This is Miro, a tool so flexible that allows you to manage your projects, create planning boards, diagrams, and mindmaps, run meetings and presentations, all in the same place.

Not only it works great and integrates with many other services, but it is also free and allows unlimited users to collaborate on the same boards.

Let's take a look at it!

Intro

Today I will walk you through a tool called Miro. Anyway, before we start, I want to say that Miro is not sponsoring this article. It is just a tool that I use, like, and find very useful, so I thought I should share it with you.

Video

As usual, if you are a visual learner, or simply prefer to watch and listen instead of reading, here you have the video with the whole explanation and demo, which to be fair is much more complete than this post.

(Link to the video: https://youtu.be/awkE68y9DQk)

If you rather prefer reading, well... let's just continue :)

What is Miro?

So, what exactly is Miro?

Miro is an Online Collaborative Whiteboard Platform. As whiteboard, it is so flexible that you can do basically anything and everything you want and need with it.

You can create presentations and mindmaps for ideation and brainstorming, you can use it for design and research, manage your team with agile workflows, create charts and GANTTs for your planning and strategy sessions and even for mapping and diagramming. You name it.

And of course, you have sticky notes :)

I've seen people planning weddings with it, and then use the same tool to pitch their idea for a new product to a board of investors.

And since it is a collaborative platform, you can share it with your colleagues, friends, or contractors to work together on a project, design, and what not. Simultaneously!

For me, I use it for many of the examples I mentioned. I do mindmaps, I use the kanban and agile boards to manage tasks, and I share it with my peers and friends to be able to collaborate on projects.

And the best part, as I've mentioned in the intro, is that Miro is free, with unlimited collaborators! To be fair they also have some paid plan, but the features you get with the free tier are mind-blowing.

If you want to try Miro yourself for free, forever, you can use this link to sign up: https://miro.grsm.io/CoderDave

Miro in Action

Alright, enough talking, let see the tool in action. Of course it is basically impossible to just describe all the things this tool does, so here you have the video.

Use this link to jump directly to the part of the video with the demo)

Free vs Paid versions

As we have seen, the free version is really complete and most of the time is just what I need. There are however few features that the paid version has, and I find very useful.

One of this is the integration with Azure DevOps.

Using the Azure Cards app, you can import Work Items from Azure Boards into Miro and create your own visualizations for them on te canvas, together with any other element you want.

Another thing I find very useful, and which unfortunately is not available in the free version, is the private board sharing. In the free plan, all the boards you create are visible to all the members in the team. Starting with the Teams plan, instead, you can manage board access rights so you can share them only with specific team members, and decide if they have complete or read-only access.

There are many other features available only on the paid plans, like SAML SSO, Polls, Video chat, Emails support, etc...

But as I said before in my opinion what you get on the free plan is a lot already and is sufficient for most of the use cases. I encourage you to try it out yourself for free, you can use this link to sign up: https://miro.grsm.io/CoderDave

Miro Apps are awesome!

Alright, lastly, let me talk about Miro's apps. All we have seen so far was on the web based experience. But they have some amazing apps as well.

They have desktop apps for PC and Mac, and mobile apps for iOS and Android phone and tablets.

I mean, they even have an app for the Surface Hub! I'd love to see it in action!

Conclusions

Alright, that's it for today. I'd encourage you to try out Miro and see if it can be useful to you, use this link to sign up: https://miro.grsm.io/CoderDave It is free to use, and it will be free forever, so give it a try.

Let me know in the comment section below what you think about Miro, I've been using it a lot lately and the more I use it the more I like it!