Google Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard, available as an add-on to Google Workspaces.
$4,999
Freehand by InVision
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Freehand, from InVision headquartered in New York, is an online whiteboard that enables teams to plan, brainstorm, and draw together. It aims to give everyone a simple way to visually represent ideas with charts, diagrams, and drawings. Whether for mind mapping, creating a customer journey map, or drafting up an org chart, Freehand can help teams make ideas and plans visual.
$4
per month per user
Pricing
Google Jamboard
Freehand by InVision
Editions & Modules
Google Jamboard
4,999
Freehand Free
$0
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Jamboard
Freehand by InVision
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google Jamboard
Freehand by InVision
Considered Both Products
Google Jamboard
No answer on this topic
Freehand by InVision
Verified User
Employee
Chose Freehand by InVision
I think Miro and Mural are more robust tools, but InVision Freehand is better than FigJam and Google Jamboard.
I’ve been working in Invision for my entire design career (5+ years) so I feel comfortable within the space. This admittedly makes me more tolerant of bugs, workarounds, etc than my younger counterparts who are fans of Figma. I have only lightly explored the other options, but …
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!
InVision Freehand has quickly evolved to be a very robust solution for our pre-design process and collaboration with stakeholders and other product teams. It has brought a lot more hands-on workshopping opportunities and created engaging spaces for cross functional teams. Internally to our design org we are able to prototype ideas faster and generate insights or changes BEFORE going into more hi-fidelity design tools or processes.
The resolution: Our webpage designs always pass the resolution threshold to where freehand starts to work its compression. During presentations, it can be a little embarrassing when we can't read the copy because it looks like potatoes.
Embedding videos: GIFs are only good to a certain point, and creating Vimeo embeds is tedious. I wish I could embed MP4s or web assets a lot quicker.
Touchpad panning: I can't tell you how many times I've "gone back" in my browser when I'm just trying to pan across the freehand. Has honestly made me wanna force quit on many occasions.
Sticky notes and text in shapes: Overall, it's really hard to use the sticky notes and text inside rectangles without the text just getting all over the place. It's different sizes, it gets too tiny, it gets way too big, and overall, it just doesn't look professional, even with a lot of fussing.
No ability to crop/mask an image. Nice to have, but sometimes we just need to delete a chunk off a screenshot, and it requires opening PS or taking a screenshot to edit anything.
Wish there was a way to have "internal comments" that are not visible to our clients.
Honestly as in any organization it's up to budget. I feel like every organization I go to I'm constantly striving to keep InVision as part of the main funded tools used by the team especially in a remote environment. I feel there is a push to move to Figma and Zooms new white boarding tool but I'm still not a fan of Zoom's tool. Microsoft also created a white boarding tool which has been buggy.
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.
Color Selection can be tricky when changing colors for shapes and text I've seen other users struggle with creating sticky notes and getting text to fit in the box properly and had to abandon the tool for a workshop for this reason After having a demo, I learned of new features I wasn't using. I don't know it would have been intuitive to find on my own.
For availability, we never have to even think about whether inVision Freehand is going to be available for us to work with. There has never been a time when we have opened up the application and had any issues of any kind. I can't imagine why anyone would work with a platform that is unreliable. inVision Freehand is realibel, stable, and getting better all the time. Whether it's their built-in tools or the expanding of Templates to work with Freehand has been a reliable go-to platform for us.
It is a little slow when bringing artboards from Sketch to Freehand using Craft. I have had some issues loading and redrawing pages when I have a lot of images on my freehand board. It gives me an error message while I am in the file and starts to reload and redraw all the photos again. Not sure if it has a limit on how many images it can handle on a board at a time.
I haven't had to use the support team for anything, which is great news because that means the product usually works as expected! In terms of online support, I've been able to find videos that show how new features work. Also, many of the people I work with have experience with the tools so they are a great resource for me.
The implementation is pretty much easy-peasy and plug-n-play. We simply download the applications and install, signed in and were good to go. I really cannot imagine that there would be anyone who would have any difficulty whatsoever in getting started in more than just a few minutes. It's really how implementing these officewide improvements should always go.
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.
Miro (formerly Realtime Board) is the original product concept for this tool and I used it for 3-4 years for product development. Invision is aesthetically a carbon copy of the tool but lacks in fine usability controls. We actually didn't choose Freehand, it just came as an added tool under our Invision subscription. It's helpful but knowing the previous tool, it's been a hard sell because it's just not as good. Again, it's really fine tuned usability things like navigation, zoom, switching from tool to tool, selecting and deselecting, etc
Getting set up with inVision Freehand was super simple. We figured how many of our team members were going to be using it and we set up our account knowing that. There were no negotiations, contract hassles or anything that would have been a waste of our time, efforts or resources.
Not everyone in the company has access to Invision, and they can't view the links I provide to them. I also wish everyone could view a file without logging in to the enterprise account. It comes in handy when I am doing focus-group studies or other studies with our customers that don't have Freehand. Unfortunately, if that is possible, I don't know how to do that.
