The best online brainstorming tool depends on how your team ideates: Miro and Mural for live facilitated workshops, FigJam for design teams, Excalidraw or Microsoft Whiteboard if you want free, and ChatGPT when you are thinking alone. Below are 12 tools sorted by session type, with real pricing and honest free-tier limits.
Best online brainstorming tools shortlist
Miro: best overall for team brainstorming workshops
FigJam: best for product and design teams
Mural: best for facilitated workshops and design sprints
Lucidspark: best for turning brainstorms into diagrams
Excalidraw: best free and open-source whiteboard
Microsoft Whiteboard: best for Microsoft 365 teams
Whimsical: best for fast, structured boards
Milanote: best for creative briefs and moodboards
Coggle: best for collaborative mind mapping
Mentimeter: best for live audience participation
Ideanote: best for structured innovation management
ChatGPT: best AI thinking partner for solo ideation
Online brainstorming tools compared
Tool | Best for | Session type | Free plan | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Miro | Team brainstorming workshops | Live and async | 3 editable boards | ~$8/user/mo annually |
FigJam | Product and design teams | Live and async | 3 files | ~$3 to $5/editor/mo |
Mural | Facilitated workshops | Live, facilitator-led | 3 murals | ~$9.99/member/mo |
Lucidspark | Brainstorms that become diagrams | Live and async | 3 boards | ~$9/user/mo (Team) |
Excalidraw | Free, open-source sketching | Live, lightweight | Unlimited, open source | Free |
Microsoft Whiteboard | Microsoft 365 teams | Live, in Teams | Yes | Included with M365 |
Whimsical | Fast structured boards | Live and async | Limited boards | ~$10/user/mo |
Milanote | Creative briefs and moodboards | Async, visual | 100 notes | ~$9.99/user/mo |
Coggle | Collaborative mind mapping | Live and async | 3 private diagrams | ~$5/mo |
Mentimeter | Live audience input | Live, large groups | Yes, limited questions | ~$14/user/mo |
Ideanote | Structured innovation pipelines | Async, campaign-based | Yes, limited | ~$6/user/mo |
ChatGPT | Solo AI ideation | Solo, conversational | Yes | $20/mo (Plus) |
Pricing verified July 2026. Whiteboard pricing changes often and varies by billing term and seat type. Confirm current rates before purchasing. Each tool is described in detail below.
Key takeaways
How you run the session matters more than which tool you buy. Decades of research show that traditional live group brainstorming produces fewer and less original ideas than the same people ideating separately first, because of production blocking and social pressure. Choose a tool that supports independent idea generation before group discussion.
Most free tiers cap at three boards. Miro, FigJam, Mural, and Lucidspark all limit free users this way. That single constraint decides more purchases than any feature.
Check whether you pay per editor or per seat. Many brainstorming participants only need to view or comment. Tools that charge per editor and keep viewers free cost dramatically less for large teams.
If you already own a suite, start there. Microsoft Whiteboard is included with Microsoft 365 and FigJam comes bundled with paid Figma seats, so many teams already have a capable tool.
AI has become table stakes, not a differentiator. Miro, FigJam, Mural, and Lucidspark all now cluster sticky notes, generate ideas from prompts, and summarise sessions. Judge them on facilitation and performance instead.
Board performance under load is the underrated criterion. A tool that lags with 15 people and 200 sticky notes creates more friction than it removes.
Which online brainstorming tool do you need?
Answer one question and most of the field disappears: how does your team actually ideate?
"We run live workshops with a facilitator." You want Miro or Mural. Mural if the facilitation craft matters (structured phases, private mode, timers), Miro if you want the broadest template library and ecosystem.
"We're a design or product team already in Figma." You want FigJam. It is bundled with paid Figma seats, so you probably already have it.
"We're spread across time zones and contribute at different hours." You want async-friendly tools: Miro, Milanote for visual collection, or Ideanote for structured campaigns.
"We need it free." You want Excalidraw (open source, unlimited) or Microsoft Whiteboard if you have Microsoft 365.
"Our brainstorms need to become real diagrams." You want Lucidspark, which hands off into Lucidchart.
"We need input from a large group or audience." You want Mentimeter, built for live polling at scale.
"I'm ideating alone and need a thinking partner." You want ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI assistant.
"We need ideas to go through review and approval stages." You want Ideanote, which is an innovation pipeline rather than a canvas.
Miro
Best for: team brainstorming workshops
Miro is the category leader in collaborative whiteboards and the default choice for remote workshops, and it earns the top spot on breadth rather than any single feature.
Who Miro is best for: distributed teams running regular workshops, retrospectives, and planning sessions who want one canvas that handles every format.
Why it made this list: it is the most complete visual collaboration platform available. The infinite canvas, the largest template library in the category (thousands of frameworks covering user story maps, affinity diagrams, retros, and SWOT grids), and mature facilitation tools including voting, timers, and cursor tracking make it the safe choice for almost any session. Miro AI clusters sticky notes by theme and summarises sessions, which removes the tedious synthesis work that used to eat an hour after every workshop. Its integration depth with Slack, Zoom, Jira, and Confluence means brainstorm outputs become real backlog items instead of screenshots.
Key features
Infinite canvas: unbounded workspace that handles very large sessions.
Miro AI: generates ideas from prompts, clusters sticky notes, and summarises boards.
Facilitation toolkit: voting, timers, private mode, and presenter controls.
Deep integrations: Jira, Slack, Zoom, Confluence, Azure DevOps, and Figma.
Pros
Broadest template library and integration ecosystem in the category
Handles every session format, from retros to story mapping
Strong AI synthesis that saves real post-workshop time
Cons
Per-user pricing scales expensively for large teams where most people join occasionally
Performance can degrade on very large boards with many simultaneous participants
Pricing: free plan with 3 editable boards. Starter from around $8 per user per month billed annually, Business around $16, Enterprise custom.
FigJam
Best for: product and design teams
FigJam is Figma's whiteboard, and for any team already paying for Figma it is close to a free upgrade.
Who FigJam is best for: product, design, and UX teams who want brainstorming to live in the same environment as their design work.
Why it made this list: it shares Figma's canvas engine, so it feels faster and more precise than heavier alternatives, and the copy-paste bridge between FigJam and Figma means an early sticky-note session can flow directly into wireframes without changing tools. Since Figma bundled FigJam into every paid seat in March 2025, most design-adjacent teams already have it at no additional cost, which makes it the best value in the category. Widgets add timers and voting, and cursor chat keeps live sessions conversational.
Key features
Figma integration: copy between FigJam and Figma, share one design library.
Widgets and plugins: timers, voting, and interactive session tools.
Cursor chat and audio: lightweight live communication inside the board.
Brainstorming templates: mind maps, affinity diagrams, and retro formats.
Pros
Best price in the category, and free with existing paid Figma seats
Fast and precise, especially compared with heavier canvases
Natural handoff from ideation into actual design work
Cons
Lighter on structured facilitation tooling than Mural
It is a workshop layer, not a full project workspace
Pricing: free Starter plan with 3 files. Paid from around $3 to $5 per editor per month, and included with paid Figma seats.
Mural
Best for: facilitated workshops and design sprints
Mural is the tool facilitators choose, built by people who run structured sessions for a living.
Who Mural is best for: facilitators, agile coaches, and consultants running formal workshops with defined phases, such as design sprints, Lightning Decision Jams, and structured retrospectives.
Why it made this list: its facilitation features respect the craft more than any competitor. Private mode lets participants add ideas without seeing each other's contributions first, which directly counters the groupthink and anchoring that undermine live brainstorming. Outline mode walks a group through a session in sequence, timers keep phases honest, and facilitator controls manage what participants can see and do. If you run workshops professionally rather than occasionally, these details matter more than template count.
Key features
Private mode: participants contribute independently before ideas are revealed.
Outline mode: guide a group through structured session phases.
Facilitator controls: manage permissions, focus attention, and moderate sessions.
Anonymous voting: unbiased prioritisation after divergent phases.
Pros
Best facilitation tooling of any brainstorming platform
Private mode meaningfully improves idea quality in live sessions
Strong enterprise compliance and template frameworks
Cons
Noticeable performance lag on very large canvases
More expensive than FigJam and heavier than most teams need for casual sessions
Pricing: free plan with 3 murals. Paid from around $9.99 per member per month billed annually.
Lucidspark
Best for: turning brainstorms into diagrams
Lucidspark is the whiteboard half of the Lucid suite, and its case rests almost entirely on what happens after the brainstorm.
Who Lucidspark is best for: teams that whiteboard first and then need precise flowcharts, org charts, or technical diagrams from the same session.
Why it made this list: the handoff into Lucidchart is genuinely useful and no general canvas matches it. A messy sticky-note session can become a structured, presentable diagram without leaving the ecosystem or rebuilding anything. For teams whose ideation regularly ends in process maps or system diagrams, that continuity saves real work. Standalone, its differentiation is thinner, which is worth being honest about.
Key features
Lucidchart handoff: convert brainstorm output into structured diagrams.
Infinite canvas: standard sticky notes, freehand, and collaboration tools.
Collaborator voting and timers: prioritisation and session pacing.
Breakout boards: split large groups into smaller working sessions.
Pros
Unmatched path from loose brainstorm to precise diagram
Suite bundle is good value if you need both tools
Solid collaboration and facilitation basics
Cons
Limited reason to choose it over Miro or FigJam if you do not use Lucidchart
Smaller template library and less active community than Miro
Pricing: free plan with 3 boards. Individual around $7.95 per month, Team around $9 per user per month, and a Lucidspark plus Lucidchart bundle around $15 per user per month.
Excalidraw
Best for: free and open-source sketching
Excalidraw is the answer when you want a whiteboard without a subscription, an account, or a vendor relationship.
Who Excalidraw is best for: developers, small teams, privacy-conscious organisations, and anyone who wants a fast sketching canvas at no cost.
Why it made this list: it is genuinely free, open source, and self-hostable, with no board limits and no account required to start. Its deliberately hand-drawn aesthetic is a subtle advantage during early ideation, because rough-looking sketches invite criticism and iteration in a way polished ones do not. For teams with data-residency requirements or a dislike of per-seat pricing, self-hosting removes the problem entirely.
Key features
Open source and self-hostable: run it on your own infrastructure.
No board limits: unlimited canvases on the free version.
Hand-drawn style: rough aesthetic that encourages early-stage iteration.
Live collaboration: real-time multi-user editing with end-to-end encryption.
Pros
Completely free with no board caps
Self-hosting solves privacy and data-residency requirements
Fast and lightweight, no account needed to start
Cons
No template library or facilitation tooling to speak of
Not suited to structured workshops or large formal sessions
Pricing: free and open source. Optional paid Excalidraw Plus adds team features.
Microsoft Whiteboard
Best for: Microsoft 365 teams
Microsoft Whiteboard is the tool most teams already own and forget they have.
Who Microsoft Whiteboard is best for: organisations already running Microsoft 365 who want collaborative brainstorming inside Teams without a new subscription or procurement conversation.
Why it made this list: it launches directly inside a Teams meeting, which removes the single biggest friction point in remote brainstorming, getting everyone into the same tool. Ink-to-shape and ink-to-table convert rough drawings into clean objects, and boards persist across OneDrive and other Microsoft apps. It is not the most capable canvas here, but it is free with a licence you already pay for, and a tool everyone can access beats a better tool half the team cannot open.
Key features
Teams integration: launch a board inside a meeting with no setup.
Ink to shape and ink to table: convert freehand drawing into clean structures.
Templates: mind mapping, planning, and group ideation starters.
Microsoft 365 continuity: boards accessible across OneDrive, Loop, and Outlook.
Pros
Effectively free for Microsoft 365 organisations
Zero adoption friction for teams already in Teams
Genuinely capable for straightforward sessions
Cons
Lacks advanced diagramming, facilitation, and AI synthesis features
Limited export options outside the Microsoft ecosystem
Pricing: included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions. A free tier is available with a Microsoft account.
Whimsical
Best for: fast, structured boards
Whimsical trades the blank infinite canvas for speed and structure, and for a lot of teams that is the better trade.
Who Whimsical is best for: product managers and engineers who need flowcharts, wireframes, and mind maps quickly, without the sprawl of an open canvas.
Why it made this list: it is noticeably faster than general whiteboards for structured artifacts. Where Miro gives you infinite freedom and expects you to impose order, Whimsical's opinionated tooling produces tidy flowcharts, wireframes, and mind maps in a fraction of the time. For teams whose brainstorms consistently end in a diagram rather than a wall of stickies, that speed compounds.
Key features
Flowcharts and wireframes: purpose-built tools, not generic shapes.
Mind maps: fast keyboard-driven structure building.
Sticky-note boards: standard brainstorming when you need it.
Docs integration: embed diagrams into structured documents.
Pros
Much faster than open canvases for structured diagrams
Clean, consistent output with minimal fiddling
Simple, predictable pricing
Cons
Less flexible than an infinite canvas for freeform workshops
Lighter facilitation features than Miro or Mural
Pricing: free plan with limited boards. Pro from around $10 per user per month.
Milanote
Best for: creative briefs and moodboards
Milanote is where creative thinking gets collected rather than facilitated, and it is the strongest async option for visual work.
Who Milanote is best for: creative professionals, agencies, writers, and designers organising briefs, moodboards, and project references visually.
Why it made this list: it treats a brainstorm as a living document rather than a session. Flexible boards combine notes, images, links, and files, and the web clipper pulls inspiration straight from the browser into a board, which suits the way creative ideas actually accumulate over days rather than in one meeting. For collecting and presenting creative direction, its visual-first approach is genuinely different from a sticky-note canvas.
Key features
Flexible boards: notes, images, links, and files in one visual space.
Web clipper: save inspiration from anywhere into a board.
Moodboard and brief templates: creative-specific starting points.
Commenting and permissions: feedback and controlled sharing with clients.
Pros
Best tool here for moodboards and creative briefs
Excellent for ideas that accumulate over time rather than in one session
Broad integrations with Slack, Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Notion
Cons
No offline access
Not designed for live facilitated workshops or voting
Pricing: free plan with 100 notes. Paid from around $9.99 per user per month billed annually.
Coggle
Best for: collaborative mind mapping
Coggle does one thing, and it does it cleanly and cheaply.
Who Coggle is best for: teams, educators, and individuals who want fast, shared mind maps without learning a full collaboration platform.
Why it made this list: focused simplicity. Real-time co-editing on branching diagrams, unlimited branches and loops, and a genuinely low price make it a practical choice when the output you want is a mind map rather than a workshop. It is not trying to be Miro, and for the specific job of mapping how ideas connect, that focus is an advantage.
Key features
Real-time collaborative mind maps: multiple editors on one diagram.
Unlimited branches and loops: structure complex idea relationships.
Version history: review or restore earlier states.
Export options: PDF, PNG, and text formats.
Pros
Simple and fast for pure mind mapping
Very affordable
Low learning curve for non-technical participants
Cons
Very limited third-party integrations
No task management, voting, or workshop facilitation
Pricing: free plan with 3 private diagrams. Paid from around $5 per month.
Mentimeter
Best for: live audience participation
Mentimeter solves a problem whiteboards do not: gathering input from a large group in real time.
Who Mentimeter is best for: facilitators, educators, and team leads collecting live input from large audiences, whether in a room, remote, or hybrid.
Why it made this list: whiteboards work well up to a couple of dozen participants and become chaotic beyond that. Mentimeter is built for scale, with live polls, word clouds, and Q&A that let hundreds of people contribute instantly from their phones. Anonymous participation is the underrated feature: it removes the hierarchy problem where junior voices defer to senior ones, which is one of the main reasons live group ideation underdelivers.
Key features
Live polls and word clouds: instant visual input from large audiences.
Anonymous participation: removes seniority bias from responses.
Q&A module: structured audience questions during a session.
Export results: download responses to Excel or PDF for analysis.
Pros
Scales to audiences far beyond what a whiteboard handles
Anonymity genuinely improves the honesty of input
Works cleanly in hybrid and in-person settings
Cons
Not a canvas, so it captures input rather than organising ideas spatially
Responses cannot be edited after submission
Pricing: free plan with limited questions per presentation. Paid from around $14 per user per month billed annually.
Ideanote
Best for: structured innovation management
Ideanote is not a whiteboard. It is a pipeline for ideas that need to survive past the session.
Who Ideanote is best for: innovation managers and mid-size to large organisations that need to collect, evaluate, and route ideas through formal review stages.
Why it made this list: most brainstorming tools end when the session does, and the ideas die in a board nobody reopens. Ideanote handles the part that follows: idea collection campaigns, custom submission forms, automated routing to the right reviewers, multi-stage evaluation, and analytics on participation and progress. For organisations running company-wide innovation programmes rather than team workshops, that structure is the entire point.
Key features
Idea collection campaigns: targeted, time-bound submission drives.
Automated routing: send ideas to the right reviewers by rule.
Multi-stage evaluation: scoring and review workflows with criteria.
Analytics dashboard: participation rates and innovation metrics.
Pros
Closes the gap between having ideas and acting on them
Strong for company-wide innovation programmes
Clear audit trail of how ideas progressed
Cons
Not a visual canvas, so it is poor for live creative sessions
Advanced reporting sits behind higher tiers
Pricing: free plan available. Paid from around $6 per user per month billed annually.
ChatGPT
Best for: solo AI ideation
ChatGPT belongs here because a great deal of brainstorming happens alone, and a conversational partner beats a blank canvas.
Who ChatGPT is best for: individuals generating, challenging, and refining ideas before bringing them to a group, and facilitators preparing session prompts.
Why it made this list: it breaks the blank-page problem. You can ask for twenty angles on a problem, argue with the weak ones, ask it to attack your favourite idea, and iterate in minutes. Used well, it is most valuable before a group session rather than instead of one: generating a starting set of ideas independently is exactly what the research on effective brainstorming recommends. Claude and Gemini serve the same role if you prefer them.
Key features
Conversational ideation: open-ended prompting with context-aware follow-up.
Custom GPTs: reusable ideation assistants with specific framing.
File uploads: ground ideation in your own briefs and research.
Shared links: pass a session to teammates for async input.
Pros
Removes the blank-page problem instantly
Excellent at generating volume and challenging assumptions
Genuinely useful free tier
Cons
No visual canvas or spatial organisation of ideas
Output needs human judgment, since it produces plausible rather than validated ideas
Pricing: free tier available. Plus is $20 per month, with Team and Enterprise plans above.
Other online brainstorming tools
These did not make the main list but are worth knowing.
Canva Whiteboards: strong free tier and excellent for marketing teams who want brainstorms to become polished visuals.
Ideamap: AI-first ideation that generates and clusters ideas from prompts.
Boardmix: a genuinely unlimited free plan, popular with teams frustrated by three-board caps.
Conceptboard: the standard choice for European data-residency requirements.
tldraw: a tiny, fast, embeddable open-source canvas for developers.
Notion: useful for capturing and organising ideas as documents rather than on a canvas.
ClickUp Whiteboards: worth it if you already run projects in ClickUp, with the unusual ability to convert meeting transcripts into board content.
Brightidea: enterprise-scale innovation management, a heavier alternative to Ideanote.
Stormboard: structured sticky-note sessions with strong reporting output.
How I evaluated these online brainstorming tools
Rankings in this category are often shaped by affiliate relationships, so here are the criteria applied consistently to every tool above.
Canvas and idea capture. Whether the tool gives you room to work the way a team covers a wall in sticky notes, with the shapes, connectors, and drawing tools that ideation actually needs.
Real-time collaboration. Live multi-user editing with visible cursors, so remote participants can point at things, build on each other, and react in the moment rather than narrating over a screen share.
Facilitation tooling. Voting, timers, private mode, and presenter controls. These are what separate a productive session from a noisy one, and they are the clearest quality gap between tools in this list.
Async support. Whether people in other time zones can contribute meaningfully outside the live session, which matters more each year as teams spread out.
Templates and frameworks. Ready-made formats for affinity mapping, retrospectives, user story maps, and SWOT grids, so you are not rebuilding structure every session.
Integrations and export. Whether outputs flow into Jira, Slack, Figma, or your documentation, because a brainstorm that stays trapped in a board rarely turns into work.
Performance under load. How the tool behaves with a dozen or more participants and hundreds of elements on the board, which is where several popular options quietly struggle.
Pricing model. Specifically whether you pay per editor or per seat, since most brainstorming participants only need to view or comment.
How to choose an online brainstorming tool
Work from your session, not from the feature list.
Factor | What to consider |
|---|---|
Session type | Live facilitated workshop, async contribution, or solo ideation. This decides more than any feature. |
Team size | Whiteboards work well up to roughly 20 participants. Beyond that, look at Mentimeter or structured platforms. |
Existing stack | If you have Microsoft 365 or paid Figma seats, you already own a capable tool. Start there. |
Pricing model | Per editor with free viewers costs far less than per seat when most people only comment. |
Free tier limits | Most cap at three boards. Check whether that fits how you actually work before committing. |
Facilitation needs | If someone runs sessions professionally, private mode and timers justify a higher price. |
Integrations | Confirm outputs can reach Jira, Slack, or wherever work actually gets tracked. |
Data requirements | Regulated or EU-based teams should check residency options, or self-host with Excalidraw. |
A practical shortcut: run the same session in two free tiers before paying for either. Most of these tools give you enough to test a real workshop, and the differences that matter, performance and facilitation flow, only show up under real use.
What are online brainstorming tools?
Online brainstorming tools are digital platforms that let teams generate, capture, and organise ideas together, whether everyone is in the session at once or contributing across different hours and time zones. Most take the form of an infinite canvas with virtual sticky notes, drawing tools, and templates, though the category also includes mind mapping tools, live polling platforms, structured innovation pipelines, and AI assistants.
They exist to solve the problems that made remote ideation worse than the in-person version: no shared wall to cover in notes, no way to see what colleagues are working on, and no record of what was decided once the call ends. A good tool restores the spatial thinking of a physical whiteboard while adding things a wall cannot do, such as anonymous voting, automatic clustering, version history, and a permanent searchable record.
The important distinction, and the one that decides which tool fits, is session type. A live facilitated workshop, an async contribution window, and a solo ideation sprint are three different activities. A tool built for one is usually mediocre at another.
How you run the session matters more than which tool you buy
This is the part most tool comparisons skip, and it has more effect on your results than any feature on this page.
Research on group ideation has consistently found something counterintuitive: traditional live group brainstorming tends to produce fewer and less original ideas than the same number of people ideating separately and pooling their results afterwards. Three effects explain most of it.
Production blocking. In a live session only one person can contribute at a time, so while someone else is talking you are holding your idea in memory, and often losing it or reshaping it to fit what was just said.
Social loafing. In a group, individual contribution becomes less visible, and effort quietly drops.
Evaluation apprehension. People withhold unusual ideas when colleagues, and particularly senior colleagues, are watching. The most original suggestions are exactly the ones most likely to go unsaid.
The practical fix is well established and easy to apply with any tool on this list. Have participants generate ideas independently first, silently and simultaneously, then share and build together. This approach, often called brainwriting, directly removes production blocking (everyone writes at once), reduces loafing (contributions are individually visible), and softens apprehension when contributions are anonymous.
That is why the features worth paying for are the ones supporting independent generation: Mural's private mode, anonymous voting in Miro and Mural, Mentimeter's anonymous input, and async contribution windows generally. A cheaper tool used with a good process reliably beats an expensive tool used as a digital version of everyone shouting over each other.
Key features to look for
Infinite canvas: room to spread ideas out without running into edges.
Real-time collaboration: live editing with visible cursors and presence.
Private or independent input mode: the single most valuable feature for idea quality.
Voting and prioritisation: dot voting or ranking to converge after divergent phases.
Templates: affinity maps, retros, story maps, and SWOT grids ready to use.
AI clustering and summarisation: automatic theming of sticky notes and session summaries.
Timers and facilitation controls: keeping phases honest and sessions moving.
Comments and threaded discussion: async depth on individual ideas.
Export and integrations: getting outputs into Jira, Slack, or documentation.
Version history: returning to an earlier state of the board.
Access controls: managing who can view, edit, or facilitate.
Benefits of using online brainstorming tools
Wider participation. Remote and async contribution means quiet team members and people in other time zones actually take part, rather than the loudest voice in a meeting room setting the direction.
Better idea quality through anonymity. Anonymous input and voting remove the seniority bias that suppresses unconventional suggestions.
A permanent record. Boards persist and stay searchable, so ideas are revisited rather than lost when a call ends.
Faster convergence. Built-in voting turns fifty ideas into a shortlist in minutes rather than a follow-up meeting.
Less post-session busywork. AI clustering and summarisation remove the hour of manual synthesis that used to follow every workshop.
A path from idea to action. Integrations push outputs into the tools where work is tracked, so decisions do not evaporate.
What do online brainstorming tools cost?
Most of this category sits in a narrow band, and the variables that matter are not the headline price.
Plan type | Typical price | What you usually get |
|---|---|---|
Free | $0 | Usually 3 boards, core templates, basic collaboration |
Individual or Starter | $5 to $10 per user per month | Unlimited boards, full templates, basic integrations |
Team or Business | $10 to $20 per user per month | Voting, timers, private mode, admin controls, AI features |
Enterprise | Custom | SSO, compliance, advanced permissions, dedicated support |
Three things distort those numbers in practice.
Per editor versus per seat. This is the biggest lever. FigJam charges per editor and keeps viewers free, which is why it can cost a fraction of a per-seat tool for the same group. If most of your participants only comment or view, prioritise this.
The three-board free tier. Miro, FigJam, Mural, and Lucidspark all cap free plans at around three editable boards. That is fine for evaluation and impossible for regular use, which is the intended effect.
What you already own. Microsoft Whiteboard is included with Microsoft 365, and FigJam is bundled with paid Figma seats. Before buying anything, check whether a capable tool is already sitting in a subscription you pay for.
The bottom line
Most teams overthink this decision. If you run regular workshops, Miro is the safe default and Mural is the better choice when facilitation is a craft rather than an occasional task. If you already pay for Figma, FigJam is close to free and good enough for almost everything. If budget is the constraint, Excalidraw and Microsoft Whiteboard are genuinely capable rather than compromises.
The more important decision is how you run the session. Whichever tool you choose, have people generate ideas independently before discussing them together, make contributions anonymous when the group has a hierarchy, and use voting to converge instead of debating to consensus. That single change in process will improve your results more than any upgrade on this page, and it works on the free tier.