draw.io is an online diagramming tool with integrations with Jira, Google, and Confluence available free online or at cost depending on integration chosen.
$5
per month
Google Jamboard
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Google Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard, available as an add-on to Google Workspaces.
draw.io can be more suitable for technical documentation for architectures, flow diagrams/charts, and conceptual images of an application infrastructure. However, this tool is not made for business intelligence work nor for dashboarding to monitor the technical components. From the administrative standpoint, this is not well suited for agile ceremony structures like retrospective boards or planning or even quarterly planning boards. The strength of draw.io lies strongly in being a lightweight diagramming tool.
Google Jamboard is ideal for live, synchronous sessions to support collaboration and engagement. It can be used for the entire class, small group, or independent work. Create a Jamboard for a simple student knowledge check, or annotation exercise, or sorting activity. Insert a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation, and have students annotate the file. There are many types of active learning activities you can do with a Google Jamboard!
Draw.io offers a lot of shapes and customizability of how the diagrams are laid out. We've been able to create a lot of different things with it, and have barely scratched the surface of the sorts of things that we could do.
Draw.io is fairly intuitive in the way that you draw shapes and connect shapes together, I was able to figure it out without a tutorial.
Draw.io is fast and performant for me compared with some of the alternatives.
The UI is intuitive. It allows a new user to start diagramming almost instantly. Manipulating elements, linking them together, etc. are all easy to do. Draw.io nevertheless a broad variety of diagram templates to help get started and also of shapes to use in diagrams. Some situations can make it a bit tricky to use, such as when having multiple shapes on top of each other (e.g. shapes placed within swimlanes) but that's a minor issue.
It's a tool that's easily accessible from your Google Suite. For a whiteboarding workspace, it provides a good basic platform. Multiple whiteboards can be created in one workspace, so you can share a session with multiple teams/plants. Compared to more advanced whiteboarding tools, it has limited features. You'll need to have access to the Internet to take full advantage of the collaborative workspace. The amount of storage space required for your session will use up your Google Drive quota.
The support for draw.io is pretty decent, considering it is a free website. I had a question one time when I was trying to do something, so I sent an email to their support email and got a response fairly quickly with an answer to my question. They also have some excellent support tools on their support website for helping you get more familiar with their program, and I found that very helpful.
draw.io is open-source and free for many uses, which means minimal upfront cost and good value.It works in the browser, also has a desktop version (so you can use offline) which helps teams that may not always be online or want local backups. Useful when you want a diagram tool that “just works” without huge ecosystem lock-in.For organisations that value control, less vendor-dependency, this is a plus.
Miro is more user friendly, and interactive as compared to Google Jamboard. Advantages of using jamboard would be that since it's a part of the Google suite, individuals are more comfortable using the tool and tracking changes/updates. Both can be used for collaboration, and brainstorming. Miro holds more features, since we can add emojis, stickers, media content etc.
