Azure DevOps vs. MindManager vs. Miro

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

It is well suited for a quick prototype of product/development planning to show relationships amongst the APIs used. This helps developers understand the impact of the product changes and identifies the need to update integration components to avoid erroneous deployments. I have not personally experienced a less appropriate scenario at the moment.

Incentivized

Miro is a comprehensive visual collaboration solution that suits companies of any size thanks to its amazing capabilities. It will allow your team members to brainstorm and share ideas in real-time. You will enjoy how this visual collaboration solution will boost collaboration in your company. It is easy to implement.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Allows me to learn by organizing notes.
• Enables me to create and present strategic plans.
• Empowers me to present complex concepts in a different and straightforward way.
• Captivates my audience when I prepare and present a conference, a class, or a seminar in MindManager.
• Allows me to share mind maps in a variety of formats like JPG, PDF, and HTML.

Incentivized

• Makes internal coordination between admin team and tutors extremely painless. It's like a single place where everyone can drop ideas, get updates and notes without loss of context which usually happens in long email threads.
• Versioning and board history are handled very well, which drastically reduces the workload. They help me track how a policy or math guideline has evolved, and also make it easy to revert changes if something doesn't work.
• Comments stick exactly where they are meant to, making internal reviews much clearer. Admins don't have to guess which note refers to which rule or section.
• Exports are clean, so even non-Miro teammates get it instantly.

Incentivized

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

• There should be some more functionality in the Notes window, such as a "Paste Special " Icon in the notes area to maintain format control.
• Although I create many of my own Web export templates, an add-on for web export design would be great, as I regularly create Interactive Electronic Technical Publications (IETP) in HTML export format.
• The ability to sync Map shortcuts between devices would also be welcome. I use MM on three devices, and I have to add or amend the Map list individually. My maps are on OneDrive, so using them should not be that hard if they are cloud-based.

Incentivized

• As a designer, I miss some more creative features. I can't even get really into designing small things (like paths). Many of my colleagues have already switched to the Figma board because it is possible there.
• Things often get lost in the workflow, especially in teams. Working on the same file often leads to misunderstandings and can be frustrating. For example, if text is accidentally deleted and cannot be recovered, or if images become distorted.
• The scale on the board is missing, which often leads to size differences.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

I feel the main issues of the old Mindjet seem to be gone with the
Corel purchase. With the huge advance of sharing via browser HTML even 1
user can affect many. And, actually, using MM kind of forced my rigid
brain to rethink how I categorize and classify information/projects.

The
idea of paying $69USD for an annual cost is more than fair and a great
model for Corel/Mindjet to keep rolling out improvements!

Incentivized

Miro saves my day. I would spend at least 4x more time on documenting my projects and work without this tool. It support my day to day role and helps me be successful while saving my capacity. It is not only very easy to start working on it without additional training required, but also adapts to any use case that I might need to implement

Incentivized

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

MindManager is very intuitive. The user interface is not cluttered and the ribbon icons are easy to understand. Several excellent "how-to" videos are available on the MindManager site as well as on YouTube. MindManager starts quickly and the user interface is very responsive. Launching other programs from MindManager such as Excel is very fast and issue free. The browsing feature is lightning fast. The drag-and-drop capability is also very fast and reliable.

Incentivized

I love it. It should perhaps even be a 10, but there are only minor things that get me when it comes to trying to move around the images on the page and selecting images on the page. Nevertheless, I've used this tool randomly over various years numerous times.

Incentivized

We have had no issues with the application's availability

Incentivized

I have not encountered events where Miro is not available. It is quite nice and reliable to be fair, even on my freemium version (startup) I don't have reliability issues. It does have sometimes where the screen refresh or "freezes" or "consumes a lot of data" and we have to rewind windows and the likes, this instances are very less

Incentivized

The application is quick and responsive. We are able to produce mindmaps and reports with ease. The program is not complicated at all and integrates well with software and programs like Microsoft Outlook and Teams, which we truly appreciate.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

I have called technical support a few times. During the COVID Crisis, I called a few times repeatedly due to a rush request. The technical support guy called me back in minutes. He somehow knew that I had called repeatedly and wanted to make sure my issue was resolved immediately

Incentivized

We have never reached out to or contacted support because Miro's platform has been incredibly intuitive and user-friendly. The comprehensive resources available, such as tutorials, documentation, and community forums, have provided all the guidance we needed. The seamless integration with our existing tools and the reliability of the platform have ensured that we rarely encounter issues that require external assistance. This self-sufficiency has allowed us to focus more on our projects and collaboration without interruptions. Overall, our experience with Miro has been smooth and efficient, eliminating the need for additional support

Incentivized

The videos are not well categorized...I had to do a bit of digging to get what I wanted and many videos on older versions. If Mindjet was to improve the titles used that would help.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

better backup and exporting functions

Incentivized

Easy to learn, Miro has a series of videos on YouTube that effectively taught this program to my team members and me. The program is drag-and-drop and works excellently. People pick up on how to use it efficiently, and it's great for organizing ideas more freely. This product is more challenging for some older audiences who are not accustomed to using a touchpad, but for most, it was very easy to use.

Incentivized

Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.

Incentivized

MindManager stands out for its wide range of export options, customization and how they have enriched the format over time. As a constantly evolving tool, and having tried others, I consider it superior for the abovementioned reasons. Its cross-platform nature has been decisive, and although there are many alternatives in the form of web applications or the like, MindManager presents itself as a more complete and robust option.

Incentivized

I use both for different things really. Figma is better for design and prototype applications with coding being enabled in Figma (which isn't part of Miro's tools). As I said earlier, I use other programmes when there is a lack in Miro, in this case the coding element. Also Miro is better suited for BAU, so I can utilise this by bringing part of the business into using it. Figma isn't collaborative enough for this purpose. Miro overall has a better user experience

Incentivized

A team can collaborate on the same project but cannot create a shared project file. It would be helpful for that feature to be added.

Incentivized

Maybe is possible now so... Could be useful to manage in some way source code for the projects? not to edit so when we make solutions with different components in MIro, maybe each component could redirect to the source code of this component

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized

• For a single person business presentation it is a plus.
• Project difficulty is well assessed using the map.
• Giving away a paper version of a map is a positive gesture. People like the map, the look, and what it says, and it may also be a way to promote MindManager to them.
• Keep the PDF or JPEG saving capabilities for small customers like me. It's important.

Incentivized

• Offer infinite canvas that allow me to brainstorm, organize ideas and think visually.
• Effective for creating prototypes and wireframes, which saves time, reduces back-and-forth, and prevents costly mistakes.
• Features like mind mapping, kanban boards, and flowcharts help me to visualize complex projects easily.

Incentivized