Miro
Also known as: Miro board, online whiteboard, digital whiteboard (Miro), virtual whiteboard
Miro is an online visual collaboration platform providing an infinite digital whiteboard for teams to brainstorm, plan, design, and collaborate visually in real time or asynchronously.
Teams use Miro for: design thinking workshops and brainstorming, user journey and process mapping, sprint planning and retrospectives, mind mapping, architecture diagramming, and creating interactive presentations. Miro boards are collaborative: multiple users can see each other's cursors and edits simultaneously, enabling remote facilitation of workshops that previously required physical whiteboard rooms. Miro competes primarily with Mural and to some extent with Figma (for design-specific collaboration).
Miro, explained at three levels
At home
Miro is an online whiteboard you can share with anyone. Instead of a physical whiteboard that only people in the room can see and write on, a Miro board is on the web: multiple people can be on the board at the same time from different locations, writing sticky notes, drawing shapes, moving things around, and seeing each other's additions in real time. It is like a virtual meeting room with a very large whiteboard, suitable for brainstorming sessions, planning workshops, or any discussion where you want to think visually together.
At work
Miro replaces the physical whiteboard for distributed or hybrid teams. Retrospectives, sprint planning, design workshops, customer journey mapping, and strategy sessions that were previously conducted in rooms with sticky notes and markers now happen on Miro boards. The advantage beyond just being remote: Miro boards are saved automatically, searchable, shareable via link, and can be accessed again months later, unlike a physical whiteboard that gets erased after the meeting.
At home
Miro facilitator features enable structured workshop running: timer (visible to all participants), voting (participants vote on sticky notes to prioritize), and presentation mode (guides participants through a board sequentially without them getting lost on the infinite canvas). Template libraries for specific workshop formats (Lean Canvas, 4Ls retrospective, SWOT analysis, customer empathy maps) provide ready-to-run structures. For people facilitating remote workshops, Miro's facilitation features reduce the coordination overhead of managing a group on an infinite canvas.
At work
Miro's ecosystem integrations extend it from a standalone whiteboard into a workflow hub: Jira integration (create Jira tickets from Miro cards, link cards to existing issues); Confluence integration (embed Miro boards in Confluence pages for documentation); Figma integration (import Figma frames for design review on Miro); Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications for board activity. For teams that plan work in Miro and execute in Jira, the Miro-Jira integration reduces the manual step of recreating Miro outputs as Jira tickets.
At home
Miro REST API allows programmatic board creation, template application, and content management. This is used by: consulting firms that create a new Miro board from a template for each client engagement automatically, teams that export Miro board content to other systems for reporting, and product teams that use Miro as a rapid prototyping canvas connected to development workflows. Miro's App Marketplace hosts well over 100 integrations and plugins built by Miro partners, covering use cases from BPMN diagramming to customer research synthesis.
At work
Enterprise Miro governance involves: workspace administration (managing board access, user provisioning, SSO integration with Okta or Microsoft Entra ID), data residency options (Miro offers EU and US data residency for enterprise customers with data sovereignty requirements), content security (board export restrictions, visitor access controls), and audit logging (enterprise plans include board activity logs for compliance). Organizations with sensitive strategic content on Miro boards (M&A planning, confidential product roadmaps) should review these controls, as Miro boards are cloud-stored and accessible via share link by default.
Real-world examples
At home
Sophie facilitated a quarterly planning session for a 15-person remote team across four time zones. She set up a Miro board in advance with team sections, a prioritization matrix, and voting sticky notes. During the two-hour session, all 15 participants worked simultaneously on the board: writing, moving, and voting. She used the timer to keep exercises on schedule and presentation mode to guide the team through the agenda without people getting lost. The board remained accessible for months as the team's reference for what was decided.
At work
Thomas was a product manager who ran bi-weekly product discovery sessions with stakeholders. He standardized on a Miro template for 'opportunity discovery' sessions: customer problem sticky notes in yellow, solution ideas in blue, evidence in green, and a prioritization matrix on the right. Each session started from the same template, creating a consistent facilitation format. After 12 sessions over six months, the complete history of discovery sessions was searchable on Miro, institutional memory that survived team changes.
Common confusions
- Many teams assume Miro works best only for real-time sessions where everyone is online simultaneously — Miro supports asynchronous collaboration as effectively as synchronous: a facilitator can set up a board with instructions and activities, share it before a meeting, and have participants complete pre-work sticky notes in their own time. After a live session, the board remains accessible for follow-up additions and references. Some teams run fully async retrospectives where participants add sticky notes over 48 hours before a summarizing session. Miro's persistent boards make async contribution as valid as real-time collaboration for many use cases.
- Some organizations assume Miro replaces their diagramming tool (Lucidchart, draw.io, Visio) — Miro's diagramming capabilities are sufficient for rough sketches and workshop-quality process flows, but it is not a precise technical diagramming tool. For professional-grade flowcharts, BPMN diagrams, network diagrams, or technical architecture documentation that will be presented to external stakeholders or included in specifications, dedicated diagramming tools (Lucidchart, draw.io, Visio) provide more control, shape libraries, and export quality. Miro is best for collaborative ideation; dedicated diagramming tools are better for polished technical documentation.
For analysts
When setting up a client workshop program (discovery sessions, design sprints, retrospectives), Miro as the standard facilitation platform is worth establishing early. The investment is: build a set of reusable board templates for your common workshop types, train team members on facilitation features (timer, voting, presentation mode), and integrate with Jira or Confluence if the team uses those tools for follow-up. The payoff is consistent, efficient workshop facilitation that scales across multiple engagements and builds institutional knowledge in persistent, searchable boards.
History & origin
Miro was founded in 2011 in Russia (originally as RealtimeBoard) and rebranded to Miro in 2019. The product grew gradually through the 2010s as an alternative to physical whiteboards for distributed teams. COVID-19 (2020) was transformative: the sudden shift to fully remote work eliminated physical whiteboard rooms and dramatically accelerated demand for digital whiteboard tools. Miro's user base grew from approximately 5 million registered users in early 2020 to over 30 million by 2021. The company raised $400M at a $17.5B valuation in early 2022. Miro expanded beyond whiteboarding with template libraries for specific workflows (Agile retrospectives, design sprints, customer journey maps), integrations with Jira, Confluence, Figma, and Slack, and an extensive plugin ecosystem. Digital Whiteboard became an established SaaS product category with Miro as the market leader.