Collaboration & Whiteboarding

An online whiteboard for product designers is doing one of two jobs: running a workshop with other people, or thinking on your own somewhere that is not a document.

Miro and Mural are the workshop tools. Both are infinite canvases with templates, voting and facilitation features, and both charge per user once a team grows. FigJam is the obvious choice when the team already lives in Figma — cheaper per editor, and it opens beside the design file instead of in another tab.

Excalidraw is where to start if you only need to sketch. Open source, free, no account, and the hand-drawn look keeps early work looking deliberately unfinished, which is useful when you do not want feedback on the wrong thing yet. Draw.io covers the same ground for flowcharts and architecture diagrams. Whimsical is faster than any of them for flows and wireframes specifically, and harder to justify at scale.

Mermaid is the outlier: diagrams written as plain text, versioned in Git and rendered inside Markdown. If your diagrams live beside code, that beats any canvas.

Prices are checked by hand and the drawbacks are stated.