Best 12 Visual Collaboration Tools for Creative Teams

Visual collaboration tools are designed to bring the right people together with the right information through features like search, shared channels, apps and integrations, pinned items, and more.

Creative collaboration is what allows a team to become more productive with higher quality work through organization and consistency.

Collaboration tools also allow your employees to communicate more effectively with one another and with clients. This can shorten decision-making cycles and boost productivity across your enterprise.

While choosing any visual collaboration software, there are tons of options, so it is important to make sure it integrates the right tools and features that will work best for your team.

So, here is a starting point for you; a list of various visual collaboration tools with varying features and widgets.

1- Miro

Miro presents an entire toolkit to empower cross-functional discovery and brainstorming through an infinite canvas, robust set of widgets, pre-built templates, and powerful platform capabilities.

With digital workspaces that enable asynchronous and synchronous collaboration, remote working feels as if everyone is in the same room.

Miro Highlights

• User-friendly interface
• Split your projects into workspaces
• Templates & frameworks
• Dozens of enterprise, business, and design templates
• Infinite canvas
• Widgets
• Easy screen sharing & presentations
• Embedded video, chat and commenting
• 100+ Integrations
• Enterprise-grade security

2- Klaxoon

Klaxoon is a cloud-based all-in-one collaboration tool that offers a great range of services including brainstorming sessions, video conferencing, project management, agile teamwork and more.

Klaxoon’s collaboration often involves syncing up quickly, every day as a team. Thanks to the Workshop Platform and its easy-to-use tools and methods, you can share useful information, ask questions, agree together on the goals to set, and find solutions more easily.

With the Workshop Platform Klaxoon offers, everyone can express themselves in all contexts and at any time: through text, image, video, gifs, questions, presentations.

Kalxoon Features

• Roadmap templates
• Activity Dashboard
• Alerts & Notifications
• Brainstorming and mindmapping templates
• Customizable Templates
• PI Planning Template

3- Figma

Great ideas can come from all corners of your organization. With Figma, you can bring everyone in your company into the design process with the backing of powerful security and flexible controls.

You can use it to do all kinds of graphic design work from wireframing websites, designing mobile app interfaces, prototyping designs, crafting social media posts, and more.

Figma Highlights

• Available on browser and as desktop apps
• Accessible and collaborative with dozens of sharing and real-time collaboration options
• Flexible to iterate and produce deliverables
• Prototyping and testing tools
• Smooth handoff to developers
• Room for improvement with plugins
  

4- Lucidchart

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming application that brings teams together to make better decisions and build the future.

It quickly visualizes your team's processes, systems, and organizational structure and its intelligent diagramming lets you visualize complex ideas faster, clearer, and more collaboratively.

Lucidchart primary features

• Easily style shapes
• Create clean diagrams & publish them
• Work faster with keyboard shortcuts
• Include links and layers for easy-to-read diagrams
• Alerts & notifications
• Customizable Templates
• Third-Party Integrations
• Workflow Management

5- Quire

Quire is a collaborative project management solution designed to help businesses manage to-do lists, tasks, and more to facilitate collaboration across teams. It helps teams capture ideas and break them down into action steps that can be tracked easily.

Quire Features

• Nested task lists
• Kanban board
• Timeline
• Outsourcing to external teams
• Multiple assignees
• Teamwork in realtime
• Reminders & notifications
• Quire API

6- Jira

Jira Software is part of a family of products designed to help teams of all types manage work. Originally, Jira was designed as a bug and issue tracker. But today, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool for all kinds of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development.

And it claims to be the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. And with the right configuration and customization, Jira can be a highly adaptive solution for all your project and team needs.

Jira Features

• Roadmaps to track progress
• Reports and insights
• Customizable workflows
• 3000+ integrations available
• Drag and drop automation
• Fully customizable Kanban and Scrum boards

7- Trello

Trello is the visual tool that empowers your team to manage any type of project, workflow, or task tracking. From meetings and projects to events and goal setting, Trello’s intuitive features give any team the ability to quickly set up and customize workflows for just about anything.

As a project management tool, Trello is most valuable to teams that work on a lot of projects. It is ideal for individuals, teams, and businesses of all sizes looking for a highly visual and intuitive task and project management solution.

Trello Features

• Developer API
• Searchable database
• Kanban boards
• Deadline alerts & notifications
• Agile workflows
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Advanced checklists

8- Conceptboard

Conceptboard is another excellent option for online collaboration and ideation processes.

Conceptboard prides itself on being a “centralized hub for all your content and ideas.” The visual nature of their workspace and low pricing options certainly makes it an attractive alternative to other whiteboard tools that may range on the pricier side of the spectrum.

Here are a few of this tool’s features to note:

Conceptboard Features

• Infinite, shared canvas to work on.
• Integrated screen share and video chat
• Add images, documents, and screenshots into your canvas. Works with many file types, including Word, Excel, PDF, JPEG, and Google Drive.
• Secure sharing options
• Easy to use templates and more
  

9-Mural

Mural is a digital whiteboard collaboration space that is centered around a digital whiteboard for teams to work together in real-time or asynchronously to unlock their genius.  — taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality with the support of guided methods and transformation expertise.

It helps everyone on the team imagine together to unlock new ideas, solve hard problems, and innovate faster. It connects teams with a digital whiteboard and collaboration features designed to inspire innovation.

Mural Highlights

• Sticky notes & sticky text
• Dozens of shapes and connectors
• Collaborative editing in real-time
• Pre-made templates
• Chat (Messaging)

10- InVision

InVision Freehand is a cloud-based online whiteboard and productivity platform that helps development professionals and businesses of all sizes create and manage projects. It allows users to prototype, test and experiment with designing templates and ideas on a digital dashboard.

InVision Features

• Simple design and prototyping
• Digital whiteboards
• Alerts & notifications
• Project management for designers
• Collaboration tools
• Configurable workflow
• A rich Content library

11- Click-up

Click-up is an ideal solution for project management teams, as it comes with a highly customizable dashboard, multiple views, and dozens of sharing options.

Team members, can add view shared documents in real-time from other platforms like Miro, Figma, Jira, and Google Drive.

Click-up primary features

• Customizable dashboards
• Real-time collaboration
• Built-in notifications
• Unlimited boards, boxes, cards
• Organize dozens of projects, and tasks in one platform
• View images, embedded projects from other platforms as Figma, and Miro
• Comes with a built-in chat
• Works seamlessly on all modern browsers

12- Milanote

Milanote is a collaborative feature-rich note-taking and design tools for individuals and teams. I have been using it for more than a year now, to organize my idea, projects, and plans.

Milanote offers dozens of built-in templates that you can populate with one click, then share it and start editing it with your team.

Milanote primary features

• Dozens of enterprise, corporate and design templates
• Upload files: PDF, images, documents
• Draw sketches
• Create boards, columns, lists, or notes
• Create comments
• Desktop apps for macOS and Windows
• Mobile applications for iOS and Android
• Built-in notification
• Add Audio, Map, Video
• Customize your boards colors and icons
• Built-in trash
• Full-text search to search into all of your boards

Final thought

Visual collaboration tools are resources that alleviate project planning woes by giving all team members a voice.

These tools introduce an innovative way of working collaboratively that will help you successfully manage complexity for yourself, your team, and your entire organization.

And, of the listed platforms above, one of them might be just the right key for your company to unlock the treasures of remote & collaborative work.

Author

• Erva Nur Uresin

Edited by

• Hamza Musa