Freeform vs Miro: Battle Royal of the Whiteboard Apps 

Glad I could help you with this.

That‘s wonderful news. Yes, I also need to make sure I use the right tool for the right job. I hope that over Time Apple will improve on Freeform and it can do more of the tasks I now have to use Miro for.

Glad it was informative. Thank you.

Glad I could help you.

Exactly. Miro is for now the app to go if you rely on templates (which most businesses do). Freeform for now is great for starting with an empty whiteboard if you mainly use scribble/handwriting/text/simple shapes and images.

Not only the Owners ID (i.e. iCloud mail address) but all email addresses of participants are visible. But they are also visible within Miro, so no difference here. If you participate on a board, your email is visible to all participants on most of these apps.

Could be, but Apple sometimes also pushes Updates to their Application in intermediary releases. But if you need a feature now, hoping for it isn’t a good solution. Better look for alternatives.

@@patrickstoeckmann Hoping and waiting is not productive…

GoodNotes and Notability have some amazing features that are missing from Freeform though. True PDF support (including real highlighting) is one of them. I wouldn‘t use it (at this time) as a replacement for those apps.

Well they already did. They added connectors and a bunch of other stuff. Updated video coming soon.

Yeah, Freeform is great for open canvas and just jotting down ideas with a pencil. Miro is better for a structured / template based approach.

While that would be nice I suppose you won‘t get that from Apple any time soon.

Well, I hope they play the long game like they did with Notes. Which was at the beginning really mediocre, but is now a solid app (although I have lots of ideas for improvements) which I suppose might even be THE leading notes app (in numbers). This is actually typical Apple. The first draft usually isn’t great (Notes, Apple Watch), but then they iterate, iterate, iterate. So, let’s see how the next Freeform iterations turn out.

@@patrickstoeckmann agreed, notes has come a long way. The biggest hurdle with Freeform is that it’s Apple only. Notes is more of a personal, stays in “sketch” mode idea recorder. I feel like a digital whiteboard needs to have collaborative functionality. Imo this is what makes apps like miro and figma such great apps.

Agreed. It would be great if Apple would open it up to a web access. Maybe like they did with Notes, where you could access it over the iCloud.com front end. Figma and Miro’s main use cases are business related, while I think that Apple’s focus is more personal, friends and family. If Apple would be targeting businesses with their apps, they would need to include more cross-platform access. For now my rule of thumb is, if you are in a small group in an Apple circle Freeform might be great for you. If you are using it for business (or serious collaboration) then probably at this point Figma or Miro are better options.

Yes, just like with those Electron apps, I always prefer a real Mac app. But with V1 Apple has some work to do to add some functionality and iron out some kinks to make it a real competitor for a lot of use cases.