Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
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Miro
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Miro provides a visual workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to dream, design, and build the future together. Today, Miro counts more than 60 million users in 200,000 organizations who use Miro to improve product development collaboration, to speed up time to market, and to make sure that new products and services deliver on customer needs.
$10
per month per user
Pricing
Google Chat
Miro
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
1. Free - To discover what Miro can do. Always free
$0
2. Starter - Unlimited and private boards with essential features
$8
per month (billed annually) per user
3. Business - Scales collaboration with advanced features and security
$16
per month (billed annually) per user
4. Enterprise - For work across the entire organization, with support, security and control, to scale
contact sales
annual billing per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Chat
Miro
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Monthly billing also available at $10 per month for the Starter plan, or $20 for the Business plan.
The main reason why we chose it - the overall G Suite solution, that we bought. We have Google Calendar, GMail & Chat built in. In order not to waste money - we decided to use Google Chat. It works fine, however, as said before, if you had experience with Slack - then you might …
Well suited for businesses of all sizes. HOWEVER, I would say keep the chat groups limited at the departmental level, ensure that your moderator or the individual responsible for the group keeps it on topic, and have your IT team monitor it from time to time. Google Chat gets used so much in our organization that we have rules and regs in our Employee Handbook regarding its proper use (and when used PROPERLY, it can be very effective).
Miro is great for a medium-big company like a corporate one because it has many efficient features set for big scheme companies. It could help manage budgets for the IT/ Help Desk sections. However, I find it less appropriate for a startup company where the budget could be limited and personal.
Retro. At different stages of the meeting it is important to be able to work with the board at the same time (to indicate what went well or badly), as well as to be able to quickly visualize the information (to combine clusters of problems) and to indicate solutions with arrows.
Display information at different levels of abstraction. This is especially important for our product backlog. It is important for different people in the organization to see different levels of presentation.
All the benefits of a physical whiteboard, plus the advantages of the digital world. Working with the world is extremely intuitive. You can invite people who use Miro once a week and I don't have to do a 15 minute briefing on how to use the tool for them.
Free vs. paid licenses - our IT department makes it hard for our associates to gain access so people are left unable to participate because they have to ask for a license and sit in an IT black hole
Admittedly I am a creature of habit and don't totally understand what Miro offers and what all the symbols mean - perhaps a way to use tutorials or have more help understanding in my flow that something could be helping me or save me time would be interesting. AI predicts what I'm trying to do?
I have various sections on my board, all different fonts. I don't know how that happened or if I can make everything sync up so it's legible as I cruise through without zooming out and in but that would be nice.
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
There is no other tool like Miro for process Mapping in particular. I've tried PowerPoint, Word, and other programs, but when collaborating virtually on how to improve a process, Miro has all of the tools and more to enable successful mapping. The colors, different types of shapes and text books, along with the ability to integrate different documents and other functionality, make it ideal for this purpose. In a virtual world, it's a must-have.
It's not perfect. There are occasional glitches, drop-outs, and it takes a bit to get everything loaded and working. But it is significantly better than Zoom or GoToMeeting when you're in instructional settings. I know my teacher friends here like it and the administrators and parents seem to be satisfied too.
It's pretty easy to use. My gripes are with some small idiosyncrasies with selection behavior with objects and editing text. When I move an object, it automatically de-selects it when I am not done with it. I have to click to select again. Text control is challenging and could be improved. It could use a little more styling capability. It's also weird that it behaves differently in a shape then when using the text tool.
I only give a 9/10 because of the speed at which it loads. I have never experienced issues with Miro logging me out early, or some other technical issue causing the program to crash, or even it just loading in perpetuity without ever actually coming up (unlike other programs such as SFDC). It take a minute for all of my boards to come up after I click on it in my favorites, but besides that, it's all good.
I took the loading quickly to be related to availability which I commented on before, so ditto with those comment on load time here. Although to reemphasize, Miro doesn't crash or just refuse to load like some other programs. The weak point of Miro for me is integration of files like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (especially the later two). When you embed these, it gets slow, and complicated to bring them up while you're in the application.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
The support staff at Miro are fantastic. Whenever I have had an issue, they have been timely and helpful with their response. They are also very knowledgeable and go out of their way to not only help, but offer proactive training sessions on different topics and new functionality so everyone can try it out.
There was a series of webinars which Miro hosted with our organization that went over the basics, then progressively became more advanced with additional sections. The instructors were knowledgeable, and provided examples throughout the sessions, as well as answered peoples' questions. There was ample time and experience on the calls to cover a range of topics. The instructors were also very friendly and sociable, as well as honest. Of course Miro isn't a "God-tool" that does absolutely everything, but the instructors were aware and emphasized the strengths where Miro had them and sincerely accepted feedback.
There was not enough training for users to understand all the key features. The rollout was very high-level, but when users are expected to start adopting it, you have to ensure they are given the proper tools to do so. Miro is a great tool, and proper training is key to adoption.
Prior to Google Hangouts, our company used Spark. Spark was not integrated into our email, therefore it couldn't be easily accessed in the same browser. With Spark we also couldn't search our emails for keywords in a conversation, searching had to be done manually. The one feature I enjoyed about Spark was a request to get a user's attention: If I had an urgent question and I wanted to ensure the recipient saw my message/question, I would request their attention and the message screen would pop up on their screen.
Miro is visually appealing, very inviting, and easy to use for the most part. It has all the drawing tools to connect shapes, create aligned diagrams, change colors, establish a layout, and color them. You can quickly change font sizes. In our meetings, teammates are very willing to follow along on Miro.
Miro is great for scaling. In every department and subdivision across my entire organization, there is someone using it. From Sales to marketing, to manufacturing and operations; and even in legal and finance, there isn't a process or a department that is not using Miro, and if they aren't, they're missing out! Even at the highest to the lowest levels of the organization, it is essential for virtual collaboration.
We're able to collaborate remotely as if we had a big wall with a lot of sticky notes, avoiding costly travel to offsite locations. ($350 per day)
Meetings flow more efficiently when we use the timer, helping us to stick to the meeting agenda and avoiding distractions.
We can save our work and return to it, without having to refer to a picture of a whiteboard that is hard to read. This saves us from confusion and helps to keep collaboration going.
