Here is a collection of some of the best visual collaboration platforms that you can use to streamline your collaboration workflow and enhance your productivity. These are digital workspaces and online whiteboards that enable you to create centralized hubs of information where you can create and access all of your tasks and projects from a single place.
You can use these collaborative digital workspaces to collaboratively brainstorm new ideas, plan for projects, and organize tasks. Some of the interesting features shared by almost all of these visual collaboration platforms include pre-designed templates to start your collaborative projects, the ability to upload and share files and content, built-in timers to time group activities, synchronous and asynchronous chat functionality including live voice calls, support integration with other apps, and many more.
Whether your team members are colocated, distributed, or fully remote, these collaborative digital workspaces will enable you to connect, work together, share feedback, and streamline your workflow.
1. Google Jamboard
Google Jamboard is a collaborative digital whiteboard that you can use to brainstorm, share ideas and collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. Each jam consists of several frames and within each frame you can use Jamboard's rich editing tools to draw, add various types of shapes, add sticky notes and text boxes, insert images from Google Drive or from the drive of your device, and many more. Best of all, Jamboard is simple, easy to use and free.
Other interesting features provided by Jamboard include ready-made templates, the ability to save and download Jams as PDFs or images, upload images to use in your jams, insert various shapes (e.g., circles, arrows, squares, rectangles, etc), add sticky notes to your jams, create beautiful drawings inside your jams using different pen tools, various sharing options (e.g., by email, URL), and many more.
'For Google Workspace for Education customers, Jamboard starts at USD $4,99 (includes 1 Jamboard display, 2 styluses, 1 eraser, and 1 wall mount) with a one-time management and support fee payment of USD $600. '
2. Slack
Slack is another good visual collaboration platform that offers a wide range of features. Channels is one of my favourite feature in Slack. It provides you with a collaborative digital space that allow you and your team to access, organize, and work on the same thing. You can create channels for different topics and projects, upload content (e.g., documents, PDFs, and files) and invite collaborators to join. You have the choice to make channels public so anyone in your organization can find and join them or private accessible to only those you invite.
Slack Connect is another key feature that enables users to communicate and collaborate in much more effective ways. Members can send messages, share files, and engage in real-time collaboration. You can even connect your third party tools (e.g., DocuSign, Zoom, Google Drive, Microsoft Word, etc) to help you automate your workflow and further enhance your productivity. You can easily book meetings, share documents, streamline processes, and increase collaboration.
Slack accessibility features enable neurodiverse teams to communicate and collaborate in an inclusive environment where every member gets equal chance at contributing and accessing shared knowledge. Some of these accessibility features include: keyboard shortcuts, screen reader, special commands for navigating Salack faster, the ability to customize the animations of GIFs and emojis, the ability to adjust zoom level and change message display, dark mode, and more.
Slack offers different pricing plans. There is the free plan which comes with limited features. The Pro plan costs $6.67/month, the Business plan costs $ 12.50/month, and the Enterprise Grid plan offers custom pricing.
3. Notion
Notion is a digital workspace that supports visual collaboration and teamwork. Notion allows you to create pages, docs with images, to-do's, and several other content types. You can invite your team members and start working together. You can share pages, add comments, and @mention teammates and with few clicks you can turn your pages into a website.
Notion can help you create and customize your workflow using a number of building blocks including text, image., file, discussion, code, bookmark, toggle list, and many more. Notion offers a huge collection of pre-designed customizable templates to boost your workflow and streamline team collaboration. The Education section features some beautiful templates for students, teachers, and schools. These are templates designed to help teachers and students organize assignments, manage lesson plans and even create and publish a school or class website.
Notion offers different pricing plans. There is the free Personal plan which comes with limited features. The Personal Pro plan costs $4/month, the Team plan costs $8/month, and the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.
4. Miro
Miro is an online whiteboard ideal for visual collaboration among colocated, distributed and/or remote teams. You can use Miro collaborative's real-time or asynchronous features to host online remote meetings and workshops with your team, hold collaborative brainstorming sessions in real time, create visual presentations, manage and track progress, and more.
Miro offers several ready-made templates to help you and your team collaborate more effectively. There are brainstorming and ideation templates, meetings and workshops templates, research and design templates, strategy and planning templates, agile workflow templates, mapping and diagramming templates, and many more.
Miro's online whiteboard includes advanced security features with the option to add more sophisticated security and compliance controls. And to help you better scale your existing workflow, Miro supports integration with a wide variety of apps and tools including Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Asana, Notion, Box, and more.
Miro offers different pricing plans. There is the free plan which comes with limited features. The Team Pro plan costs $8/month, the Business plan costs $16/month, and the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.
5. Monday.com
Monday.com is another collaborative digital workspace that supports visual collaboration. You can use it to centralize all of your work and files into a single platform accessible anywhere, anytime. You can also connect your teams and collaborate in real-time. Monday's customizable dashboard enables you to keep track of your team's work and helps you easily scale your workflows.
Monday offers a number of practical building blocks to help you build your workflow. These include Views (helps you visualize your work using different views such as timeline, Gantt chart, calendar, etc), Boards, Dashboards (helps you keep track of progress, timelines, due dates, important projects, etc), Docs (enables you to 'connect, collaborate, and execute ideas and workflows in real-time from any doc'), Automations (choose an automation recipe or design your own to help with streamlining processes), and more. Monday also supports integration of different apps including Slack, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Zoom, Excel, Google Drive, etc.
Monday.com offers different pricing plans. There is the Individual free plan which comes with limited features. The Basic plan costs €8/month, the Standard plan costs €10/month, the Pro plan costs €16/month, the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.
6. Conceptboard
Conceptboard is a collaborative online whiteboard that provides a spacious canvas where you can seamlessly collaborate with your team both in real-time and asynchronously. You can create boards, invite collaborators, share files, engage in synchronous discussions, and brainstorm new ideas. The great thing about this visual collaboration platform is that invited participants do not even need a login to take part in your online meetings. Their guest access enables them to participatie whenever they want.
Conceptboard is also ideal for saving notes and project ideas thus centralizing all your content in a single place accessible anywhere with Internet connection. You can start your board using a pre-built template (e.g., Empathy Maps, Kanban Boards, etc). Just drag and drop and share folders with your collaborators. Everything you create on Conceptboard is automatically saved and synced across devices allowing you to track changes using the board history. If you accidently delete anything you can restore it with a single click.
Conceptboard offers different pricing plans. There is the free plan which comes with limited features. The Premium plan costs $6/month, the Business plan costs $9.50/month, the Enterprise plan which offers custom pricing.
7. Mural
Mural is another good visual collaboration platform that provides you with a digital whiteboard where you can work collaboratively with your team in real-time as well as asynchronously. Mural offers over 300 professionally designed templates to kick start your collaborative project. It also offers tons of collaborative features to help you visualize your ideas and work together more efficiently.
These include sticky notes and text, the ability to build various shapes to map out complex ideas, access an extensive icon library to integrate into your visual story, drag and drop images and GIFs to boost your collaborative team work, capture your ideas with freehand sketching and writing, and many more.
Other interesting features provided by Mural include a timer to help you time activities and stay focused, Super lock to help you lock objects, private mode that enables you to hide contributions of individual collaborators, easily share murals using hyperlinks, add feedback and comments to boards, hold synchronous chats with your team or start voice calls, and more. Mural also integrates with other productivity tools including Slack, Dropbox, Adobe, Embedly, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Forms/Sheets/Slides, and many more.
Mural offers different pricing plans. There is the free plan which comes with limited features. The Team+ plan costs $9.99/month, the Business plan costs $17.99/month, and the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.
8. Lucidspark
Lucidspark is another interesting collaborative online whiteboard that offers various features to enhance visual collaboration. Lucidspark helps you 'capture team insights with sticky notes, freehand drawing, and color-coded cursors, shapes, and lines for each collaborator.'
Other helpful features provided by Lucidspark include Breakout Boards which enable collaborators to split up into smaller groups for exchange of feedback and ideas before sharing with the large group, a built-in timer to keep everyone focused, 'easily tally votes on ideas, visualize the results, and group ideas by number of votes', use Gather and Sort features to easily tag and organize ideas, ready-made templates, integrations with other tools such as Slack, MS Teams, Jira, Lucidchart, Google Drive, and more.
Lucidspark offers different pricing plans. There is the free plan which comes with limited features. The Individual plan starts at $7.95/month, the Team plan starts at $9.00/month, the Enterprise plan offers custom pricing.
