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
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
Freehand by InVision
Miro
Editions & Modules
Freehand Free
$0
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
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
Feels better and more intuitive than Miro, however, FigJam would be my ultimate go-to just because Figma is the software that I am most familiar with. Figma has design, prototyping, and now the collaboration feature, so if I was deciding on the software for collaboration I …
I didn't make the decision to purchase InVision Freehand vs Miro. If given the choice I would have chosen Miro. Miro has features that are more intuitive and automated. The product is just easier to use. InVision Freehand gets the job done and what makes it stand apart is its …
InVision Freehand is lacking in features compared to competitors like MURAL and Miro, but its streamlined, easy-to-use interface makes it easy to pick up and throw something together in an instant. It does not do large complex work as well as its competitors, but InVision …
We were using inVision Freehand at the time based on a team member's suggestion. They were familiar with it, having used it at their prior organization, so we naturally adopted it after they introduced it to the organization. However, the team quickly moved on to other …
Miro is the main competitor I have used. It is extremely similar to Freehand but I like Freehand more because we do a lot of our prototyping and design in InVision so it is more of a one-stop shop for me. I also enjoy the different types of templates in Freehand, a few of them …
One of the key differentiators between Miro and Freehand is that after a certain number of users Miro is a paid subscription plan, which can be unattractive. Freehand has many of the same features, and in my opinion, features a better UI for easy maneuvering. However, Miro does …
I have found that between freehand InVision Freehand, Miro, MURAL and FigJam, each product does certain things differently. Some of those products execute certain features better than others. One benefit to InVision freehand is that it's sometimes nice to have all of your messy …
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 …
I actually have access to all three. And I use all three for different things, though truthfully, I could probably get away with just using Figma. I'm not sure how InVision Freehand is better than Miro or Figma. But we already own it, so it has made sense for me to use it in …
I didn't select Invision Freehand. I have used Miro the most in the past and I feel like you are dragging behind what they offer. From my experience, their text editing tools are easier. They provide the ability to vote on activities. Attaching emojis to things actually works. …
We use Miro as well and I like it also but it's been a bit more complicated to learn and doesn't fit as well in situations where we need to create and update things quickly.
Honestly, Zoom and Teams don't compare for their whiteboarding. Mainly because those are glitchy and unreliable. I've tried using them in meetings and especially with Zoom (maybe because they are newer) it loads and freezes up. I like to be "on it" in meetings and can't have …
The two other platforms that people have tried to get us to use are Figma and Miro. Since we have been using InVision Freehand it works much better for our teams and is within the InVision environment that we are familiar with. The InVision Freehand tools and user interface are …
For real-time collaboration and whiteboarding Comparable to Mural and Miro Better and more flexible than Figma For written documentation: Different features and more limited than Google Doc Similar to Notion in editing experience but more limited in features For creating …
Cost effectiveness and while Miro is good for collaboration and sprint and PI planning, I think its too open-ended. Easy to get lost in a board. Snagit is my go-to tool but it is not a collaborative tool. If I could combine Snagits tools with Invisions look/feel...that would be …
InVision Freehand is closing the gap and adding all the functionalities that some of these tools provide separately. In the race towards a one-stop digital design ecosystem, InVision Freehand is well poised to deliver and connect where others can't. I hope that with the news of …
Freehand is the least polished of the bunch. It doesn't instantly make your thoughts and design look sexy. It doesn't open up your designs to be edited live, inspected, and sliced up for export. It doesn't let you interact with flow charts, like showing or hiding long pieces of …
In my opinion, InVision Freehand is worse than every other option I've tried. I would not have selected InVision Freehand if given the choice, but it wasn't my decision at our company.
InVision Freehand is simple to use and doesn't have all the bells and whistles Figma offers - and its simplicity has a place in the workspace tech stack. We haven't tried Figma Jam yet - even though we use Figma, we still prefer Invision.
Figma is far superior. They have templates and great video integration. The template portion is the best. You can choose from many and even have a network of others that are creating templates for people to use. I am sure InVision Freehand has a lot of the same features, but …
We tried InVision Freehand and experienced the app being very slow, even with only a few users using it simultaneously. However, its UI is very good, specifically the design collaboration. Miro is better for exchanging text-based ideas.
I use Miro when I need to collaborate with non creatives on my team. When I am collaborating with other creatives, we use Figma, FigJam or InVision Freehand. I feel that the simplicity of Miro is better suited for non technical and non creative stakeholders.
Miro is much more flexible in terms of plugins, much scaleable, and very handy in terms of usage, AI tool in it helps a lot to quickly get the template and make life more easier. I found the Miro is much more advanced than any tool I used in the past. I love this.
Verified User
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Chose Miro
There are so many reasons why I prefer Miro to FigJam. The connections are essential to me articulating my thought process. I have never said this about a piece of software before, but everything I make inside Miro is beautiful. Often, I recreate visual deliverables made in FigJ…
We adopted Miro before we moved from Sketch to Figma, which is part of why it beat out FigJam for us. It was already somewhat entrenched before FigJam became available to us.
Also the licensing model and the fact that Miro is available to and used by most everyone in our corp …
It does so much more and the user experience is a lot better. I can more easily search and find the right spaces, share them with colleagues and organise the work into groups. The collaboration features really set it apart. Even though it has some room to get better, it’s ‘good …
I think Miro is great for product management. The templates and canvasses are very convenient to use. As a designer, I think they can improve more in the sketching part.
Invasion Freehand is not robust. MURAL and Miro are usually interchangeable... The company selected Miro, and I noticed it is easier for mapping and diagrams, but with my limited experience with MURAL, I don't think it would be an awful option; the MURAL just doesn't seem as …
Miro is what my company pays for, but I like the features it offers. I did like FigJam as I meant I only had to use one app rather than two and I know how to use Figma really well in my role. Miro has more features though, would be good to integrate Figma and Miro
We’ve actually decided to go ahead with FigJam as designers wanted to keep all their project work together, and the features FigJam has do everything we need. We like the fun aspects a little bit more and the community templates are brilliant. Miro would likely be a better …
Figma is great at Hi-fidelity prototyping, Notion is good at organizing, and Invison is good at creating low-fidelity prototypes. Miro is excellent at designing sprints and keeping organized. The overall experience you get with miro trumps the former, especially with the …
The other products that have been tried had fewer features and also the interface for navigation was much more intuitive in Miro allowing quick adoption by new users. Interacting with the feature elements e.g. moving blocks around, aligning things, adding and customizing the …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
