Miro Review: Does It Work for Project Management in 2024?

An Online Whiteboard Tool With Diverse Functionality, Including Project Management

Miro is primarily an online whiteboard tool with diagramming and mind-mapping functionalities that make it easy for remote teams to brainstorm ideas.

Miro also works as a full-fledged presentation app, similar to Zoom or Microsoft Teams. You can share your screen and have audio and video calls with your teammates. You can even create slideshows in the app itself.

On top of that, Miro provides project management features such as Kanban cards and Gantt charts to help you track tasks easily.

While it may seem that Miro is trying too hard to do many things at once, these features work surprisingly well together, helping you stay productive without distraction. You can map out your processes and turn concepts into tasks and projects. Plus, built-in collaboration, documentation, and time-tracking tools help streamline your workflow and keep all resources in one place.

All this comes at affordable prices, as Miro has a solid free plan and three relatively inexpensive paid plans. Aside from English, Miro is available in French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. And, despite the abundance of tools, Miro is easy to use, even as a beginner.

That said, Miro lacks standard project management reporting tools, which may be an issue if you’re dealing with large chunks of information.

So, can Miro cater to your project management needs? Let’s find out.

Infinite Boards to Turn Your Ideas Into Actions

Miro’s setup includes boards where you can add unlimited elements without ever running out of space. You can choose between numerous board templates that let you visualize and organize your tasks in different ways.

Creative teams may find Miro’s brainstorming capabilities particularly useful, but Miro’s highly visual and extremely customizable system can help you organize any type of work, whether it’s a content calendar or a new software feature.

Enter the Miroverse of Board Templates

Miro offers 1500+ board templates divided across categories such as Brainstorming & Ideation and Agile Workflows. The templates are well-designed and highly customizable, so you’ll be able to set up projects quickly and get organized every step of the way. For instance, you can use mind maps to brainstorm tasks, turn them into Kanban cards, and work on them one by one.

Still, the highlight for me is Miroverse – a huge selection of community templates Miro users have created and made available for free. You’ll find some exceptional designs there, as well as inspiration on how to use them for your own projects.

Effective Task Management With Kanban Boards and Gantt Charts

Miro’s Kanban template lets you view your tasks as cards on a board. When you click on a task, a separate window opens, allowing you to edit task details. You can assign tasks to team members, add due dates, change status, and more.

You can drag and drop your cards according to the task status (To Do, In Progress, Done). Also, even if you’re not using the Kanban template, you can add Kanban cards to your current template by clicking the More Apps button on the left sidebar.

If you opt for one of Miro’s timeline designs (available in the Strategy & Planning section), you’ll be able to create Gantt charts of your projects, and they are as good-looking as they are useful. Thanks to Miro’s neat drag-and-drop editor, you can easily set up task dependencies, rearrange events, and get a clear overview of past and future milestones.

Notes On and Off the Board

One thing I particularly like about Miro is how it helps you keep all documentation in one place (while making it fun). To provide feedback and instructions or simply draw attention to important information, you can attach colorful notes anywhere on your board with Miro’s sticky notes feature.

Aside from sticky notes, you can also create documents as accompanying material to your boards. Miro’s note feature allows you to create project summaries, to-do lists, meeting agendas, and more – providing additional information for everyone on your team to see.

Integrations to Streamline Your Workflow

Miro has 100+ integrations to help you streamline your operations. For example, if you’re already using a project management software such as Asana or Jira, you can import your task cards and put them on your board.

You can find third-party apps for everything from communication and productivity to design tools. Aside from Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 apps, some notable examples include Unsplash, Adobe XD, and Board Translator. The latter lets you translate your Miro boards into more than 25 languages.

Miro’s Intuitive Interface Is Easy (and Fun) to Navigate

Miro manages to strike a good balance between offering advanced functionality while remaining user-friendly. It has a bright and colorful interface with clearly-labeled features, so it’s easy to navigate regardless of your technical or project management background.

If you need assistance once you’ve signed up, Miro has video tutorials and pop-ups to introduce its features and help you explore the interface. You’ll quickly understand how Miro’s boards work, and you can even adjust your interface based on whether you’re using a touchpad or a cursor. I tried both, and honestly couldn’t tell the difference.

Getting Started With Miro

You only need an email address to create a Miro account, and a quick onboarding process follows. Miro will ask a few questions about your business and suggest templates to help you get started.

Once you sign up, you’ll land on your dashboard, which contains an overview of your boards and recommended templates. From here, you can add teams, invite members, and manage integrations.

To create a board, you can use a prebuilt template or start from scratch. You’re free to add images, shapes, tables, charts, and even experiment with digital drawing tools.

Smart Drawing and Wireframe Library

Another thing I love about Miro is how it lets you make visual elements look good, even if you aren’t particularly skilled at design. For instance, the Smart Drawing feature recognizes shapes you draw by hand, such as circles and rectangles, improving their look as if they were digitally created. It’s rare to see a project management platform have this capability built in.

Another nifty feature is the Wireframe Library, which includes objects such as buttons and icons commonly found in mobile apps. This tool can be quite handy for design teams working on mockups.

Segment Your Boards With Frames

Miro’s framing tool lets you put borders around parts of your board to create snapshots. It’s a great way to segment your boards if you want to turn them into slides for a presentation or capture and export the screenshots. For instance, if you have content on your board that you would like to reuse later, you can frame it and export it as an image or PDF. If you use the table widget, you’ll be able to export the file to CSV.

On some level, frames function like reporting tools to help you extract information. Still, a proper reporting tool would be nice to have, especially if you have different teams working on a single board. Most project management software offer a mix of basic and advanced reporting features to help you track the progress of individual tasks and entire projects and easily identify areas for improvement.

So, if you need a more efficient way to drill down information and make large amounts of data less overwhelming for everyone on your team, you may be better off with a traditional project management platform like monday.com.

Track Changes and Group Your Boards

Aside from creating frames, the bottom toolbar also allows you to access your board history (on paid plans). You can use this tool to track all the changes you and your collaborators made to your board. For instance, the Board Activity list lets you see the recent changes made to your board, which I found helpful for evaluating each teammate’s input to your projects.

Miro also lets you restore previous versions of your board – a lifesaver when you need to review and recover changes. This can be quite useful for implementing an old idea that may work better than the current concept of your project. All versions of your Miro boards are automatically saved in your board history and stored for 90 days.

Another time-saving tool to help you organize your work is the Projects feature, which is available on all paid plans. It lets you group your boards into folders so you can access them more easily.

Miro Was Designed to Bring Remote Teams Together

Miro has one of the most comprehensive sets of collaboration features on the market, offering more than most other project management software. You and your colleagues can use boards, a built-in chat function, and video conferencing to collaborate in real time.

Miro also lets you leave comments and @mention people on tasks and notes. Miro’s Comments section (which you can access in the bottom toolbar) gives you an overview of all your comments and mentions across boards and notes so you don’t miss anything.

Team Dashboard and Communication

With Miro, you can invite team members to view and edit your boards and collectively brainstorm and action ideas. As you work together, you can see your collaborators’ cursors move so you know which area of the board to focus on. Aside from notes and comments, you can also add cute reactions to show appreciation for your colleagues’ hard work.

Miro’s Interactive Presentation Mode allows you to guide people through your board and communicate in real time through live chat and video conferencing. You can present your board in three ways: standard (full) view, as frames (slides), or with Activities (for highly collaborative meetings).

Activities (previously Smart Meetings) are the most interesting of the three and work best for online workshops. With Activities, you can create interactive sessions with pre-planned segments, such as brainstorming and voting. You can divide participants into groups without interruption (by using the Breakouts tool) so they can work together on tasks. You can also run a timer during your sessions to see how much time you spend on specific activities.

A particular highlight for me is the ability to set up voting sessions, which is a helpful tool when you need to make quick team decisions. When you click on the voting icon in the upper right corner, you’ll be able to access a voting panel with settings. You can select a topic and set the duration of the voting session.

Once you set up a poll, collaborators will see a pop-up window allowing them to join or skip the voting session. They can vote by choosing one of your predetermined sticky note answers. Also, all votes are anonymous, which eliminates pressure.

File Sharing

Miro lets you upload images, text documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and presentations, either from your desktop or cloud-based hosts like Dropbox and Google Drive. It supports a wide range of file formats, such as .jpeg, .gif, .odt, .rtf, and more, though it doesn’t allow you to upload ZIP files.

You can save the uploaded files to your Miro library and quickly access them when needed. When it comes to video files, though, you can only embed them via URL links. The great thing about Miro is that it offers unlimited storage on all plans, but bear in mind that the maximum file size you can upload to the board at once is 30 MB.

Mobile App

Although it doesn’t offer every feature you’d get with the web app (e.g., you can’t add templates or turn on presentation mode), Miro’s mobile app is still great for keeping up with project updates on the go, and it offers a lot more collaboration functionality than most other project management smartphone apps. You can add sticky notes, frames and comments, upload photos, create pen drawings, and more.

Great Knowledge Base, but Very Limited Live Support

Miro offers a wealth of support documentation, including numerous guides and tutorials designed to assist you in learning the ropes. The articles have been organized coherently and logically, facilitating swift information retrieval. Additionally, Miro maintains a vibrant community forum, which serves as a valuable resource for seeking assistance on all facets of the platform.

Live support channels are limited. The free plan only allows you to submit a ticket, while Starter and Business plans also include email support.

I tested live support by inquiring about reporting tools. Miro’s customer support agent was friendly when answering my question. She even suggested I submit my idea about adding reporting tools to Miro’s Wish List. Still, it took two days for me to get a reply, so if you’re dealing with an urgent issue, help may not come fast enough.

24/7 priority support, personalized onboarding programs, and customer success programs are only available at the enterprise-grade level. The lack of live chat and phone support on low- and mid-tiered plans is quite disappointing, given that almost all other project management software include it as a standard feature.

Fair Prices for a Comprehensive Service

In addition to three paid plans billed monthly or annually, Miro offers a solid forever-free plan. It’s a good option for individuals and small teams as it comes with access to all templates, core features of the presentation mode (the ability to present your boards in full view and as slides, with live chat, reactions, stickers, comments, and sticky notes), and unlimited members.

That said, there are limitations to the free version. You can only create three editable boards, you can’t add visitors (non-registered users) or guests (registered users), and you can’t set user permissions. And when you export your boards in high-quality resolution, they’ll come with watermarks.

At just $8.00 per month (per member), Miro’s Starter plan offers great value for most businesses. You’ll have unlimited editable and private boards, project folders, as well as access to advanced integrations and presentation mode features, including video chat and Activities. You can invite unlimited visitors (one-time users who can only access public boards shared via link) and unlimited guests (users who can view and comment on boards).

Coming in at double the price of the Starter plan, the Business plan provides marginal additional functionality, including more diagramming features and the ability to customize presentation mode. It also lets you add unlimited guests with editing access.

Designed for large companies looking to scale even further, Miro’s high-tier Enterprise plan includes advanced support and security. You can contact the sales team to learn more about the types of custom pricing it offers.

Compared to big players like monday.com, Miro may not have the most advanced project management features for the price. For instance, monday.com’s Pro plan costs the same as Miro’s Business plan but provides more management tools, such as forms, workload management, and automations.

However, Miro combines the best of multiple worlds to give you a well-rounded project management, collaboration, and presentation app at a reasonable price.