Brainstorming has always been one of the harder things to translate from a physical office into remote work. There’s something about a shared whiteboard — sticky notes, arrows, quick sketches, ideas building visually in real time — that a chat message or a shared document struggles to fully replicate. Digital whiteboard tools exist specifically to close that gap, giving remote and distributed teams a shared visual canvas that works nearly as well, and in some cases arguably better, than a physical whiteboard ever did.

This guide covers the strongest digital whiteboard tools available, what each does particularly well, and how to think about choosing between them for your team’s specific brainstorming needs.

Why Digital Whiteboards Matter for Remote Teams

A shared digital canvas solves a problem that’s easy to underestimate until you’ve experienced its absence: in a remote brainstorming session without one, ideas tend to live in scattered chat messages, disconnected verbal comments during a call, or a single person’s notes — none of which capture the collaborative, visual, building-on-each-other’s-ideas quality of good in-person brainstorming.

A good whiteboard tool lets every participant contribute simultaneously and visually, see other people’s ideas develop in real time, and organize scattered thoughts into clusters, diagrams, or structured frameworks — all without anyone needing to be physically present in the same room. For remote teams that do creative or strategic work together, this category of tool is often one of the highest-value additions to a collaboration stack.

Miro

Miro has become one of the most widely used digital whiteboard tools, largely because of the sheer breadth of what it supports beyond basic sticky notes and freehand drawing. It offers an enormous library of templates for specific use cases — retrospectives, user story mapping, customer journey maps, SWOT analysis, mind mapping, and dozens of other structured formats — which lowers the barrier for teams that want structure without designing a brainstorming framework from scratch.

Beyond templates, Miro supports a genuinely large, infinite canvas, robust real-time collaboration with visible cursors showing where each participant is working, voting and reaction tools for prioritizing ideas after a brainstorm, and integrations with tools like Slack, Asana, and Jira that let boards connect directly into a team’s broader workflow.

Miro’s depth is also its main trade-off — the sheer number of features and options can feel overwhelming for teams that just want simple, fast brainstorming without a learning curve. Larger organizations running structured workshops and complex planning sessions tend to get the most value from Miro’s full feature set; smaller or less formal teams sometimes find it more than they need.

FigJam

FigJam, built by the team behind the design tool Figma, takes a lighter, more playful approach to digital whiteboarding. Its interface feels less like an enterprise workshop tool and more like a fun, approachable canvas — bright colors, simple sticky notes, basic diagramming, and fun extras like stamps and emoji reactions that add a bit of levity to collaborative sessions.

FigJam’s most natural advantage is for teams already using Figma for design work, since the two tools share a similar interface language and integrate seamlessly — design teams can move fluidly between a FigJam brainstorm and a Figma design file without friction. Its feature set is generally lighter than Miro’s, with fewer built-in templates and less depth for highly structured workshop formats, but this simplicity is often exactly what smaller or less formal teams are looking for.

For creative and design-adjacent teams specifically, FigJam’s tight integration with Figma and its lighter, friendlier feel often make it the more natural default choice over Miro’s more feature-dense approach.

Mural

Mural occupies similar territory to Miro, with a strong focus on structured, facilitator-led workshops. It’s particularly well-regarded for its facilitation-specific features — timers, voting mechanisms, and guided workshop templates designed to help a facilitator move a group through a structured brainstorming or planning process, rather than leaving the canvas fully open-ended.

This makes Mural a strong choice specifically for teams that regularly run formal workshops with a designated facilitator guiding the group through defined stages, as opposed to more casual, unstructured brainstorming sessions. Its feature depth and pricing put it in similar territory to Miro, and the choice between the two often comes down to specific template preferences and facilitation feature details rather than any dramatic overall difference.

Google Jamboard (Discontinued, Noted for Context)

Google’s own whiteboard tool, Jamboard, was a simple, lightweight option tightly integrated with Google Workspace, but Google officially discontinued it, with the product sunset completed in recent years. Teams that previously relied on it have generally migrated to alternatives like FigJam, Miro, or Google’s newer collaborative tools. It’s worth knowing this history mainly to avoid confusion if older recommendations or documentation still reference Jamboard as an active option.

Whiteboard.fi

Whiteboard.fi is a simpler, more education-oriented whiteboard tool, originally built with classroom use in mind but also usable for lightweight team brainstorming. Its defining feature is simplicity — individual whiteboards for each participant that a facilitator can view simultaneously, which suits structured teaching or training contexts more than open-ended creative brainstorming.

For business teams, it’s a less common choice compared to Miro or FigJam, but it’s worth mentioning for organizations running training sessions or structured group exercises where seeing each participant’s individual work matters more than a single shared collaborative canvas.

Excalidraw

Excalidraw takes a distinctly different, more minimalist approach — a simple, sketch-style digital whiteboard with a hand-drawn aesthetic, popular particularly among technical and software teams for quick diagramming, system architecture sketches, and lightweight collaborative drawing. It’s open source, and a hosted version is available for real-time collaborative use.

Its feature set is intentionally minimal compared to Miro or Mural — no elaborate template libraries or workshop facilitation tools — which is exactly its appeal for teams that find heavier whiteboard tools unnecessarily complex for quick, informal collaborative sketching. Software engineering teams in particular often gravitate toward Excalidraw for its clean, distraction-free approach to diagramming.

Choosing Between These Tools

For large-scale, structured workshops with extensive templates: Miro’s breadth of features and template library make it the strongest choice, particularly for organizations running frequent, formal collaborative sessions across different team functions.

For design-adjacent teams already using Figma: FigJam’s tight integration and lighter, friendlier interface make it a natural extension of an existing design workflow rather than a separate tool to learn.

For facilitator-led, formally structured workshops: Mural’s facilitation-specific features (timers, structured voting, guided templates) give it a slight edge for teams that regularly run this kind of formal collaborative session.

For quick, informal technical diagramming: Excalidraw’s minimalist, sketch-style approach suits software and technical teams wanting fast, lightweight visual collaboration without unnecessary feature overhead.

Making Remote Brainstorming Sessions Actually Work

Choosing the right tool solves only part of the remote brainstorming challenge — how a session is actually run matters just as much, and a few practices consistently improve outcomes regardless of which specific tool is used.

Set up the canvas before the session starts. Arriving to a blank canvas and building structure live tends to eat into actual brainstorming time. Preparing a basic template or framework in advance — even something as simple as labeled sections for different topics — helps participants dive straight into contributing ideas rather than spending the first ten minutes figuring out how to organize the space.

Use a silent brainstorming phase before discussion. A common and effective technique is having everyone add ideas to the board silently for a set period (5-10 minutes) before opening up group discussion. This prevents the natural tendency for the loudest or most senior voice to dominate and shape everyone else’s contributions before quieter participants have had a chance to add their own ideas independently.

Build in a clear prioritization step. Digital whiteboards make it easy to generate a large volume of ideas quickly, but without a deliberate follow-up step — dot voting, grouping similar ideas, or ranking exercises — a board full of scattered sticky notes doesn’t naturally translate into decisions or next steps. Most tools in this category include built-in voting or reaction features specifically designed to support this step.

Assign clear ownership of what happens after the session. A brainstorming session that produces a rich, colorful board but no follow-up action tends to feel like wasted effort in retrospect. Designating someone to review the board afterward, extract concrete next steps, and share them with the team ensures the collaborative energy of the session actually translates into forward progress.

Final Thoughts

Digital whiteboard tools have genuinely closed much of the gap between remote and in-person creative collaboration, and in some ways — persistent, searchable boards that don’t get erased, equal visual space for every participant regardless of how loud they are in a live conversation — they offer advantages physical whiteboards never had in the first place. Miro and Mural suit teams running larger, more structured workshops; FigJam fits naturally for design-oriented teams; and Excalidraw serves technical teams wanting fast, minimal diagramming. Whichever tool fits your team’s style, the real value comes from pairing it with deliberate brainstorming practices that make the most of the collaborative space it provides.