Online whiteboards have become essential for remote and hybrid teams that need to brainstorm, plan, and collaborate visually. Miro and FigJam are the two most prominent options, each bringing different strengths to the canvas. Miro is a full-featured visual collaboration platform built for diverse business use cases. FigJam is Figma’s companion whiteboarding tool designed for quick brainstorming and design-adjacent collaboration. This comparison examines pricing, features, templates, and integrations to help you choose the right whiteboard for your team.
Quick Verdict
Miro wins for teams that need a comprehensive visual collaboration platform supporting workshops, strategy sessions, diagramming, and cross-functional planning across the entire organization. FigJam wins for design teams already using Figma who need a lightweight brainstorming tool tightly integrated with their design workflow.
Overview of Both Platforms
Miro
Miro was founded in 2011 and has grown into the leading visual collaboration platform with over 60 million users across 200,000 organizations. It supports an enormous range of use cases from brainstorming and retrospectives to user story mapping, technical diagramming, and strategic planning. Miro’s infinite canvas, extensive template library, and robust facilitation tools make it the go-to whiteboard for distributed teams.
FigJam
FigJam launched in 2021 as Figma’s answer to the whiteboarding space. In 2024, Figma made FigJam free for all users, signaling its role as a gateway into the broader Figma ecosystem. FigJam focuses on simplicity and speed, offering a clean canvas with sticky notes, shapes, connectors, stamps, and reactions. Its integration with Figma makes it particularly valuable for design teams that want to brainstorm and then move ideas directly into design files.
Pricing Comparison
Miro Pricing
- Free – unlimited team members, 3 editable boards, basic features, and community templates.
- Starter – $10 per member per month (billed annually), adding unlimited boards, private boards, and voting.
- Business – $20 per member per month, unlocking guest access, SSO, advanced attention management, and smart diagramming.
- Enterprise – custom pricing with advanced security, compliance, centralized admin, and premium support.
FigJam Pricing
FigJam is free for all users as part of Figma’s ecosystem:
- FigJam – free for everyone with unlimited FigJam files, audio chat, stamps, templates, and widgets.
- Figma Professional – $15 per editor per month includes FigJam plus full Figma design capabilities.
- Figma Organization/Enterprise – $45-$75 per editor per month includes FigJam with enterprise controls.
The Bottom Line on Pricing
FigJam’s free pricing is a powerful advantage. Teams can use FigJam for brainstorming at zero cost, making it the obvious choice for budget-conscious teams or those already in the Figma ecosystem. Miro’s free tier limits you to 3 editable boards, and its paid plans add up quickly for larger teams. However, Miro’s pricing reflects a significantly more capable platform for enterprise-grade visual collaboration.
Features Head-to-Head
Canvas and Core Tools
Miro’s infinite canvas supports sticky notes, shapes, text, images, videos, drawing, connectors, frames, and mindmaps. The canvas handles hundreds of objects smoothly and supports advanced features like clustering, bulk editing, and smart shapes that snap to grids and alignment guides. Miro’s toolbar is extensive but well-organized.
FigJam’s canvas is intentionally simpler. It offers sticky notes, shapes, connectors, stamps, emojis, drawing, text, and sections. The tools are designed for speed and ease of use, prioritizing quick capture over complex diagramming. FigJam’s clean aesthetic matches Figma’s design philosophy and feels immediately approachable.
Templates and Frameworks
Miro’s template library is vast, with over 2,500 templates covering agile ceremonies, design thinking, strategy frameworks, customer journey maps, org charts, technical diagrams, and more. Custom template creation lets teams standardize their most common activities. The template quality and variety far exceed any competitor.
FigJam offers a curated selection of templates for brainstorming, retrospectives, planning, and team activities. Community-contributed templates expand the library further. While the selection is adequate for common activities, it is a fraction of Miro’s offering in both quantity and topical coverage.
Facilitation and Workshop Tools
Miro excels at facilitated sessions. Timer, voting, estimation, attention management (bring everyone to the same view), presenter mode, and talktrack (guided board walkthroughs) give facilitators control over collaborative sessions. These features make Miro the preferred platform for running design sprints, strategy workshops, and retrospectives with distributed teams.
FigJam provides stamps and reactions for quick feedback, audio chat for real-time conversation, and a cursor chat feature for lightweight communication. While useful for casual brainstorming, FigJam lacks the structured facilitation tools that workshop leaders need for formal sessions.
Diagramming
Miro supports advanced diagramming with flowcharts, UML diagrams, entity relationship diagrams, network diagrams, and technical architecture diagrams. Smart diagramming features on the Business plan auto-organize shapes and suggest connections. For teams that create technical diagrams alongside brainstorming content, Miro serves both needs on one canvas.
FigJam handles basic diagramming with shapes and connectors but is not designed for complex technical diagrams. Teams needing detailed flowcharts or architecture diagrams will find FigJam’s tools insufficient.
Figma Integration
FigJam’s deepest advantage is its native integration with Figma. Designers can move from brainstorming in FigJam to designing in Figma within the same ecosystem. Sticky notes can be converted to design tasks, FigJam boards can be embedded in Figma files, and the transition from ideation to execution is seamless. For design teams, this workflow integration is compelling.
Miro integrates with Figma through an embed widget, allowing Figma files to be viewed within Miro boards. The integration works but is not as fluid as FigJam’s native connection.
AI Features
Both platforms have introduced AI capabilities. Miro AI helps cluster sticky notes, generate content, summarize boards, and create diagrams from text descriptions. It can turn unstructured brainstorming into organized frameworks automatically.
FigJam AI offers similar features including auto-organization of sticky notes, template generation, and content summarization. Both implementations are useful for processing large volumes of brainstorming content.
Integrations
Miro integrates with over 130 apps, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Asana, Confluence, Google Workspace, Notion, and GitHub. Its API supports custom integrations, and the embed feature works across most platforms.
FigJam’s integrations are primarily through the Figma ecosystem, with connections to Jira, Asana, and other tools through Figma’s plugin system. The integration library is smaller but covers core workflow tools.
Pros
- Infinite canvas with buttery-smooth zoom and pan handles boards with 5,000+ sticky notes, wireframes, and diagrams without lag on modern browsers
- 300+ templates cover sprint retrospectives, user story maps, customer journey maps, SWOT analysis, and technical architecture diagrams, saving 30+ minutes of setup per workshop
- Built-in video chat, screen sharing, cursor tracking, and timer let you run a full remote workshop inside Miro without switching to Zoom or Teams
- Voting, timer, and presentation mode features turn a brainstorming session into a structured facilitation with dot voting and timed rounds
- Native integrations with Jira, Asana, Slack, Confluence, Figma, and Azure DevOps let you drag issues, designs, and documents directly onto the canvas
Cons
- Free plan limits you to 3 editable boards; the 4th board requires the Starter plan at $10/member/month or converting boards to view-only
- Boards with 10,000+ objects experience noticeable input delay and slow browser tab memory usage above 1.5GB
- Desktop app is essentially a wrapper around the web app and does not offer offline editing or meaningful performance improvements
Pros
- Browser-based with zero installation — designers, PMs, and engineers collaborate in the same file simultaneously across Mac, Windows, and Linux
- Component variants with properties (boolean, text, instance swap) let design systems scale to 1,000+ components without file bloat
- Auto Layout handles responsive padding, spacing, and wrapping — designs stay consistent from mobile to desktop without manual resizing
- Dev Mode gives engineers CSS, iOS, and Android code snippets, token values, and redline measurements directly from the design file
- Community hub has 500,000+ free plugins, UI kits, icons, and wireframe templates — including official Material Design and iOS kits
Cons
- Requires internet connection for full functionality; offline mode only allows viewing cached files with no editing capability
- Per-editor pricing means every designer pays $15/mo ($45/mo on Organization); free viewers have limited commenting and no editing
- Performance drops significantly on files with 100+ frames or complex nested components, especially on lower-spec machines
- No native animation timeline — motion design and microinteractions require exporting to Protopie, Rive, or After Effects
Who Should Choose Miro?
Miro is the right choice for organizations that need a comprehensive visual collaboration platform used by diverse teams across the company. If you run workshops, facilitate strategy sessions, create technical diagrams, or need advanced facilitation tools for distributed teams, Miro’s depth and template library are unmatched. Product managers, agile coaches, consultants, and cross-functional teams will find Miro essential for their collaborative work.
Who Should Choose FigJam?
FigJam is the better choice for design teams already embedded in the Figma ecosystem who need a quick, lightweight brainstorming tool. If your primary use case is design-adjacent brainstorming, team retrospectives, and ideation sessions that feed into Figma design work, FigJam’s free pricing and native Figma integration make it the obvious pick. Small teams with simple whiteboarding needs will appreciate FigJam’s simplicity and zero cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can FigJam replace Miro for all whiteboarding needs?
FigJam can replace Miro for basic brainstorming and team activities, but it cannot match Miro’s depth for workshops, technical diagramming, strategy planning, and facilitated sessions. Teams with diverse whiteboarding needs across departments will find Miro’s comprehensive feature set necessary.
Is Miro worth paying for when FigJam is free?
For design teams with simple brainstorming needs, FigJam’s free tier may be sufficient. However, organizations that run formal workshops, need advanced facilitation tools, create technical diagrams, or use whiteboards across non-design departments will find Miro’s paid plans justified by the productivity gains.
Can I use both Miro and FigJam together?
Many design teams use both. FigJam for quick design brainstorming sessions that flow into Figma, and Miro for broader organizational collaboration, workshops, and complex diagramming. This approach leverages each tool’s strengths without forcing one to serve all purposes.
Which platform handles large boards better?
Miro handles large, complex boards with hundreds or thousands of objects more reliably than FigJam. Its canvas is optimized for enterprise-scale collaboration with features like frames, navigation aids, and performance optimizations that maintain responsiveness on content-heavy boards.