I ran over 300 workshops on Mural. I built my entire facilitation practice around it. Here's why I walked away — and what finally replaced it.
I want to be upfront: I loved Mural. For four years, it was the first tab I opened every morning. I facilitated design sprints, quarterly planning sessions, and team retrospectives — all on Mural. I had templates I'd spent weeks perfecting. I recommended it to every client.
So when I tell you I stopped using it, I need you to understand — this wasn't an impulse decision. It was a slow, painful realization that the tool I'd built my workflow around was no longer the best option.
This is the story of how that happened.
It started in September 2025. Our annual renewal came up, and I opened the invoice expecting the usual $9,600 for our 80-person org. Instead, I was looking at $11,520. Mural had quietly raised their Team plan from $10 to $12 per user per month.
No new features. No advance notice. Just a bigger number.
The math: At $12/user/month for 80 people, we were paying $11,520/year for a whiteboard tool. That's more than we spent on our project management software, our design tools, and our communication platform combined.
I brought this up with our operations team. "It's just how SaaS works," they said. "Everything goes up." And they were right — everything does go up. But that doesn't mean you have to accept it.
I run a lot of workshops with distributed teams. Some people join from their desk, some from a conference room, and increasingly, some from their phone or tablet during travel.
Mural's mobile experience has always been rough. But by late 2025, it had become genuinely embarrassing. I'd watch participants struggle to place sticky notes, lose their cursor position, and eventually give up and just type their ideas into the chat.
I started scheduling workshops around "make sure you're on your laptop" warnings. That's when I knew something was broken. A collaboration tool that only works on one device isn't really a collaboration tool. It's a desktop application with a subscription fee.
In early 2025, Mural announced AI features with a lot of fanfare. "AI-powered collaboration," the blog post said. I was excited. Our workshop prep took hours — setting up boards, creating frameworks, populating templates. If AI could handle even 30% of that, it would transform my practice.
The reality? Mural's AI could generate sticky notes from a prompt. That was essentially it. No board structure. No frameworks. No dependencies or groupings. Just sticky notes floating in space, which I'd then spend 20 minutes organizing manually anyway.
It felt like they'd checked a marketing box without solving an actual problem.
The final straw came during a client workshop in November 2025. I was facilitating a strategy session for a 40-person team. Fifteen minutes in, the board started lagging. Sticky notes took 3–4 seconds to appear. The voting feature froze entirely. I watched in real-time as a room full of executives lost confidence in the process.
We finished the session on a shared Google Doc.
That evening, I opened my laptop and started researching alternatives. Not casually, like I had before. Seriously. With a spreadsheet.
I had four non-negotiable requirements:
I tested five tools over three weeks. FigJam was too design-focused for general facilitation. Lucidspark felt like it was built for a different decade. Whimsical was fast but lacked collaboration depth.
Then I tried Overboard.
I'll be honest: I'd never heard of Overboard before a colleague mentioned it in a Slack channel. It was newer, smaller, and didn't have the brand recognition of Mural or Miro. I almost dismissed it.
But I typed "sprint retrospective for a 12-person engineering team with action items and follow-ups" into the AI prompt, and 8 seconds later, I was looking at a fully structured board. Not sticky notes. A complete board with sections, labels, prompts, and a facilitator guide.
I sat there for a minute, just staring at it.
Over the next two weeks, I ran four workshops on Overboard. The real-time collaboration was noticeably smoother than Mural. The mobile experience was the biggest surprise — participants on phones could do everything that desktop users could. No compromises, no workarounds.
And then I looked at the pricing.
| Mural | Overboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Per user / month | $12.00 | $1.99 |
| 80 users / month | $960 | $159 |
| Annual cost | $11,520 | $1,910 |
| Annual savings | $9,610 | |
$9,610 per year. For a tool that, in my testing, was better across every dimension I cared about. I kept waiting for the catch. Limited boards? No — unlimited, even on the free plan. Missing features? No — everything I used on Mural was there, plus the AI generation. Hidden costs? No — $1.99/user/month is the price. Not "starting at." Not "for the first year." Just the price.
I was dreading this part. Four years of templates, frameworks, and workshop archives on Mural. I assumed migration would take a weekend.
It took about 40 minutes.
Overboard has a one-click Mural import. You connect your account, select the boards you want to bring over, and it handles the rest. Structure, content, layout — everything transferred. Not perfectly (some complex nested elements needed minor adjustments), but close enough that I was running workshops on the imported boards the next day.
What transferred cleanly: Board layouts, sticky notes, text boxes, shapes, images, frameworks, sections, groupings, and comments. What needed minor fixes: Some custom template positioning and a few embedded links.
I've now run over 60 workshops on Overboard. Here's what I can say with confidence:
The AI is a genuine time-saver. I used to spend 30–60 minutes setting up each workshop board. Now I spend 5–10 minutes refining what the AI generates. That's not a small difference — it's given me back roughly 8 hours per month.
The performance is solid. I've had 50+ participants on a single board with zero lag. The strategy session disaster that prompted my search hasn't repeated.
Mobile participation has doubled. When the tool works on phones, more people use phones. Our workshop participation rates are up 15% because people can join from anywhere.
Nobody misses Mural. I expected pushback from my team. There was none. Two people asked where the old boards were (imported, same place). One person said the new tool "feels faster." That was the extent of the transition friction.
If I could go back to September 2025, when that pricing email arrived, I'd tell myself: don't wait. The switching cost you're imagining is much larger than the actual switching cost. The import tool works. The learning curve is negligible — if you can use Mural, you can use Overboard in five minutes.
I'd also tell myself to stop confusing familiarity with quality. I stayed on Mural for months longer than I should have because it was comfortable, not because it was best. Sunk cost is a powerful drug.
Tools should earn your subscription every month. When they stop earning it, you should stop paying it. It's that simple.
If you're on the fence, just try the free plan. Import a few boards. Run one workshop. You'll know within 30 minutes whether it's the right move.
For me, it took about 8 seconds.