Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
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.
InVision was much better when it came to building and interacting with prototypes while Miro and Mural are much better visualization and collaboration tools. But from a pure design and development perspective Figma has been the best I have used and the one preferred by all …
Honestly, Figma is so much better than its competitors, if you even want to call them that. You get accurate, high-fidelity work that you can quickly get into development for launch. The Figma community of plugins and templates is also AMAZING! There are so many passionate …
Mural has a User Interface that is easier to understand, which allows us to bring newcomers to brainstorm and design sessions without investing time in learning. Mural has more dinamic objects that impact on the presentation and visibility of the work, like having Post it notes …
I have had an experience of working with all the three above mentioned tools--Miro, InVision, and Lucidchart--and I can confidently say that MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) beats all these three tools when it comes to performing any kind of online collaboration activities, which …
Figma has been a game-changer for my team. It’s perfect for collaboration, rapid prototyping, and development handoff. In addition, FigJam allows for collaborative workshops remotely. As I mentioned, we use Figma daily to design experiences, create clickable prototypes to share and perform user testing, run brainstorming workshops with FigJam, and manage our Design System. Figma solves so many business problems, including the ability to collaboratively create experiences across the UX and product teams and provide tokens for our developers. Like most design teams, we need to be able to test our work with users. Figma allows for rapid prototyping that we can share with the world to get real-time user feedback through our user testing tool. In addition, we have set up our design system in Figma. It has allowed for easy collaboration and communication with designers across the company and seamless execution for our developers using tokenization.
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.
As a visual designer, I spend 90% of my working time in Figma. So, as a design tool, Figma is mature and feature-rich. It covers all the basic needs and provides extras, such as simple prototyping and the ability to use external plugins.
Collaboration: It’s very easy to work together on the same file in Figma. You can easily brainstorm together or use Figma as a shared screen.
Smartness of components: Figma provides many adaptability options for components that allow building very flexible and scalable layouts.
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
Sometimes, I have to break components - if there was an easier way to customize on the spot without breaking them.
If I change the naming convention in the library, it would be nice to replace the old version. Because it will just remove the style altogether, I have to go back and apply it again.
I rated 10 because there are many reasons to retain Figma as a design tool. 1. Very high dependency on designers, as it is one of the go-to design tools. 2. Figma has the majority of the product designs, either moved to development or in progress. 3. This is one of the best design tools which provides lots of flexibility and analytics related to the usage of components which is a great feature. Overall its one of the best design tools we have, hence retaining it would be an ideal choice.
It's so simple to use! I have no background in UI design but basic designing and I was able to learn this software Figma within 3-5 days. There are tons of tutorials available on Youtube from so many popular YouTubers in the space, you can just go through them and start designing.
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.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
It's been at least a couple years since I used Sketch. It used to be my go to, but then there was a sudden shift towards Figma, and Sketch become obsolete. I was initially less drawn to Figma as it introduced a learning curve I wasn't ready to add to my workflow. I remember the days when I was onboarding designers from Sketch to Figma and that transition was hard as we were used to certain ways of working. Now, I believe Figma is easier to start with if there's nothing else to compare it with.
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.
