Mural vs. Sococo

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.

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

• 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

Incentivized

• Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
• Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
• Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.

Incentivized

• It'd be nice that the zoom regulation could be easier to manage
• The advanced features are a little bit easy to adopt. Why not adding some agile trainings, or some other tools to facilitate their adoption
• A faster and easier way to Integrate with ms office

Incentivized

• It would be great if it supported other major browsers. Not everyone has Chrome installed.
• The ongoing subscription cost is difficult to justify. This is the only reason we stopped using it.

Incentivized

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.

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Chat support tends to get back to you within a few hours and are always helpful.

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.

Incentivized

• Mural allows us to draft communications for clients that aim to increase the NPS of the organization
• Mural allows us to keep up with the agile framework, which reduces Time to Market of our products and initiatives
• Mural allows us to identify blockers in our day to day tasks, which reduces the Cicle Time of our Kanban cards

Incentivized

• Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
• It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.

Incentivized