it is to share around with people seems to be easier.
I like it better than Miro because MURAL's more informal feel makes it encourage conversation and use. Miro also let's you bury too much information "inside" the notes making it really easy to lose sight of important data. I like MURAL better than Lucidspark because of how fast the pages load, especially links within the board. Any app is better than Microsoft whiteboard which is appalling unusable and feature incomplete.
