Visual collaboration workspace Online whiteboard for real-time collaboration

An online whiteboard gives people a shared digital workspace to brainstorm, plan, and make decisions through visual collaboration. Work together in real time or contribute on your own schedule.

Mural combines that flexibility with templates, AI, and integrations, so you can develop an idea, build a plan with your team, and carry the next steps into the tools you use to deliver it.

What is an online whiteboard?

An online whiteboard is a shared digital canvas for working with ideas visually. People add text, sticky notes, images, diagrams, and documents, then arrange and connect them to make information easier to understand.

A digital whiteboard remains available after a session ends, so contributors can return to review and refine the work. Unlike a static document, its flexible layout lets you show relationships spatially: group research findings by theme, connect steps in a process, or place competing options side by side. People can edit the shared canvas together or add input at different times.

What are the benefits of using an online whiteboard?

An online whiteboard makes contributions visible, gives distributed teams a shared place to work, and preserves ideas so people can build on them. Seeing the information together makes it easier to spot connections and decide what deserves attention.

• See everyone’s input. Gather suggestions and questions in one place so the discussion can draw on more than whoever speaks first.
• Include people across locations and schedules. Combine live participation with time for contributors to review and respond independently.
• Make complex information easier to follow. Group related ideas, map connections, and show dependencies that can be hard to explain in a document.
• Keep useful work available. Return to research, plans, and earlier decisions as circumstances change.
• Leave with a path forward. Document priorities, owners, and next steps alongside the ideas that informed them.

In Mural, the research, discussion, and resulting plan can stay together, giving teams a record to consult when priorities change.

What can teams do with an online whiteboard?

Teams use an online whiteboard to explore problems, organize what they learn, and agree on a course of action. In Mural, that can mean anything from a quick individual sketch to a cross-functional planning process.

Brainstorm and organize ideas

Collect ideas as sticky notes, group related contributions, and name the themes that emerge. As an online brainstorming tool, Mural gives teams space to explore a wide range of possibilities before prioritizing the opportunities worth pursuing.

Plan projects and workflows

Map a goal to the tasks, dependencies, owners, and milestones needed to reach it. A visual workflow lets people trace how work passes between teams and spot a missing handoff before it delays the project.

Conduct research and map stakeholders

Bring research findings together, compare observations, and identify unanswered questions. With stakeholder mapping, teams can also visualize relationships, influence, and needs to understand whose input or support a project requires.

Make decisions with greater clarity

Place options alongside agreed criteria so people can evaluate tradeoffs together. Record the reasoning behind the choice, including constraints and unresolved questions, so the team can revisit the decision without reconstructing the entire discussion.

Support sales, marketing, and product workflows

Sales teams can map account relationships and plan client workshops. Marketing teams can develop go-to-market plans that connect audiences, messages, and channels. Product teams can organize discovery findings and explore potential solutions, while consultants can work through strategy with clients in a shared space.

How does Mural improve the online whiteboard experience?

Mural adds structure, AI-assisted organization, and connections to execution tools to the online whiteboard experience. Templates guide the activity, AI helps teams review large amounts of input, and integrations carry the outcomes into follow-up work.

Start with templates

Start with a method that fits the work instead of designing each activity from scratch. Mural templates give teams ready-to-use prompts and layouts for brainstorming, planning, research, stakeholder mapping, and strategy. Choose a mind map to explore connections, affinity clustering to organize findings, or a workflow diagram to map a process, then adapt it to your goal.

Use AI to organize and analyze ideas

Make a large collection of contributions easier to review with Mural AI. It can group sticky notes by topic and summarize canvas content. After a brainstorm, use it to surface themes, then review those themes together and decide which opportunities to pursue. Mural AI is included with Team+, Business, and Enterprise plans, subject to account settings.

Connect collaboration to execution

Turn agreed next steps into work your team can track with Mural integrations. For example, once the Linear integration is connected, you can create Linear issues from sticky notes, edit issue details, and sync changes between the two tools. The team can carry selected ideas into its backlog without retyping each one.

Other integrations let you work on a mural within Microsoft Teams or embed it in Confluence, keeping the visual plan available alongside discussions and documentation. Integration availability varies by plan.

Collaborate in real time or asynchronously

Work together during a live session or invite people to contribute on their own schedules. Teams can gather input before a workshop, discuss it together, and return later to review updates. Timers and Summon help facilitators guide live participation without making every contribution depend on a meeting.

Support enterprise collaboration

Scale collaboration across departments while managing who can access and administer the work. Mural Enterprise combines single sign-on, user provisioning, and permissions management with advanced security and administrative controls. Reusable templates and guided methods give departments consistent ways to work while leaving room for different needs.

See why enterprise teams choose Mural for collaboration and innovation, including how it helps teams work across departments and turn ideas into action.‍

‍How to get more from an online whiteboard

Use an online whiteboard tool effectively by defining an outcome, giving contributors a clear structure, and documenting what happens next. A few deliberate choices make the workspace easier to use during a session and easier to understand afterward.

Define the goal before you start

State what the work should produce, who needs to contribute, and who will make the decision. “Choose two customer onboarding improvements to test” gives participants a more useful target than “discuss onboarding.”

Choose a structure that fits the work

Select a template or divide the canvas into sections for inputs, analysis, and decisions. In Mural, use Areas to organize related content and an Outline to make those Areas easier to navigate. Put instructions near each activity so people can contribute independently.

Make participation easy

Add a short example and explain how people should respond. Invite sticky notes for ideas, images for references, diagrams for relationships, and documents for supporting detail. Give contributors time to think individually before the group discusses the input.

Organize input as the work develops

Pause to group related contributions, name themes, and summarize what you have learned. Keep open questions separate from agreed priorities. If you use AI to organize input, review the results together before treating the summary as a basis for action.

Capture decisions and next steps

Record the decision and its rationale, then give each follow-up an owner and a due date. Before closing the activity, confirm where people will track delivery and transfer the agreed work through the appropriate integration. Leave a concise recap on the canvas so someone returning later can understand what changed.

New to the workspace? Learn how to get your team started with Mural.

Why use Mural as your online whiteboard?

Use Mural to turn a collection of ideas into a plan your team understands and can act on. Start on your own or invite collaborators, use a template to guide the work, and develop priorities together in real time or asynchronously.

As the work grows, use AI to organize input, integrations to turn selected ideas into tracked tasks, and enterprise controls to manage collaboration across departments. Your team can follow through on the plan and return to the research and reasoning behind it.

Start with a free account to try visual collaboration. AI and advanced capabilities are available on paid plans.

Bring your ideas, plans, and priorities into one visual workspace with Mural.