FigJam is an online interactive whiteboard from Figma headquartered in San Francisco, presently in beta (2021) but available to the public in a free trial. The vendor states that in 2022, FigJam will have plans for $0, $8, and $15 per editor, per month.
$5
per month per editor
Google Jamboard
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Google Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard, available as an add-on to Google Workspaces.
If you're working in small product teams, like triads, and already using Figma, this is a no brainer for white boarding, quick/fast sketches, wireframing, collaborative doodling ... it gets less appropriate with large teams, infrequent. IMO, due to the way in which they price, it's better to keep the inner circle small-ish.
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!
It misses easy-to-use pre sets of diagrams. The ones presented seem to be not native and hard to use. Miro is a good benchmark.
Navegating throught projects in the main page is confusing, specially when people are not admin users.
It should suggest ways of organizing the pages designers do, specially when the project is big and have many pages and sections.
It could have, for example, a draft version for every page, so that one can hide it when they finish the work, but can open it whenever something needs to be modified, versioning the job.
I don't use it often, because the organization I work in uses a different environment on a commo basis. This is rather used between the designers, who prototype the solutions in Figma - they just have it as a workbook/notebook for their ideas. However, if those need to be shared with stakeholders or other organization members, the designers are expected to use a different environment.
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.
FigJam works best in pair with Figma, as it allows you to keep track of your project in one place, supporting all phases of the process. The functionality is more intuitive, quick, and efficient. Visually, I also prefer it more —it’s more enjoyable and playful, making the experience much more engaging.
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.
FigJam saves a lot of time ... it's nice to have all my visual notes/sketches within Figma itself where a lot of design work lives
The project organization and other features contribute to the ease of answering that age old question ... "where can I find that mockup?"
Dev Mode is pretty cool. Not many use it, so some designers may spend unnecessary time spec'ing out things that no one will appreciate, let alone look at.
