Figma vs. Mural

Figma allows us to create assets across multiple teams, such as email templates, website assets like site banners, product pictures, and Amazon/retail digital content. Outside of Figma, our design team still needs to rely on some other features to create all of our assets. This could include things like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and GIF makers. It would be nice if Figma included some of the basic features of these other platforms so that we could create everything in one platform.

Incentivized

Remote Collaboration: In a remote or distributed work environment, Mural shines. It enables teams to collaborate effectively in real-time, bridging geographical gaps and facilitating virtual meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions. Workshop Facilitation: For facilitators leading workshops or team-building activities, Mural provides interactive templates and tools for engaging participants and achieving specific objectives.

Incentivized

• Detailed enough to create pixel perfect designs with total control over the outcome
• Creating and implementing design systems to improve consistency and speed up design work
• Robust prototyping tools to create simple animations or to connect various pages
• I love autolayout, which improves design spacing and responsiveness

Incentivized

• Ability to follow other users' cursors makes it easy for a group to understand what a particular person is explaining
• Drag-and-drop components for ease of use
• Quick and easy way to provide access to internal/external users as MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) is a SaaS product

Incentivized

• Prototyping in Figma is pretty much nothing more than a glorified slide show. Sure, variables, etc are available but it takes way to long to set them up and even more time when there are revisions needed.
• It would be helpful if there were a contextual help system for various functionality. For example, advanced autolayout (like space between) can become very tricky to implement sometimes. I often wish there were an AI assistant to ask for help. I often use ChatGTP to help me through these times.
• Searching layers needs to be much easier and more intuitive.
• I would like to be able to make groups like the layers palette in Photoshop. That would help with organization and speed a lot.

Incentivized

• It'd be nice that the zoom regulation could be easier to manage
• The advanced features are a little bit easy to adopt. Why not adding some agile trainings, or some other tools to facilitate their adoption
• A faster and easier way to Integrate with ms office

Incentivized

Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.

Incentivized

It's easy to use for designers who are familiar with design terms and functions from Photoshop and Illustrator. However, non-tech and non-designer collaborators have a hard time figuring out how to leave comments and apply changes, compared to other online design tools like Canva and Squarespace. Even simple drag-and-drops and rearrangement of certain blocks become too complicated due to uncommon functions like Hug and Lock.

Incentivized

Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from
most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a
graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.

The only regret I have is, its not available when there is no internet

Incentivized

I think its great, As there are many other software or systems which can be integrated with it as plugins or API's

Incentivized

I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.

Incentivized

Chat support tends to get back to you within a few hours and are always helpful.

In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.

Incentivized

Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.

Incentivized

I would use Figma for sure for any product design you need, for any marketing or visual illustrations related to a product or business. Even if the navigation between files/folders and within the design is not the best, the capabilities and focus on designing are the best in the market, vs other tools like Miro.

Incentivized

I like it better than Miro because MURAL's more informal feel makes it encourage conversation and use. Miro also let's you bury too much information "inside" the notes making it really easy to lose sight of important data. I like MURAL better than Lucidspark because of how fast the pages load, especially links within the board. Any app is better than Microsoft whiteboard which is appalling unusable and feature incomplete.

I think this is great and as I mentioned at ADP we use Figma extensively whether by designers, researchers or content writers

Incentivized

• We have the Figma Org Plan subscription on the annual renewal basis, and we use Figma exclusively for all of our digital product design initiatives/projects. As we are still a very small & lean In-house UX/Product Design team, we see the value in using Figma to curate our Design System libraries which allow us to collaborate and partner with our PMs and Engineers quite well on multiple product design & development initiatives.

Incentivized

• Mural allows us to draft communications for clients that aim to increase the NPS of the organization
• Mural allows us to keep up with the agile framework, which reduces Time to Market of our products and initiatives
• Mural allows us to identify blockers in our day to day tasks, which reduces the Cicle Time of our Kanban cards

Incentivized