Gliffy is an online diagramming tool with collaboration features from the San Francisco company of the same name, offering standalone versions of Gliffy and integrated versions for Jira and Confluence.
$6
per month
Miro
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Miro provides a visual workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to dream, design, and build the future together. Today, Miro counts more than 60 million users in 200,000 organizations who use Miro to improve product development collaboration, to speed up time to market, and to make sure that new products and services deliver on customer needs.
$8
per month per user
Pricing
Gliffy
Miro
Editions & Modules
Professional
$6
per month
1. Free - To discover what Miro can do. Always free
$0
2. Starter - Unlimited and private boards with essential features
$8
per month per user
3. Business - Scales collaboration with advanced features and security
$16
per month per user
4. Enterprise - For work across the entire organization, with support, security and control, to scale
It really all comes down to ease of use. The way you can make diagrams and how Gliffy integrates with Confluence is very important for our way of working.
More collaborative and flexible than Confluence. More intuitive and better user experience than draw.io (albeit without as comprehensive notation). More use cases can be fulfilled than Gliffy, which is pretty basic.
We continue to use Gliffy for technical designs and in our technical documentation which it is better suited to than Miro. We looked at using Microsoft Whiteboard within Microsoft Teams but functionally there was no contest.
Miro offers (live!) collaboration (the others don't), and process mocking works more intuitively. However, in larger files (final process versions), I often struggle with Miro if I don't lock half of the elements on the screen.
Miro has the most complete feature set of any diagramming/collaboration tool I've ever used, and I have really only scratched the surface of what it can do.
Gliffy is great if you have a need to show images directly on a Confluence page. It’s also good for people that just want to illustrate something that would be harder to draw with a strict modeling tool. Gliffy is less appropriate if your personnel are skilled modelers and appreciate the modeling functionality provided by a real modeling tool.
Miro's infinite canvas and sticky notes functionality make it ideal for brainstorming ideas, contributing thoughts and organizing them visually in real-time.Software teams use Miro to manage sprints, backlogs, and stand-ups, visualizing tasks and progress. We use it for sprint planning, retrospectives, and kanban boards.Miro is well suited for user journey maps, facilitating collaboration between designers, product managers, and developers.We've also used it for strategy planning and workshops: mapping out strategies, SWOT analysis, and plan projects. It's useful for visualizing goals, actions, and timelines.Also, we use it to organize research findings, synthesize user insights, and map out data visually, helping in the analysis and decision-making process. Less appropriate scenarios for Miro include working with Text Documents; doing High-Fidelity Prototyping and interactive prototypes that require detailed user interactions; and working with large datasets & calculations. We don't use Miro to replace the polished, slide-based presentations created in PowerPoint. Also, we need to be very careful with confidential information.
First it's important to point out that Gliffy has priced itself incredibly well for small to medium sized businesses. Most other similar solutions are so expensive that organizations will avoid getting workflow software overall. Gliffy can take pride in knowing they're helping small business operate better.
Gliffy is incredibly easy to use for a first time user. I rarely have to train someone on how to use it. It's a lot of fun to see people get excited about systems and processes when using Gliffy. If you need to get up and running quickly I can't think of a better solution for workflow visualization.
I also like using Gliffy for mindmapping. I'm sure some mindmapping experts can tell me how I'm doing that incorrectly, but it just works for me. This points to the ease with which Gliffy allows you to get your thoughts down quickly and easily.
Exceptional templates help me get started quickly with almost any type of whiteboarding, creating consistency where needed and extreme variety when also needed.
Having multiple active users on the same board happens so smoothly. It's easy to get people on the board and updating objects simultaneously without weird conflicts is amazing.
The amount of objects & tools Miro provides allows us to create very specific and detailed artifacts.
I have had some trouble saving complex diagrams and viewing them on the fly. On a handful of occasions, diagrams are unable to save, which means I either need to try to "save as" a separate diagram, or I am perpetually stuck trying to "load" recent changes. Overall, this means I always have a slight lingering fear that my diagrams aren't fully saved or recoverable. Support has been pretty responsive helping me to reload corrupted diagrams.
Adding Text, Notes, and Images can be a challenge. While laying out objects with simple text is a strength, adding formatted text and commentary can be a challenge. I often find my objects ghost-moving all over the screen and lost. I'd love a drag-and-drop way to load images in to diagrams. The process is a bit cumbersome with the file upload wizard.
Template environments - I struggled a bit to try to create a default starting point for my diagrams. I've tried to load common libraries and ignore others, those settings are often ignore upon reload. I'd love to use the same 10 objects and ignore the rest, I am not able (yet) to create this scenario, though there may be more to learn.
Searching, Indexing, Retrieving my diagrams. As part of an enterprise plan, I find there are too many clicks required to a) find/search for my diagrams and b) save diagrams into my Gliffy folder. In our implementation I can see all folders for all of my colleagues, and need to drill down a bit before I get to my folder, where I can actually search my documents in a list. I'd prefer a more intuitive way to land on my diagrams and to organize them (e.g., by customer) so that I can access them more quickly.
Probably our instance of Miro, our security reqs: repeated need to sign in. Blerg.
I like rectangular stickies - but Miro defaults to square. Let me set my default.
Layers - I wish I could more easily have something below my stickies - yes - can do with locking but if you have to change your locked material, it's a pain.
Because of its great versatility and ease of use. From diagramming to roadmpas and even user interface wireframes. Once a draft or first version is done we like to use the Confluence integration so we can collaborate and have one single source of truth
There is no other tool like Miro for process Mapping in particular. I've tried PowerPoint, Word, and other programs, but when collaborating virtually on how to improve a process, Miro has all of the tools and more to enable successful mapping. The colors, different types of shapes and text books, along with the ability to integrate different documents and other functionality, make it ideal for this purpose. In a virtual world, it's a must-have.
I didn't bother answering all of the other questions because all you need to know is that Gliffy is incredibly easy to use. It's perfect for first-timers or really anybody who wants to view a process visually and quickly. It's simply fantastic from a user-friendly standpoint. Keep up the great work!
It's pretty easy to use. My gripes are with some small idiosyncrasies with selection behavior with objects and editing text. When I move an object, it automatically de-selects it when I am not done with it. I have to click to select again. Text control is challenging and could be improved. It could use a little more styling capability. It's also weird that it behaves differently in a shape then when using the text tool.
I only give a 9/10 because of the speed at which it loads. I have never experienced issues with Miro logging me out early, or some other technical issue causing the program to crash, or even it just loading in perpetuity without ever actually coming up (unlike other programs such as SFDC). It take a minute for all of my boards to come up after I click on it in my favorites, but besides that, it's all good.
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.
The support staff at Miro are fantastic. Whenever I have had an issue, they have been timely and helpful with their response. They are also very knowledgeable and go out of their way to not only help, but offer proactive training sessions on different topics and new functionality so everyone can try it out.
Superb. very well explained videos. Really helps get the knowledge up on the product. The slides are divided into the topics of usage. I have enjoyed following and implementing all of these slides. The videos are well explained and it is easy to follow. There are tutorials that you can take yourself later. It would be nice however if more training modules were added.
It was and still is a challenge to get our IT folks at 3M to support the tool. Single sign on still not implemented. I now have Miro on my personal computer. I had a few hardware issues, but nothing major.
The Gliffy platform supports only web whereas Lucidchart and Zoho Creator both support web, iPhone App and Android App. Gliffy is geared toward SMB and MSB whereas their competitors also market to freelancers and Enterprise customers providing solutions for each. Gliffy only offers online support whereas their competitors offer phone support, online support, knowledge base and video tutorials
I find Miro to be a superior tool, other tools I have used became unresponsive or too slow to be effective in the roles and jobs I needed them to do. I am currently working in a Miro board with over 1000 discrete elements and it loads fast, I can maneuver and work with the material in real time without the board lagging to keep up. When working with a tool like this, it's important the tool itself doesn't become an obstruction to getting the work done. With Miro, I've never had to worry about that
Miro is great for scaling. In every department and subdivision across my entire organization, there is someone using it. From Sales to marketing, to manufacturing and operations; and even in legal and finance, there isn't a process or a department that is not using Miro, and if they aren't, they're missing out! Even at the highest to the lowest levels of the organization, it is essential for virtual collaboration.
Gliffy had a positive ROI on our initial efforts in getting team members to map out their workflows, provide them in confluence through its integration and get them distributed to our organization. The ease of use was a huge success for adoption.
Gliffy did seem to have unfriendly costs. Even as a customer for years that signs year-long contracts the price needle did not move much. Enterprise-wide software is expected to have discounts at a bulk buy within the industry.
Gliffy for the first time provided a tool for us to put our thoughts in a shareable format. It paved the way for increased organization and getting to buy into pre-existing processes.
