As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Miro 2.5/5 and Mural 2/5 in Design. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Miro and 0 pick Mural. Miro scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (European sovereignty, Design, prototyping & design systems, Brand assets & governance, plus 3 more). Provenance — Miro: Rest of world; Mural: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Miro holds the higher mean in six of the seven criteria; Mural leads none. Design and prototyping (4.8 to 3.0) and sovereignty (5.0 to 2.7) each lean Miro six judges to none. Collaboration and handoff (6.2 to 5.0), pricing transparency (6.5 to 5.3) and brand asset governance (4.8 to 3.2) each lean Miro five to none with one tie. File ownership and portability (4.7 to 3.8) leans Miro three to none with three ties. The split is AI and content rights: means tie at 6.2, one judge each way, four ties — Mural's addendum excludes customer content from training and lets admins switch AI off, while Miro's AI terms are read as unusually explicit. Miro's card lists a US entity, EU residency optional, US CLOUD Act exposure; Mural's attributes read unknown. Five per-judge totals favor Miro, narrowest 5.1 to 4.9. We declare no winner; the splits are the finding.
Choose Miro if
You need EU data residency selectable on your plan — Miro's sovereignty card lists EU residency as optional and included on every plan; Mural's card lists data residency as unknown, and its verdict places residency only in an Enterprise feature with no region named.
You want seat prices published before you buy — pricing transparency leans Miro five judges to none (6.5 vs 5.3), and Mural's spread there reflects unpublished seat pricing.
Your workflow includes developer handoff — collaboration and handoff leans Miro five judges to none (6.2 vs 5.0); Miro documents a copy-to-Figma export route and a Marketplace app for table export, while Mural's spread reflects undocumented developer handoff.
You need a written exit path — Miro's terms state customer IP retention plus a 30-day export window after the subscription ends, which the skeptic credited; file ownership and portability leans Miro three judges to none with three ties (4.7 vs 3.8).
Design and prototyping capability decides your purchase — six judges lean Miro (4.8 vs 3.0); note the bench found no public information on shared component libraries, tokens, variants or auto layout for Miro.
Choose Mural if
Your deciding criterion is AI and content rights — the means tie at 6.2 with one judge leaning each way and four ties, and Mural's AI addendum excludes customer content from model training.
Your security team requires an admin switch for AI — Mural's addendum lets admins switch AI off.
You need contractual rights to your AI inputs and outputs — Mural's addendum gives customers rights to inputs and outputs.
Procurement requires stated certifications — GDPR compliance, SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 are stated for Mural, and a data processing addendum is incorporated by reference.
Your team's core work is workshop facilitation — the bench reads Mural as a facilitation canvas, with sticky notes, drawing, templates, mapping and workshop controls documented.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Skeptic
Has read "free for viewers", "commercially safe AI" and "export anytime" on every page in this category. Reads instead for the click that turns a reviewer into a billed editor, the plan the IP indemnity actually covers, and whether the export keeps a single component.
Miro
This judge's pick
Mural
Criterion by criterion
Design, prototyping & design systems
Miro
The captured pages document an infinite canvas with drag-and-drop editing, clickable prototypes stakeholders can comment on directly, and a Brand Center of shared company fonts, colours, styles and templates with one-click automatic styling — shared styles plus linked screens. We found no public information on team libraries that update where used, component variants and properties, or design tokens with themes and versioned publishing.
Mural
This is a facilitation canvas, not a design tool: the documented making features are sticky notes, drawing, images, templates and diagramming, wrapped in workshop controls like timers, voting, private mode and a facilitator lock. The only prototyping on the record is workshop templates about the prototyping process, and we found no public information on reusable components, shared styles, tokens or interactive prototypes.
Collaboration, review & developer handoff
Miro
Real-time co-editing, comments and @mentions pinned to the exact image under discussion are documented, and the handoff is concrete rather than screenshot-based: a copy-to-Figma workflow whose elements stay fully editable, an MCP push that generates a React app from the prototype, REST APIs and WebSDKs on every plan, and named Confluence and Jira integrations. We found no public information on version history with restore, branching before changes reach the main board, or whether guests and clients can comment without a paid seat.
Mural
The collaboration half is genuinely documented: comments with tagging, email and Slack notification, object-linked and draggable comments, a resolved tab, and a clear member/guest/visitor model with visitors in every plan on expiring links and Enterprise external domains constrained to guest roles. The handoff half has nothing behind it — the captured pages show no inspect view, version history, branching or developer mode, and the only documented path into another tool is copy-paste onto another app's board.
Brand assets & governance
Miro
Brand Center is documented as a central library of company fonts, colours, styles and templates, automatic styling pushes those onto boards and presentations, teams get custom branded templates, and Admin insights monitor featured-template usage. We found no public information on approval workflows for new assets, licence, rights or expiry metadata on assets, or controls over who may lock or edit a template.
Mural
The brand library on the record is Mural's own marketing assets — its wordmark, symbol and hex values for other people to download — not a home for a customer's brand. What a customer team gets is a shared template set plus a facilitator lock that freezes objects, and we found no public information on customer brand kits, published guidelines, approval workflows, or asset rights and expiry metadata.
Files, formats & portability
Miro
The terms write the customer's IP ownership into the contract and grant a 30-day export window after the subscription ends, after which account deletion is permanent and unretrievable; product pages document a copy-to-Figma path that keeps elements fully editable, while turning board data into an exportable table means installing a third-party Marketplace app. No captured page states an open or documented file format, bulk export of a team's boards, or what the built-in export features actually preserve.
Mural
Export runs to PDF, PNG, a PowerPoint outline, zipped HTML and data files, and a sticky-notes CSV — one mural at a time, members only, with download links dead after five days — and the help centre states plainly that there is no way to switch a mural into another program beyond copy-pasting onto another board. To its credit, the terms do address cancellation (access to term end, then deletion under standard retention policies) and downgrades taking effect at renewal without refund.
AI features & rights to the work
Miro
The AI addendum assigns output ownership to the customer and requires consent before Enterprise inputs train the models, with objection rights on other plans — but the standing licence is non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide and royalty-free, and the same page states that IP infringement claims over AI output are excluded from indemnification. The AI trust page adds real admin control — per-feature access, choice of providers and models, your own API key, prompt blocking and an audit trail — yet where the models process data is not stated and the privacy policy notes AI features share limited data with Microsoft.
Mural
The AI addendum is a real contract: no training on customer content, customers keep rights to inputs and outputs, processing is purpose-limited to providing the features, admins can switch AI off at company or workspace level, and labelling, monitoring and human oversight are committed to. We found no public information naming the model providers, their processing locations, or an indemnity for generated output; the addendum separately reserves use of anonymized, de-identified inputs to improve AI features, and the captured pages give different figures for whether AI features are on by default on Enterprise plans.
European sovereignty
Miro
EU data residency is listed as included on every plan down to Free and selectable alongside US, Australia and Japan, the privacy policy names RealtimeBoard BV in Amsterdam as EU representative, and the terms bind both parties to a DPA. Contracting runs through RealtimeBoard Inc. in San Francisco under California law, a third-party provider list is referenced but not shown, and the AI chain demonstrably touches Microsoft — hosting is European-selectable, the entity and the processing chain are not.
Mural
The contracting chain is American and written down: Tactivos, Inc. dba Mural, California governing law, exclusive venue in San Jose, and an Enterprise feature list that names data residency and BYOK without naming a region. A Data Processing Addendum is incorporated by reference into the public terms and GDPR compliance is claimed, which is the one European element; hosting location and the subprocessor chain are unknown on these pages.
Pricing transparency
Miro
The pricing page publishes €0, "€8/month per member, billed yearly" and "€20/month per member, billed yearly" with a full comparison table naming the plans where SAML SSO, audit logs and Enterprise APIs begin, AI credits and MCP call allowances per plan, and the terms add a 90-day non-renewal notice and non-refundable fees. A buyer still cannot compute a real bill: we found no public information on what viewers or guests cost, how and when added seats are billed, VAT treatment, or any figure for Enterprise beyond "Custom pricing—from 30 members".
Mural
One paid plan carries a public number — Business at "$17.99 USD per member / month billed annually" — alongside a free tier and an Enterprise contact-sales wall, and we found no public price for the Team+ plan or for the Limited and Full Member seat tiers the help centre describes, even though the tier decides who may export. In the product's favour, the terms state that fees exclude VAT, invoices fall due in thirty days, prepaid fees are non-refundable, annual renewals come with notice, and SSO begins at Business.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Miro
Mural
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
Compliance · Certifications
ISO/IEC 27001 · SOC 2 Type II · SOC 3 · NIST · TISAX · GDPR1
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Miro higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Miro and 0 pick Mural. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Miro or Mural European?
Miro is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Mural is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Miro and Mural have a free plan?
As of 28 Oct 2026, both vendors’ own pages state a free plan. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.