The specifics of the testing depended on the app, but it generally involved signing up for an account and creating a few different whiteboards to see how everything worked, as well as testing any unique or headline features. If an app looked like it could meet them, I tested it to see how it was to use. To find the best online whiteboards, I started out with a list of every relevant app that I could find and then compared each one against the criteria above. But for now, I wasn't overly concerned if an app wasn't yet using AI. Over the next year or two, as AI becomes more mature and the use case becomes clear, AI may well be necessary to make it on this list. While most whiteboard apps are starting to have-or at least, test-AI-powered features, they aren't yet a major factor for inclusion. This meant it had to be accessible through the web and ideally on mobile devices. Whether you're working on your own ideas or collaborating on a shared whiteboard with a team, chances are high that you'd like to have access to the whiteboard even if you're not seated at your desk. The more advanced the app, though, the more advanced I wanted the presentation features to be.Īccessible everywhere. This could be sharing your whiteboard online, exporting it, or a dedicated presentation mode. Because whiteboards are so often used for both ideation and presentation, I looked for features that allowed you to present using your whiteboard. You can stick a photo or doodle on a real whiteboard, so I felt you should be able to attach links, images, and other files to your web whiteboard as needed for easy reference. Your digital whiteboard shouldn't limit the kinds of things you can add to it. Some apps allow private collaboration between team members, while others allow you to share a link or code so that even non-users can comment or add notes. The specifics didn't matter as much as the feature working as it was meant to.Ībility to attach files. I required all the apps on this list to allow multiple users to collaborate in real time. Using a whiteboard-whether physical or digital-is often a collaborative act. You should be able to zoom and scroll around at will.Ĭollaboration features. I was looking for whiteboarding tools that have an unlimited, ever-expanding canvas, so whatever way your visualizations go, they can accommodate them. And with such a large canvas, navigating it needed to be easy. While physical whiteboards might have size restrictions, going digital shouldn't come with limits. There are a few key features that I felt a great online whiteboard had to have: To that end, I only considered dedicated digital whiteboards when putting together this list, not any app that could be used-or claimed it could be used-as one. (Google was a little more creative and called its whiteboard product Jamboard.) But if you're visiting this article, you either don't want to use these built-in tools, you aren't locked into a tool like Microsoft Whiteboard or Jamboard because of your existing work setup, or you need a dedicated online whiteboard tool that offers more advanced or specific features. Zoom has Zoom Whiteboard, Microsoft Teams has Microsoft Whiteboard (which is also a standalone app), and Webex has, you guessed it, a feature called Whiteboard. Similarly, most online conferencing software and office suites have a whiteboard built in. InVision Freehand for annotating design files with a team Stormboard for creating multiple whiteboards in a single brainstorming session I'd be happy to work with a team using any of these picks. I've been working remotely for my entire tech writing career-more than a decade now-so I have a lot of experience with testing apps and actually using online collaborative tools. I tested dozens of online whiteboards to find the best ones for a variety of needs. Online whiteboards are necessary because fast, easy, and visual collaboration is too important not to have a virtual option, especially when you can't guarantee all your colleagues will be in the same place on any given day. This means that tools like the whiteboard-a staple of meeting spaces-have officially taken the digital leap. Office work has been back for a year or two, but it's still not how it was before 2020.
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