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
Mural
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) from Tactivos (DBA MURAL) in San Francisco is described by the vendor as a digital workspace and visual collaboration tool, designed for creative teams to make the process of design more efficient for distributed teams, working remotely.
$12
per month
Pricing
Freehand by InVision
Mural
Editions & Modules
Freehand Free
$0
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Starter
$12
per month
Plus
$20
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Freehand by InVision
Mural
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Plans are billed annually.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Freehand by InVision
Mural
Considered Both Products
Freehand by InVision
Verified User
Director
Chose Freehand by InVision
These products are very similar. MURAL seems to have more fun characters.
I find InVision Freehand to be a bit more user-friendly than MURAL. I find that it does not glitch quite as much and that this enables more ease in collaboration. I also appreciate the various functions that is included in the free version of InVision. It's perfect for …
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 …
MURAL is very similar in the type of approach we could use to walk through certain items but it lacks many features that we rely on in InVision, so we typically stay away from MURAL.
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Freehand by InVision
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 …
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 …
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.
All products are getting pretty good, but InVision stands out as the most frictionless one to use. A lot of the power is cleverly designed so that it doesn't get in the way of how differently people naturally think and operate. For example, even the presence of a grid on some …
I really do like Miro and its features a lot but the fact that it doesn't integrate or live with the rest of our UX deliverables makes it challenging to use.
I selected Invision Freehand for my purpose because it is easier to create and doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to use. For example with FigmaJam, I feel like it's easier for designers to use because they use Figma for creating designs. With Mural I like to use …
I honestly think all the tools mentioned above are pretty well designed and executed compared to freehand. As far as the features of freehand compared to other tools, I do not see anything unique or extra that one software does that the other software does not. So with that …
Freehand is more a tool for design/ideation, whereas Mural is more a tool for workshop collaboration. Freehand benefits from its integration with other InVision tools and Sketch.
InVision FreeHand is pretty similar to other tools like Miro, FigJam, and Mural. It is more a question of preference on how the tool looks and works because it is very similar in terms of features and what you can do. I guess if you used InVision Freehand before and like …
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.
I've recommended MURAL to a lot of people in a lot of fields. This is a great tool for any group of people that might stand around a white board if they were in person. Even if they are in person, I still recommend it pretty often because, unlike a white board, MURAL is virtual, so it can go offline with you. I've recommended it to other Software Teams, individual software developers, engineering teams, Sales Managers, Office Staff, Manufacturing teams, and more.
enables easy for all collaboration especially in the hybrid environment
makes brainstorming better as users can create digital sticky notes, draw diagrams, and add images to visually represent concepts and ideas
it helps to visualize data effectively - users can create charts, graphs, and diagrams to present data-driven insights to team members and stakeholders
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.
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.
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.
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 (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
Mural was easier to use and share compared with Whiteboard. Whiteboard's functionality is limited. It is also integrated into Teams in an odd way that makes it difficult for team members to refer to old whiteboards. Mural as a stand alone web app is better.
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.
