35 Best Visual Collaboration Software To Enhance Team Comms In 2024
10 Visual Collaboration Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 35 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
There are so many different visual collaboration platforms that selecting the best one for you can be tricky. You want to break down geographical barriers, allow your teams to work more efficiently and foster a collaborative environment where ideas can be shared, refined, and executed visually – and need the right tool for the job. I've got you covered! In this post, I use my personal experience managing hundreds of products and using many different platforms with large teams to share my picks of the best visual collaboration software.
What Is Visual Collaboration Software?
Visual collaboration software is a digital platform that supports remote or distributed teams in working together visually. It provides a place where team members can collaborate on projects, share ideas, and collectively manipulate visual elements, fostering a more engaging and effective collaboration experience.
This software usually includes features like digital whiteboards, project planning boards, and document-sharing capabilities. Together, they facilitate a dynamic and interactive collaboration environment, allowing team members to contribute, edit, and discuss visual content in real-time.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Visual Collaboration Software
Here’s a brief description of each visual collaboration tool to showcase each platform’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Connect teams and collaborate in real-time in a centralized workspace
monday is an award-winning visual collaboration platform that helps managers plan and execute complex projects. The team and task management tools allow project managers to onboard any team member and manage multiple projects across the team from one dashboard.
The platform has multiple productivity features, such as an integrated Kanban board, time-tracking, workflow automation, automated notifications, and calendar integration.monday’s collaborative environment helps project members create a knowledge base, communicate with each other, and share files in a centralized location.
The custom automations make moving tasks from one phase to the next, assigning team members to take over a task, and alerting them to changes easy for everyone on the team. monday also has customizable templates that can save time when building processes from scratch, such as team tasks, project portfolio tracking, contact management, or campaign planning.
monday integrates with other apps a project team might be using to help automatically move information between them. For example, you can sync the dates from a specific board to your Google Calendar. New dates on the board automatically show on your Google Calendar. Other integrations include Outlook, Slack, Zendesk, Dropbox, and Mailchimp.
monday costs from $10/user/month when paying monthly or $8/user/month when paying annually and comes with a 14-day free trial.
Miro serves as a cloud-based digital whiteboard tailored for remote teams focused on visual collaboration, especially during brainstorming and planning phases. Its infinite canvas offers unlimited space for the expression of ideas, accommodating everything from mind maps to project workflows. Users can integrate text, images, videos, and brand elements, ensuring a comprehensive representation of concepts.
Moreover, through a combination of asynchronous commenting features and real-time collaboration tools, Miro can accommodate all of your remote team's collaborative needs. For example, the TalkTrack feature allows team members to record explanatory videos for different sections of the board. This proves particularly useful for teams spread across various time zones, enabling clear communication and understanding without simultaneous online presence. Other asynchronous communication features include comments, sticky notes, and voting.
Miro additionally allows you to easily share boards with team members, stakeholders, or clients. You have control over the level of access and permissions for each individual, allowing you to define who can view, edit, or comment on the board. This allows you to remotely share relevant boards with whoever needs access to your team's ideas and plans while also keeping your information secure.
Miro integrates with Google Drive, Google Meet, Notion, Asana, Monday.com Zoom, Dropbox, Trello, Jira, GitHub, Slack, Atlassian, and Confluence.
Miro costs from $10/user/month. A free version with one workspace and three editable boards is also available.
FigJam is an online whiteboard that teams can use for all kinds of purposes. It can facilitate brainstorming, work management, and real-time collaboration among team members. The platform is highly flexible and offers plenty of features, yet is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly.
Stickers, comments, shapes, arrows, images, and other assets are available in the whiteboard. You can use these elements to map out your ideas, outline concepts, or develop plans. There are also several ready-made templates included in the platform, helping you speed up your process or jumpstart your collaborative session. These templates cover things like brainstorming session outlines, retrospective meeting structures, and project management and roadmapping processes.
Team can collaborate virtually in the software with its audio and live chat features. Commenting, stamp and emoji reactions, and even bitmoji avatars can also be used to exchange ideas, feedback, questions, and sentiments. External collaborators can also be invited to your boards if you'd like to include clients, freelancers, or agencies in your processes.
The software integrates with other tools including Figma, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Jira, Mixpanel, and Github. Paid plans start from $3 per user per month, but a freemium plan is also available with unlimited users and up to 3 FigJam files.
Using an intuitive and versatile interface, you can use Asana to manage your project tasks and collaborate with teams of any size. The simplicity of Asana’s design assists managers when keeping team members on track and assigning tasks to complete work efficiently.
It doesn’t matter how many departments or teams come together to work on a project; the platform helps them assign task ownerships, share files, and combine related work. You can use Asana’s flexibility to simultaneously keep track of ongoing tasks and long-term projects.
The platform provides project progress reports in minutes to give an overview for teams and stakeholders. This gives an organization’s leadership the chance to accurately track any initiative’s status from start to finish to see how you’re progressing toward its goals.
Asana integrates with many of the tools you might already be using, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Calendar, Tableau, Salesforce, and over 100 more applications.
Asana costs from $13.49/user/month when paying monthly and $10.99/user/month annually. They also have a free forever plan for up to 15 teammates.
Oppolis Cloud is a cloud-based all-in-one collaboration solution to help teams manage projects on a single platform. With Oppolis Cloud, you will be able to streamline your creative review cycles, as you will have a central location to view different projects, including logos, graphics, web design, videos, brochures, and HTML emails.
Using this collaboration solution allows product teams to have a single platform to use to collaborate on different projects and proof creative assets. Oppolis Cloud also comes with Adobe Creative Cloud integration to free up the creative team from the “export > email > repeat” process since they can use the Adobe Creative Cloud extension to submit their output and receive feedback without ever leaving the application. While the creative team uses Adobe CC, clients and managers can use the Oppolis Cloud dashboard to approve projects and send feedback.
All creative proofs are stored in the Oppolis Cloud system and all comments and the complete version history is visible, making it easy to review and reverse changes while ensuring that other members will be able to collaborate.
Oppolis Cloud comes with one free plan and two paid plans. Both plans allow for more than two members to use the solution while taking advantage of the unlimited proofs, projects, and jobs.
Stack Overflow for Teams provides organizations a secure, private home for your questions and answers by giving teams instant access to their colleague’s knowledge. Stack Overflow’s unified platform provides a built-in editor to let team members update documentation, flag out-of-date articles, and link specific questions to knowledge articles to help answer queries.
The Q&A module in the platform allows users to generate a personal alert or task when requesting new information. Both small, agile teams and large, dispersed teams can use Stack Overflow to share knowledge throughout the organization. Organizations can retain key knowledge in an editable format to allow team members to make updates.
The search functionality allows users to perform narrow and broad searches in the company’s knowledge base to find the information they need. Leadership teams can also distribute awards to individuals according to the amount of content they publish and when they complete other daily activities.
Stack Overflow integrates with third-party apps, such as GitHub, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira.
Stack Overflow costs from $6/user/month, and they have a free version available for up to 50 users.
Space by JetBrains—also known as JetBrains Space or just Space—provides features for software teams and projects for the entire development pipeline. The platform’s main functionality includes code reviews, planning tools, and package repositories. JetBrains Space primarily focuses on software development teams.
Still, other teams within an organization, such as marketing, sales, legal, and human resources, can use the information sharing, communication, and project management tools.What makes Space special is its integration with various systems that can interact with each other and exchange information to provide you with an experience in managing the teamwork environment.
The platform provides visual boards, planning checklists, and an issue tracker. It also has a team directory that allows users to see who’s working on what and consult the team calendar for an overview of everyone’s availability.
Space by JetBrains can integrate with other third-party applications through Zapier. It also has an API that you can use within your current systems.
Space by JetBrains costs from $10/user/month when paying monthly and $8/user/month annually. They also have a free version that allows up to 10 application connections.
If you, or anyone else on your team, ever wonders what the company knows about a key trend or topic, Stravito provides a purpose-built sharing and storage platform for market research. The system uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to classify information automatically.
To ensure a user has the authority to access specific content, Stravito enables managers to provide role-based permissions to information. The platform offers various features to users, such as collaboration, data backups, communication management, and data encryption, all from one location.
Organizations can also use the information they find within Stravito to create impactful marketing plans. Many refer to the platform as the “Netflix of Insights” because it helps users leverage insights to anticipate and respond to the needs of customers.
Stravito integrates with multiple third-party platforms, including Tableau, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint.
Stravito does not provide pricing information for its platform. You can contact them to request a quote.
Height is a visual collaboration software that facilitates team collaboration and communication in product development, allowing team members to visualize, organize, and track tasks and progress.
Why I picked Height: As someone who has worked on various product development teams, I have experienced the challenges of collaborating with multiple team members, staying on top of tasks, and visualizing progress. Height's visual collaboration software provides an intuitive and efficient solution to these challenges.
Height Standout Features & Integrations
Features include a user-friendly interface, visual project management tools, and real-time collaboration capabilities. The platform's customizable boards allow teams to visually organize tasks and progress, while its communication features, including video conferencing and chat, facilitate seamless collaboration. Height also provides a comprehensive analytics dashboard that allows teams to track progress and performance.
Integrations include Figma, Notion, Sentry, Zendesk, Slack, Discord, Fivetran, GitHub and GitLab.
ClickUp
Combines essential business applications on a customizable cloud-based platform
ClickUp’s goal is simple, “one app to replace them all.” It does this by offering all the tools a project team needs to complete their work in an efficient and accessible way. The tools ClickUp provides are suitable for organizations in any industry of any size; these include collaboration and communication tools, task statuses and assignments, alerts, and visual reporting. Project teams can customize the workspace, everything from project funnels to web page branding, to suit their needs.
ClickUp is the Swiss Army knife of visual collaboration software that lets users combine everything they need into one platform. It helps entire teams collaborate, assign customizable tasks and sub-tasks, and save time with shareable screen recordings. Project managers can create trackable goals for projects with automatic progress tracking, measurable targets, and clear timelines. ClickUp also makes it easy to work with different teams by converting sprint targets into weekly goals.
ClickUp integrates with over 1,000 third-party tools, such as GitHub, Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Google Calendars, and Microsoft Outlook.
ClickUp costs from $9/user/month on a monthly basis or $5/user/month when paying annually.
The Best Visual Collaboration Software Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| monday.com | From $8/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Miro | From $8/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| FigJam | From $15/full seat/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Asana | From $10.99/user/month (billed annually) + free plan available | Website |
| OppolisCloud | From $44/user/month | Website |
| Stack Overflow | From $6/user/month | Website |
| Space by JetBrains | From $10/user/month | Website |
| Stravito | No price details | Website |
| Height | From $8.50/user/month | Website |
| ClickUp | From $7/user/month | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
Selection Criteria: How I Picked the Best Visual Collaboration Software
To compile my list of the best visual collaboration platform, I evaluated each software based on the following criteria:
Core Functionality
Because there are a few different types of online collaboration software that made it onto my list, their core functionality varies a bit. I’ve explained the basic capabilities of each platform in its overview. Some are project management tools, while others are virtual whiteboards, and others are databases or repositories. Each collaboration tool is valuable in its own way, and will be more or less suitable to the needs of different teams.
Key Features
Here are some key features I spotted in the virtual collaboration platforms I tested to create this list:
- Virtual workspaces: These usually take shape as an online whiteboard. It might offer sticky notes, mind maps, diagramming tools, proofing, and templates.
- Video conferencing: Whether it’s built into the software or an integration with Zoom or Microsoft Teams, many platforms have video calling and screen sharing.
- File sharing: Several of the tools featured have repositories that can be used to share files. Some also connect with Google Drive, Dropbox, or other file sharing platforms.
- Project management: Some of the platforms on the list have project and task management tools, including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and customizable workflows.
- Communication tools: Lots of software have tools to help team members share ideas and feedback, and facilitate asynchronous and real-time collaboration.
Usability
A user-friendly interface is important in a visual collaboration tool. Especially for remote teams, a clunky and outdated system is only going to hold you back. I looked for software that had a clean and intuitive interface, and was easy to set up and navigate.
Integrations
I’ve included notes on each software’s integrations to help you pick one that will connect with your other apps and SaaS tools. Many of them have native integrations with project management platforms like Jira and Trello. Some also connect with Slack or Teams for easier communication. I also noted which ones have APIs that allow you to build your own custom integrations.
Pricing
We’re all working within a software budget, and it’s important to weigh the cost of a new tool against its added value. Most software on my list range from $5-$30 per user per month. I’ve included pricing information with each overview, including whether a software offers a free plan. Even if there’s no free version, a lot of them offer free trials or demos so you can at least get a sense of the tool before purchasing.
How To Choose the Best Visual Collaboration Software for Your Team?
When looking for a new visual collaboration software to help your team, you can use these considerations to help you out:
1. Identify Who Can Benefit from Using Tools
An organization is likely to have multiple pain points that have different priority levels, no matter the size of the business. Identifying these pain points is the first step. Are people struggling with remote collaboration? Or looking to automate their ideation process? You can start by taking time to talk with your team and asking them to give their opinions. You can then arrange their needs in order of priority when you have the data.
You might be looking to improve cross functional collaboration at your business (and cross functional collaboration can lead to product growth). Visual collaboration tools can be really helpful in getting people to work together across teams and departments. But it’s important to align teams on how the software will be used, and what type of work it’s meant to support.
2. Use Your Teams Opinion When Evaluating Solutions
The point of choosing visual collaboration software is to help your teams become more productive and prevent any challenges in the future. You can help by getting your team involved when deciding on the right software to use. When researching the right tool, give your team some education on your choices to help them understand what’s possible and how the features can help them.
3. Consider Software Compatibility
Before settling on your final choice, it’s important to determine whether you can deploy the software alongside the systems you already use. Will this work well with the systems you have in place? How will it fit in? Are you going to have to transfer data manually to the new software, or does it have the integrations to help? It might mean paying more upfront but be sure to choose a platform with more of the functionality important to your team.
4. Determine the Costs
It’s important to consider the costs of implementing new software, such as upgrades, maintenance, and subscription fees. Think about the long-term benefits of using the system and if it’s worth using your budget. You can also determine whether the platform has different pricing if it’s an on-premise or cloud-based system.
5. Identify Any Learning Curves
You can do your research to find out if the software vendor offers any after-sales services. Your team will most likely need some training, and if there’s a steep learning curve, it will be beneficial to get some expert help. For a platform to be fully effective, there will be frequent updates, and you might need a tutorial for each update. If a vendor doesn’t provide any onboarding assistance during the implementation of the system or any major updates, you should move to the next vendor.
6. Measure Expected Changes
Every new software you implement will have an impact on your team and the organization. The point here is to ensure that you find a solution that helps make your team’s lives easier, not the other way around. You can measure the expected changes by:
- Engaging with stakeholders.
- Connecting with the program designers.
- Confirming resources and expectations.
- Determining data collection methods.
- Planning for communication results.
Other Product Collaboration Software Reviews
Looking for more types of software your product team can use to collaborate? Here are some other reviews we’ve written:
What Do You Think About This List?
What do you think are the best visual collaboration tools? I know this was a lot of information to take in, but this is only a small list of what’s available. Leave a comment, or sign up for our newsletter to get the latest project management insights from the top product management professionals. I hope to see you become a part of the team!