Balsamiq is a wireframing tool that helps lean product teams turn early ideas into clear, actionable direction. The tool helps product managers, founders, and engineers worldwide share concepts, reduce rework, and build better products.
$12
per month (up to 2 projects)
Miro
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Miro is a web-based Collaborative Whiteboard platform that provides teams with an infinite digital canvas for visual planning, diagramming, and workflow mapping. The platform integrates a spatial user interface with automated drawing tools and natural-language processing (NLP) to structure freeform ideas into defined project workflows and database schemas.
$10
per month per user
Pricing
Balsamiq
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
Balsamiq
Miro
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Pay per project, not per user
Monthly billing also available at $10 per month for the Starter plan, or $20 for the Business plan.
Balsamiq is lagging a lot as compared to Figma but it's comparable with respect to MockFlow.
Also, Figma is a full stack solution in designing and hence it was an overkill of my role. Balsamiq is easier to use & know in the industry and hence that helped in decision making.
I receive value for all the Lucidchart and Balsamiq with Miro. When it comes to Figma, I believe Miro is not doing up-to-the-mark work. Meanwhile, I do believe it won't be long before I see the Figma-type feature implemented in Miro. Overall, I think Miro has done an amazing …
Information Technology Manager and Admin Coordinator
Chose Miro
We have replaced Microsoft Visio with Miro. I still do a lot of my wireframes in Balsamiq. However, I do plan on looking into Miro wireframe to see if it has what I need to switch to using it as my primary tool for putting together wireframes and presenting them to stakeholders …
Miro is easier on the eyes, and I prefer it by FAR. We use Confluence whiteboards when our team faces Miro access issues (usually new team members), but Miro is way more dynamic and organized. It also has more templates and features to make our documents and boards look how we …
It's better. I used to be a Mural fan when Miro first launched, but Miro immediately outpaced Mural in terms of performance, ease of use, and killer features. There was a time where mapping complex systems required a lot of custom shape creation in Visio, especially when the …
I have a hard time building out triangles, arrows and radius buttons in Miro which is often frustrating and makes the low fidelity look less professional
Miro, to me, is a one-stop-shop whereas some of the other players go deeper in their disciplines. I consider Miro as a generalist (as opposed to a specialist) and it works well when you wish to work with a cross-functional team to get things rolling. I wouldn't use it to …
I've used Mural before in training as a guest user, and I've found that the user experience seems to be easier than with Miro. Looking at Klaxoon, I used it a few times as a guest user and I liked it, especially the feature of being able to follow the facilitator of the session …
I've tried and churned a lot of products in recent years. Even the products that closely compete with Miro, but it has been the stickiest for me, personally. The feature set this big and diverse with the simpleness and low learning curve involved, Miro has been an easy winner …
Of course, Above maintained products are not Replacing the Miro and they are solving different problems for us, but there are also a lot of similarities between the products. like Prototyping or collaborating through Figma Boards
Balsamiq is a great tool for quickly getting ideas into visual form. At first it seems like there are not that many UI assets, but this constraint actually adds to the speed. There are less things for you to fuss over, you can focus on getting your ideas down. This is a tool for lofi rough drawings not a tool for building beautiful prototypes for developers to code to. It is fantastic for ideation because you mostly just drag and drop components onto the canvas and move things around. It's great in a live workshop setting for that reason.
We have used it mostly for documenting our solution, roadmap and as a single source of truth.. It has been very helpful for product management, bridging the gap between developers, solution architects, business teams and compliance. I think Miro board is well suited for product documentation and product management. The talk tracks help us transmit information with an additional layer of understanding. Not sure about scenarios where it is less appropriate. Our use cases are well covered.
Mock ups are obviously only just mock ups (this is important as if users see mock-ups in HTML, for example, they tend to think the system is ready to use or not far off)
Has a good selection of standard shapes that mock real world fields / controls
Allows not for profit organisations use it for free
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.
The sketch-like style can be off-putting to some stakeholders, and it’s not initially very clear that there is the option to turn this “off.” While I do think there is benefit to the default style, knowing from the start that this flexibility existed would have helped us be able to use this tool more often in the past and in different situations.
There are very limited collaborative functionalities. When it’s early in the design process, it’s often really helpful to have a number of people in the design to offer in-app feedback so the designer doesn’t have the burden of collecting feedback from many disparate sources in order to incorporate the feedback.
There are limited UI elements. As design evolves, there are more and more UI elements to consider, and many to stop using. Our Balsamiq wireframes would be a lot more effective in communicating design ideas to stakeholders if there was a wider range of UI elements to choose from.
I'm not sure how else we would be able to complete our work without Balsamiq or another similar tool. All of my experience with Balsamiq has been positive and they continue to develop new features so that my job gets easier. I would be very surprised if we didn't renew Balsamiq
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
Very intuitive and easy to understand. It only takes minutes to get the hang of it and get back to work. For new analysts (like, brand new, fresh out of school) it's not difficult and they need minimal to no hand-holding. The training content that is embedded is easy to find and use.
Overall it is very intuitive and easy to use. We have new members of the team join all the time and they are able to pick it up quickly and learn it very easily, so that is the mark of a good software product. And although it is so freeform, the library of templates give great starting points and help with ideas to build the boards from scratch.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Creating digital wireframes in Photoshop is a nightmare. Photoshop was not really designed for this purpose. It doesn't have good collaboration options and it doesn't allow pattern libraries, which are essential for consistency and efficiency. We use UXPin and Axure for some time, but found that these platforms were a bit bloated. Balsamiq is much simpler than any of these options. It's a perfect wireframing platform for non-designers or for designers that want to focus on content and element-placement prior to design
Some examples of collaboration software we looked into were FigJam, Mural, and Mermaid. While all three of them are excellent at what they do, either collaboration or diagramming, Miro finds the proper compromise between functionality and usability. FigJam is very user-friendly and convenient for collaboration; nevertheless, it lacks the ability to structure. Mural can be used effectively for workshops, but it is not as straightforward as other tools commonly used. Mermaid is great for creating code diagrams, but it cannot be used for team collaboration. This is why Miro was chosen for our use case.
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
The product works very well for showing product owners and developers design ideas for purposes of discussion, debate and refinement.
The products also works very well for specifying new designs for developers. This is best done in a series of screens that show various screen states and user interactions.
I also use the products to document bugs in software products and websites we have developed. This includes outlining and documenting bugs and changes to user interactions and refinements to the usability of completed interfaces and user experiences.
This is one of those platforms where the entire team needs to be bought into it, or it doesn't function as intended. Once we achieved that, it's been a wonderful tool for brainstorming and project management internally.
Surprisingly, Miro has not allowed us to reduce software; however, it's a worthwhile addition to our tech stack.
Our team has Miro boards bookmarked, and we know exactly where to go when we have ideas or things that we want to add. It's great to know that we will receive notifications when that happens.
