Choosing Between Figma, Confluence Whiteboards, or Miro for Visual Collaboration

[Jason U]

Hi everyone,

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about visual collaboration tools. Figma, Confluence Whiteboards, and Miro all serve similar purposes — yet they were clearly designed with different goals in mind.

In my daily work, I rely on these tools to create diagrams, flowcharts, and visual documentation. I’m now in the process of making this a company-wide standard, so I need to officially choose one platform for visual collaboration.

Here’s how I see it so far:

• Confluence Whiteboards → Seamlessly integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem. It feels natural for teams already using Jira and Confluence.

• Miro → Offers a very rich feature set, great templates, and strong integrations with multiple ecosystems.

• Figma → Probably the most technical one. It’s loved by designers and dev teams for how deep it goes into product design — but I’m not sure if that complexity fits everyone.

So now I’m wondering — if you had to make an organization-level choice for visual collaboration (considering usability, features, and adoption), which one would you go with, and why?

Would love to hear your thoughts and real-world experiences!

[Rene klinkhamer]

We were recently faced with exactly this issue, we had to choose one.

In the end we went with Confluence Whiteboards – probably the least feature-rich of all 3 options – but the cheapest and easiest choice.

Budget

All the rest of our documentation happens in Jira and Confluence already. If we're paying for an Atlassian account anyway, it was a no-brainer budget-wise to kill the other accounts.

Risk

Risk and security also played a role, it's easier to get risk approval for one platform than for multiple ones.

Access

As you said, Figma is great (for designers) but not everyone has a Figma account already. Because this was about collaboration, the one with the lowest barrier to entry won out. Everyone already has an Atlasssian account, so everyone in the whole org can participate and share.

[Valerie Knapp]

Thanks for this post @Jason U ! It is helpful to see the confrontation between the different tools and what would be best for different scenarios, for me as an outsider.

Cheers

[Marten Coombe]

Hi there Jason.

I suppose it depends on what is most important to you. We went with Confluence whiteboards because of the integration with Jira however the others have lots of good reasons to go for it. 

If you are using whiteboards for team planning for Jira or projects that will end up in Jira then Confluence Whiteboards is definitely the way to go. I believe that both the others have integrations though I haven't tested them at all. It is the less feature rich and can be annoying to use but overall does the job and is in active development so we see new features and functionality every couple of months.

Figjam is a pleasure to use for whiteboarding and if you use Figma for UX/UI design, and that is important to you then I would consider it. It is an extra per seat cost so be aware of the cost to scale.

Miro has been around for ages and has a lot of nice bells and whistles. Of the three it would be the one I would choose last as it is the furthest away from the Atlassian sphere however if you are running User workshops, internal design conversations or planning sessions and you don't care about Jira then have at it. It is also the most expensive from memory (don't quote me on that as it has been a while since I checked it out).

Also note that Figma and Figjam are part of the same company but are different products in the same way that Jira and Confluence are and serve different purposes. They also have separate costs.

I have used all three at different times over the last 5 years and I think you just have to be clear on what your primary needs are.

Hope that helps. 

[Ulf Rask]

• Whats the size of your organisation, a 7 person org operates very differently from a 700 person org.
  Is cost an issue?
• Are you already heavily invested in Atlassian products and want a seamless Atlassian experience?
• Whats the competence level of your users? How easily will they be able to use figma vs confluence whiteboards and Miro.
• Whats right balance between convenience using the tool for everyday tasks vs the important but seldomly used last 10% of the use cases.
  How do you manage visibility of information? Different tools might require setup of user groups in different places and will be a costly to keep up to date with organisational changes.
  How do you retain and organize the information you create with the tool. All information needs to be organized so it can be found, managed and and used after creation. The better the fit is to how you actually work, the less time needs to be spent mucking about with moving information around.
• How do you intend for people to discover information? 
• All three of these are great but as you already state but...  what is the actual problem you want the the tool to help you with? The worlds best screwdriver have a hard time competing with a bicycle.

[Matt Richards]

The best tool is the one that is closest to your primary toolset, and most easily adopted by your users. There are, of course, other considerations like cost, security and compliance, operational complexity, etc., but ultimately these are irrelevant if the tool will go unused. 

[James Rickards _SN_]

My personal opinion is Confluence Whitebaords for everyone, followed by Lucid Suite over Miro and Figma, but only for the few power users who need the extra features.

I'd suggest looking at the licencing. In particular consider the "cost to view" in isolation to the "Cost to build". If you need to pay a little bit more per user, but only for your super users, then your overall licensing may be cheaper.  For example adding Draw.io for Confluence looks cheap per user, but once you scale it up to give to every user, it is far more expensive than a couple of Lucid Suite accounts.

With what Atlassian are doing with Rovo, having as much of your company IP captured in the Atlassian eco system will make it much easier for the AI to correctly infer what you want it to do. This would come in handy with the dev flows where an AI can create pull requests with suggested code changes based on that context.