Atlassian seems to be spreading itself widely over a huge product surface area (look at the Team'24 announcement roster) while neglecting key features or UX improvements that can make a difference.
I hope Whiteboards is getting a lot of attention internally because it has the potential to dominate a market—the market currently occupied by Mural, Miro, Lucid Charts, and so on. Those tools have many advanced features, but in some ways, they are overkill for people's needs. A lot of people want shapes, arrows, post-it notes, and icons.
Whiteboard pricing (based on an upgrade from standard to premium Confluence) decimates the equivalent pricing from Lucid or Miro (up to 10x cheaper). One of the companies I work with is exploring this opportunity on an 800-1000 seat decision.
What we have today is good, although it has annoying bugs like uploading a transparent PNG creates a not-transparent PNG on the board 🤬.
What would I love to see to cement this tool as the 'no-brainer' choice for Confluence users?
1. Support for Safari on the Mac - "Your browser is not fully supported" is not a good look.
2. Support this app in the iPad app or the iPad browser. Mural offers a weak experience on the iPad, while Miro's is almost equivalent to the desktop. One use case I see is using a whiteboard as a collaborative design or story mapping tool for an epic or initiative. You can link the board straight from the Jira issue (good work there). But try viewing it on your phone or iPad—forget about it.
3. A colour-choosable icon library like Mural offers - where we can drop a wide range of icons into diagrams on boards. Even Miro doesn't offer this - it's library of icons is weak.
4. No silly bugs like the transparent PNG glitches
5. Tables - it's something Miro does well, but Mural does not.
6. Nested sections (to be fair, outlines in Mural/Miro don't even offer this).
So, where's the roadmap for Whiteboards? Where can we see what you are working on?
