Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
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Miro
Score 9.0 out of 10
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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
Google Chat
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 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
The main reason why we chose it - the overall G Suite solution, that we bought. We have Google Calendar, GMail & Chat built in. In order not to waste money - we decided to use Google Chat. It works fine, however, as said before, if you had experience with Slack - then you might …
Well suited for businesses of all sizes. HOWEVER, I would say keep the chat groups limited at the departmental level, ensure that your moderator or the individual responsible for the group keeps it on topic, and have your IT team monitor it from time to time. Google Chat gets used so much in our organization that we have rules and regs in our Employee Handbook regarding its proper use (and when used PROPERLY, it can be very effective).
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.
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.
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.
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
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.
It's not perfect. There are occasional glitches, drop-outs, and it takes a bit to get everything loaded and working. But it is significantly better than Zoom or GoToMeeting when you're in instructional settings. I know my teacher friends here like it and the administrators and parents seem to be satisfied too.
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.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
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.
Prior to Google Hangouts, our company used Spark. Spark was not integrated into our email, therefore it couldn't be easily accessed in the same browser. With Spark we also couldn't search our emails for keywords in a conversation, searching had to be done manually. The one feature I enjoyed about Spark was a request to get a user's attention: If I had an urgent question and I wanted to ensure the recipient saw my message/question, I would request their attention and the message screen would pop up on their screen.
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.
