Mural – Visual Collaboration and Online Whiteboarding Platform

Overview

Mural is an enterprise-focused visual collaboration platform that provides an online digital whiteboard environment for teams. Founded in 2011, Mural is designed to support various collaborative activities, particularly within remote and hybrid work settings. Its core functionality revolves around an infinite canvas where users can add sticky notes, shapes, drawings, images, and documents to visualize ideas and information. The platform aims to replicate and enhance the experience of in-person whiteboarding and workshop facilitation in a digital space.

Mural is commonly used for activities such as design thinking workshops, where teams engage in empathy mapping, ideation, and prototyping. It also supports agile methodologies by providing templates and tools for sprint planning, retrospectives, and stand-up meetings. Brainstorming sessions benefit from Mural's features like private modes, voting, and timers, which help structure and facilitate group idea generation. The platform's emphasis on visual communication helps teams organize complex information and foster shared understanding, which is critical for distributed teams.

The platform offers a range of pre-built templates for common business frameworks and processes, allowing teams to quickly initiate structured collaboration without starting from a blank canvas. Facilitation tools, such as summon, private mode, and voting, are integrated to help meeting leaders guide participants through activities and gather feedback efficiently. Mural also provides integrations with other business tools, supporting workflows that span across different applications. Its compliance certifications, including SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, address enterprise security and data privacy requirements, making it suitable for organizations handling sensitive information.

Mural targets a broad audience, from individual contributors and project managers to design teams and consultants, who require a flexible and secure environment for visual collaboration. For instance, a design team might use Mural for a remote user journey mapping session, while an agile development team could leverage it for a distributed sprint retrospective. The platform's developer API enables technical users to extend its capabilities, integrating Mural into custom applications or automating workflows, further enhancing its adaptability within diverse enterprise ecosystems.

Key features

• Digital Whiteboard: An infinite canvas for visual collaboration, supporting various media types including sticky notes, text, shapes, images, and documents.
• Templates: A library of pre-designed templates for common frameworks like Lean Canvas, SWOT analysis, empathy maps, and agile ceremonies, enabling structured collaboration.
• Facilitation Tools: Features such as summon (to bring participants to a specific area), private mode (for individual ideation before sharing), voting, and timers to guide and manage collaborative sessions.
• Integrations: Connects with other enterprise tools for communication, project management, and document sharing, streamlining workflows.
• Developer API: Provides programmatic access to manage murals, content, and users, allowing for custom integrations and extensions to automate tasks or create specialized applications.
• Security and Compliance: Adheres to industry standards including SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, addressing data security and privacy requirements for enterprise use.
• Real-time Collaboration: Enables multiple users to interact simultaneously on the same canvas, with cursors and changes visible in real-time.

Pricing

Mural offers a free plan with limited features, suitable for individual use or small teams exploring the platform. Paid plans provide expanded functionality, increased storage, and advanced administration capabilities. Pricing is typically structured per user per month, with discounts for annual billing.

Pricing data is accurate as of May 2026. For the most current pricing details, refer to the official Mural pricing page.

Common integrations

• Microsoft Teams: Embed murals directly into Teams channels and meetings, facilitating real-time collaboration within the communication platform (Mural Microsoft Teams integration guide).
• Slack: Share murals, receive notifications, and create new murals directly from Slack channels, enhancing communication workflows (Mural Slack integration guide).
• Zoom: Integrate Mural into Zoom meetings to enable interactive whiteboarding sessions during video conferences (Mural Zoom integration guide).
• Jira: Embed Jira issues into murals for project planning, backlog refinement, and agile ceremonies, linking visual collaboration with task management (Mural Jira integration guide).
• Google Drive: Attach and access files from Google Drive within murals, centralizing resources for collaborative projects.
• Azure DevOps: Connect murals with Azure DevOps work items, supporting visual planning and tracking for software development teams (Mural Azure DevOps integration guide).

Alternatives

• Miro: Another widely used online whiteboarding platform offering similar features for visual collaboration, known for its extensive template library and integrations.
• Figma (FigJam): A collaborative online whiteboard from Figma, designed for brainstorming, diagramming, and workshops, often favored by design teams due to its integration with the Figma design tool.
• Lucidspark: A virtual whiteboard that provides tools for ideation, planning, and organization, emphasizing ease of use and integration with other Lucid Software products.
• Adobe XD Coediting: While not a dedicated whiteboard, Adobe XD offers coediting features that allow multiple designers to work on prototypes simultaneously, serving a similar real-time collaboration need for design tasks.

Getting started

Mural offers a developer API for programmatic interaction, allowing users to manage murals, content, and users. Below is an example of how to interact with the Mural API using a hypothetical Python client to create a new mural. This example assumes you have an API key and the necessary SDK or HTTP client setup.

import requests
import json

MURAL_API_BASE_URL = "https://api.mural.co/api/v1/"
API_KEY = "YOUR_MURAL_API_KEY"

def create_new_mural(workspace_id, title, folder_id=None):
    headers = {
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    
    payload = {
        "title": title,
        "workspaceId": workspace_id
    }
    if folder_id:
        payload["folderId"] = folder_id
        
    try:
        response = requests.post(
            f"{MURAL_API_BASE_URL}workspaces/{workspace_id}/murals",
            headers=headers,
            data=json.dumps(payload)
        )
        response.raise_for_status() # Raise an HTTPError for bad responses (4xx or 5xx)
        mural_data = response.json()
        print(f"Successfully created mural: {mural_data['title']} (ID: {mural_data['id']})")
        return mural_data
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as http_err:
        print(f"HTTP error occurred: {http_err}")
        print(f"Response: {response.text}")
    except Exception as err:
        print(f"An error occurred: {err}")
    return None

# Replace with your actual workspace ID and desired mural title
# You can find your workspace ID through the Mural UI or by using the API to list workspaces.
example_workspace_id = "wk_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
example_mural_title = "My First API Mural - 2026-05-27"

# Optional: If you want to create it in a specific folder
# example_folder_id = "fo_yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"
# new_mural = create_new_mural(example_workspace_id, example_mural_title, example_folder_id)

new_mural = create_new_mural(example_workspace_id, example_mural_title)

if new_mural:
    print("Mural creation successful.")
else:
    print("Mural creation failed.")

This Python code snippet demonstrates how to send a POST request to the Mural API to create a new mural within a specified workspace. It includes error handling for HTTP responses and prints the ID of the newly created mural upon success. Developers would typically integrate this into larger applications for automated mural generation, template deployment, or content management.