
Ask HN: What collaborative whiteboard are you using? - simonmales
I feel my team was way more productive when we all were whiteboarding together when designing new solutions.<p>Recently I have been day dreaming about VR whiteboards and tablet assisted whiteboards as I feel the tactile sense of a pen would help.<p>What are you using today?
======
jtolds
Here's the best set up I've used so far:

1) Get the cheapest iPad that supports the Apple Pencil. The 2018 non-Pro was
this for me last I looked.

2) Get the Google Jamboard app (not the Jamboard hardware, it is not at all
worth it).

3) Share the "jam" with yourself on a different device (a nearby laptop)

4) Screenshare the laptop.

Things I think any virtual whiteboard scheme needs to have:

1) You need to be able to see people's faces! If you can't see the people in
the video call, good luck having anything feel natural.

2) See #1 again. Having the laptop drive the video call is important so you
can configure it to see everyone's face while you present.

3) being able to use a pen to write and a finger to erase (if you have to open
a menu, fail. sadly the jamboard app also gets this wrong though their way
overpriced hardware gets it right)

4) ideally you have the ability to have an infinitely scrolling whiteboard.
Jamboard doesn't do this, but it's close.

The Jamboard app also works on phones so other people can fairly easily join
in and contribute. This scheme has its problems, but holy crap, so many
whiteboard apps focus way too much on fancy new widgets and shapes and text
and whatever and not enough on getting out of the way.

~~~
melvinroest
Checkout doodledocs.com -- no account creation needed, front-end app only (it
doesn't always work behind corporate wifi)

It's nowhere near perfect, but it's open source and I'm open to any
collaboration on it for fun (even a complete rewrite, I'm not a fan of
EmberJS. I explored EmberJS with it). I'm currently noticing an eraser bug
when you are in draw mode and they are in eraser mode (d'oh).

I didn't know Jamboard existed when I made it. But I made it because I didn't
find any app that applies pressure sensitivity and it's quite simple to do
(TL;DR modern browsers support pressure sensitivity).

You can also annotate websites with it. Though, I didn't get the collaborative
aspects of that working.

My focus was on the question "what if websites are like paper?" And I ran with
it for a month, while exploring EmberJS. For that reason, I don't have an
undo, but simply an eraser. It's also why the default style is pencil /
pressure-sensitive based (you can have a more pen-like style though).

Its main use cases that I use it for are:

\- Learning how to draw by tracing images.

\- Brainstorming / whiteboarding (empty board)

\- Brainstorming / whiteboarding (image loaded via URL)

\- Draw over websites (mostly for annotation / having margins to write on)

I'm curious to know what you think of it.

People can also use an MS Surface or Wacom by the way.

~~~
egfx
It’s not exactly mobile friendly. You should direct mobile users to use this
on their desktop with some kind of alert.

~~~
melvinroest
That is a really good tip! Thanks :)

------
nikivi
I love [https://excalidraw.com](https://excalidraw.com)

Christopher Chedeau did a recent talk on nice challenges they had building it
in the open
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fix2-SynPGE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fix2-SynPGE)

I want to build a plugin for Figma to embed Excalidraw inside Figma as I use
Figma for all my design work already.

~~~
asdkhadsj
I like the look and UX of this, but I can't seem to draw on Safari. Anyone
know a workaround?

~~~
vjeux
Can you open an issue on github? It should work on both mobile and desktop
Safari.

------
uzername
Our team's have been using Miro for this kind of collaboration. I was
surprised that it felt better than using a whiteboard in person, because the
cost of changing the already drawn boxes and arrows went way down.

For more technical whiteboards, I've been using excalidraw. I like presenting
the "drawn" look to help imply that this is an unfinished idea and we're
sketching the concepts out.

~~~
facorreia
Miro works great for us as well.

It's particularly good that multiple people can edit at the same time. It's
pretty fast and we reuse the notes across sessions.

------
iandanforth
[https://miro.com/](https://miro.com/) (previously realtimeboard.com)

~~~
cygned
We use Miro for backlog grooming and idea visualization. The Jira sync is very
helpful for us.

~~~
iandanforth
I've never used that feature. Can you describe your workflow for backlog
grooming of Jira issues in Miro?

~~~
cygned
So what we do is importing Jira issues to a Miro board using the Miro Card for
Jira plug-in. The development team orders them by difficulty/size
horizontally. PO orders them by value vertically. We use that every couple
sprints to visualize the overall shape of the backlog. Stories are updated
from Miro directly, if necessary.

We are currently thinking about keeping Jira issues permanently on a board and
then update them, rather than pulling them in just for ordering

------
ldiracdelta
An engineer has a problem. So he says to himself, "I'll use a remote-enabled
auto-capturing whiteboard."

Now he has two problems.

~~~
jyounker
Now his team has a problem :)

~~~
pmiller2
Now N people have N+1 problems.

------
murkle
This seems very good: [https://awwapp.com/](https://awwapp.com/)

~~~
senko
Thanks!

Cofounder here, happy to answer any questions.

While AWW has been around for some time we've seen a big surge (~6x) in the
past two months due to current situation (as did most online/collaborative
tools).

While AWW can be used directly on site, we also have an embeddable version,
for example some interviewing startups use us as part of their web-based
interviewing workflows.

Edit to add: AWW was launched here almost 10 years ago as a hobby project:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886353)
It grew steadily over time and now profitably employs several people and is
used by millions of people worldwide.

~~~
mitchell_h
Thank you! Seriously AWW is an awesome app.

~~~
ykevinator
Second, awwapp is awesome

------
karaterobot
Figma. It's not all that useful for actually mimicking a whiteboard, in the
sense of drawing arbitrary shapes with a pen. It has a pencil tool, but it's
not great. Fortunately, most of what we do is drawing rectangles with text in
them and lines between them, and it's pretty good at that. Plus, it supports
undo with cmd-z, which most whiteboard apps don't seem to.

~~~
thingsilearned
+1 here. Figma's collaboration features are also just incredible so many
people can participate simultaneously, and make copies w/ their own versions.

We've got ours also well setup with a big library of assets like buttons, and
illustrations we've had made, and different example charts, so if what you're
discussing is a new feature or landing page it's really easy to drag in a
bunch of ready-made components to express your idea.

------
lovasoa
I recommend WBO : [https://wbo.ophir.dev/](https://wbo.ophir.dev/)

I am the main developer, and I have been maintaining and using it for several
years now. Some of its advantages :

\- It is fully open-source, free, and without advertisement. You can easily
deploy it to your own server.

\- All the whiteboards have an infinite size.

\- It is fully web-based, you can use it without installing anything, even on
relatively old browsers.

\- It's translated in several languages.

\- It's actively developed. In-development features include image upload,
element resizing, new tools, and others...

~~~
AlexITC
Thanks for sharing, looks interesting.

By the way, for some reason I have problems scrolling with the trackpad as it
scrolls very slowly, while scrolling with the arrow keys works just fine.

~~~
lovasoa
You're welcome. Yes, scroll amounts are not consistent between browsers, and
we haven't implemented anything yet to work around that. I've opened a github
issue to track the problem.

------
wortelefant
Mural.co - other than miro, it allows unlimited anonymous co-editing without a
need to sihn on. Since we use it only occasionally, we just have a single
facilitator account for the team

~~~
oso2k
I've used Mural.co quite successfully as well. I think we probably bought an
enterprise license. Collaborative, full-featured, almost as good as a
whiteboard/butcher paper and a tall stack of stickie notes.

~~~
wortelefant
I experienced two longer outages though in the last momth, both times during
workshops. I'm keeping screenshpts on a google slides deck as a backup for the
more important events at least until the growth pains have subsided.

------
Cactus2018
Osmo "base + reflector" for iPad, a document camera "whiteboard" for video
conference.

>> I don’t want to look like promotional, but recently a professor used an
Osmo reflector
([https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12](https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12))
to project class notes and it caught on with teachers.

>> A team worked through the weekend and released a free app to make this
super easy
([https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947](https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947)).

>> While the base + reflector is not free, if you already have an Osmo game at
home, you can reuse that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22660301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22660301)

~~~
jtolds
oh this is actually really good and it's just a $10 mirror! you can see the
people you're presenting to, and while they can't see your face, they can see
what you're writing. what a neat idea

------
rubayeet
Google Jamboard + Wacom Intuos tablet with stylus [1]

[1] [https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-
intuo...](https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuos)

~~~
aaronharnly
Which hardware are you using exactly? There are a lot of different price
points; I’d love to find the cheapest that is still good enough to be useful.

~~~
stan_rogers
Any of the low-end Wacom tablets would do the trick, and you don't need the
current model. Previous to the move to "everything is an Intuos now (and the
Intuos all become Intuos Pro because 'Pro')", that would have been the Bamboo
Creative, and before that the Graphire. All of them are _well_ more than good
enough for the task at hand, and if you can pick up old stock (or used)
cheaply, go for it. Note, though, that if you've never used a tablet before,
it'll take a bit before your movements coordinate - I've always suggested
trying to live as much as possible using the tablet in lieu of mouse or
trackpad for about a week. Once you've got the knack, it's pretty much with
you for life, but it's easy to give up in frustration when you're not used to
absolute positioning that's remote from the screen until the moment it all
just sort of clicks.

~~~
aaronharnly
Thank you!

------
anairs
Hands down Miro has been a great tool for.What I really liked about Miro is
that it has a desktop app which makes it really snappy, its simple and
intuitive to use and has great collaboration features (stickies, comments,
notes etc.)

hope that helps

~~~
andrethegiant
+1 for Miro. It's truly an impressive piece of work.

------
DesignGuy85
Freehand by InVision is great! Very simple and intuitive.

[http://freehand.new](http://freehand.new)

~~~
davefp
Seconding Freehand.

------
rvivek
I love excalidraw.com A quick shoutout to our service, we embedded excalidraw
in our pair programming solution that helps you do system design interviews
effectively:
[https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair/](https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair/)

~~~
eddyg
Indeed. Excalidraw is really good... has an end-to-end encrypted collaboration
mode... _and_ is MIT-licensed.

[https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw)

------
vivster7
Its still very much in development, but we're building
[https://whiteboard.systems/](https://whiteboard.systems/)

Its based on the idea that for most system diagrams, you just need boxes, text
and arrows. everything else is superfluous. Its collaborative by default so
you can invite someone to join you with the URL. The tools aren't discoverable
yet, so to use it:

\- option(⌥) + click to create a box

\- option(⌥) + drag to create a grouping box

\- select a box and option(⌥) + click another to draw an arrow

\- select a box and type to edit text

would very much appreciate feedback! (email in profile)

~~~
rckoepke
As you requested feedback, it's dead simple and I like that. Speed and low
friction is super useful in a lot of situations.

I have just some "bugs" I guess (Windows Chrome):

\- Can only add text to a box immediately after selecting it. Move it first,
then cannot add text. Probably should be a blinking insert symbol to indicate
when you can edit text or not, as this would at minimum make the state
"discoverable". Personally I feel a lot of people will try to double click to
edit text.

\- Backspace deletes boxes but "delete" does not.

~~~
vivster7
appreciate the feedback.

we fixed a bug so text should always be editable if the box is selected. and
the "delete" key should also work now.

agree the blinking cursor is the standard for indicating if something is text
editable. Its proven a bit tricky to get right, but hopefully, we'll have it
working soon.

------
aaronharnly
I’d love to hear what hardware people are using. I’m looking at buying
hardware for some of our team, but obviously woild like to find the right
cost/quality ratio.

~~~
finaliteration
I’ve been using a Wacom Intuos S combined with Microsoft Whiteboard. The
Intuos wasn’t outrageously expensive and has been working really well for my
needs (mostly just process and class diagrams during online architecture
discussions).

~~~
aaronharnly
Thank you!

------
news_to_me
If you have an Apple Pencil, I made
[https://whiteboard.zjm.me/](https://whiteboard.zjm.me/) as a collaborative
whiteboard tool. (It also supports mouse, but a stylus is way better.)

~~~
pbsurf
Seems to be the only one here with real stylus support - pressure sensitivity
and draw with pen, pan with finger. Very nice!

------
filipn
We've been trying different tools, and we've found Excalidraw
([https://excalidraw.com/](https://excalidraw.com/)) to be satisfying our
needs. It's relatively new and albeit it's lacking a few features, it has
proven really good for drawing diagrams and designing new solutions like ui
mockups and stuff like that.

------
sixhobbits
I've been following the progress of [https://room.sh](https://room.sh) and it
looks really promising. Haven't used it much yet though.

~~~
a21y
room.sh co-founder here. Thanks! :) We've got loads of cool stuff on the
horizon so stay tuned.

That being said, happy to answer any questions if anyone has any.

~~~
AlexITC
As a suggestion, the website allows you to type a room name, which opens a new
tab and asks you for the room name again, certainly the second step could be
avoided.

~~~
a21y
The second step is asking for your name, not the room name, so that you can be
identified by others in the room. But noted, there might be room to make that
clearer!

------
toddmoy
For whiteboarding, I prefer Whimsical (whimical.co) over Figma or Mural. It's
focused on digramming, wireframing, and mind-mapping; it's an absolute joy to
use. Blazing fast, simple, and stays out of your way.

For context, I spend much of my day designing in Figma, which I love as well,
but not for whiteboard-style collaboration.

------
taylodl
I have a team using IdeaBoardz
([https://ideaboardz.com](https://ideaboardz.com)). Our Scrum of Scrums is
using Miro ([https://miro.com](https://miro.com)). Miro is more full-featured,
but IdeaBoardz is easier to use.

------
screye
I use MSFT whiteboard with my surface pro 7 and share it over teams. (teams
also has a whiteboard tool, but for some reason it is very clunky)

If it doesn't have to be collaborative, then I use Onenote, because the
scribbles can be saved as meeting notes.

It helps that I work at MSFT and everyone uses Windows + has whiteboard
installed.

~~~
s1mon
OneNote can be collaborative. It also runs reasonably well on an iPad with
Apple Pencil. I used this combo for a remote meeting recently while we were
all on teams for audio. Some people were using OneNote on Windows and drawing
with a mouse. There was occasional sync/lag issues, but I will certainly try
it again.

The Teams Whiteboard is pretty bad, and clunky to get to in the middle of a
meeting. Most Teams users don't even know it's there.

As others have mentioned the ideal solution would have an easy way to point at
things on the whiteboard. The lack of a hover state on touch based systems
makes this more tricky, but there can, of course, be a pointer tool.

~~~
screye
> OneNote can be collaborative

I have moved to it last week. Let's see how it goes. I love how convenient it
is that my natural brainstorming serves as detailed meeting notes.

> easy way to point at things on the whiteboard

I use whiteboard on my surface, and then project my screen instead of starting
whiteboard from team. That way I can point at stuff, but it is harder to be
collaborative.

------
NullError
We use MIRO and it has changed the entire company culture. We have 5
international offices, and with micro, it allows everyone to have full
transparency with what other offices and teams are working. It is now the 2nd
most important tool beside Slack. (400+ Employees)

------
dublin
Shared whiteboards and a good audio connection are FAR more important than
most videoconferencing solutions. Microsoft's Surface line kicks Apple's iPads
around the block here, at least partly because the Surface "pen" has a built-
in "eraser", but Apple's "pencil" doesn't. Windows Whiteboard is a pretty
decent starter solution here, and runs on both Windows and iOS. Run in
conjunction with Zoom or Teams, it's a pretty darn usable setup.

------
sixdimensional
Prior HN on shared whiteboards:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22675247)

------
irskep
I started building my own with a friend because nothing else had what I wanted
(great freehand drawing and text tools) and was cheap. We've only just
finished the MVP, so feedback would be very helpful!

[https://browserboard.com/](https://browserboard.com/)

I have no idea if it'll hold up under load, I guess let's see. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ You
can share the URL to collaborate with someone else.

~~~
zenhack
Neat; simple but I like it. One concrete thing that jumps out at me as I play
around with it: I keep instinctively trying to hit Ctrl+Z to undo, which
doesn't work (and then I remember there's a button). Might be nice to make
that shortcut work.

Also: I enjoyed this:

> No BS

> Browserboard is written by two people in their spare time who aren’t thirsty
> for advertising dollars. We have no reason to spam you or violate your
> privacy.

A thought: any interest in porting to Sandstorm? It seems like the app would
be a perfect fit, and giving people an easy way to run it themselves gives you
an out if it gets too popular for you to keep running it for free. If you're
not familiar:

[https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io)

Relevant blog post: [https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-
apps-re...](https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-
federated-hosting)

(Disclosure: I am one of the more active contributors to Sandstorm)

~~~
irskep
> I keep instinctively trying to hit Ctrl+Z to undo, which doesn't work

I've only tested on Mac, and Cmd+Z works. What platform are you on?

Sandstorm is a maybe, but we're doing great on a $7/mo Heroku instance. :-)

~~~
zenhack
> What platform are you on?

Firefox on Linux.

~~~
irskep
Figured it out: I was using 'meta' instead of 'mod'. Should be fixed, thanks
for the report!

------
mikecoles
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) - Provides the screens/windows to the conf
call as well as your camera shot.

Gromit-MPX - Allows drawing overtop whatever screen/window you'd like.

Wacom Intuous - Much nicer to draw with than a mouse or finger.

[https://obsproject.com/](https://obsproject.com/)

[https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx](https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx)

[https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-
intuo...](https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuos)

------
agrafix
We noticed that most whiteboarding apps out there over-focused on perfect
diagrams, so a lot of time in meetings is lost due to rearranging boxes and
arrows. Hence, we built [https://letsboard.co](https://letsboard.co) \- a very
simple collaborative whiteboarding tool and are using it daily now.

------
matco11
Miro.com is great. It is so much more than a whiteboard. We use it for
brainstorm sessions, retros and all sort of things.

------
egyptish
InVision's Freehand has developed leaps and bounds over the last month - it
integrates with our MS Teams so it was easy to use and jump into.

Also comes with a presentation mode so you can walk through designs and have
others on it follow along.

Compatible with iPad and Apple Pencil, which I recommend over the browser for
markups.

------
nojito
Microsoft Whiteboard is pretty phenomenal for collaborative white boarding

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-
whit...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-
whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app)

~~~
NicoJuicy
I wished they made PC version on par with the school's edition though :( .

It would be much more usefull for event-storming.

------
dharma1
Any video conferencing tool + cheap wacom + Figma is quite powerful. Works on
MacOS/Linux/Windows.

There are some things Figma isn't intended (and as such very good fit) for
though, like diagramming/flowcharts, or marking up PDF's - haven't found great
multiplayer web apps for those.

Feels like concurrent multiuser editing is something that a lot of software
would benefit from - maybe something we will look back in 5 years as being
weird it didn't exist and we had to send files back and forth to work on
something together. Would make working together on almost anything easier
remotely.

Miro and Mural are also quite nice collab tools, more limited than Figma but
some nice things out of the box.

------
ryanmarsh
Remote training

I've found Google Jamboard has the right mix of features and ease of use for
collaborative exercises during training.

Everything else

I've introduced a few enterprise clients to Miro and they're running with it.
I've been impressed with how they've employed it.

------
davidwitt415
I've been using MURAL, Miro and Figma. MURAL and Miro are pretty close, and
each has it's strengths, but I prefer MURAL. For a team that doesn't need the
bells and whistles, Figma is a great choice.

------
AlexITC
While I don't use it daily, I built
[https://collabuml.com](https://collabuml.com) (launched on HN a month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955971))
which has been helpful for me, I made it this way as lots of time you mostly
care about writing system diagrams instead of freestyle whiteboard.

------
prando
One of the main criteria for a whiteboard is to use it with a stylus - so I
purchased [https://air.bar/](https://air.bar/) to turn my non-touch-screen
laptop into a touch-screen-one. However, its latency is not low enough to
provide a smooth experience. Does anyone know of a good digital pen that plays
well with Win 10. I suspect our company policies won't allow me to share
screen via an iPad.

------
NullError
Miro! Its a company changing tool!

------
iso1631
I use a real whiteboard on my wall in shot of the camera

~~~
pmiller2
I'm surprised I had to scroll down so far to see this. You could distribute
individual whiteboards to every engineer, and even have a dedicated
webcam/tripod setup, for next to nothing.

It's not "collaborative" in the sense that remote people can erase stuff on
your board, but, I don't think that's a big deal. The "erase API" just becomes
"Hey, @iso1631, why don't we get rid of X and replace it with Y?"

I suppose if you wanted to try and automate it, you could do so pretty easily
with some custom software that just overlays photos of all the boards. The
amount of image processing would be pretty trivial.

~~~
iso1631
Normally when we whiteboard we just have one person at the controls anyway

------
me_me_me
I have tried few of them, but what I find most infuriating is the lack of
keyboard shortcuts.

Usually they support only C+z for undo.

Switching between pen and eraser by having to actually click an icon is fine
on iPad but it drives me up the wall when I am using wacom tablet and
keyboard.

Does anyone know application that supports keyboard shortcuts?

------
greenfiddlefig
We've been LOVING Sprink (trysprink.com) and it's free! Compared to Miro which
we previously used, the interface was much easier for our team. Plus there's
no setup required which is a huge bonus when you want to quickly share a board
and still video/audio call.

------
austinking
Our company was stuggling to conduct remote interviews, so I made a shared
whiteboard tool to help out. Great for team collaboration as well.

You can generate as many unique boards for free as you want here:
[https://interviewboard.io](https://interviewboard.io)

~~~
AlexITC
I feel you, I created another tool which has helped me on system design
interviews: [https://collabuml.com](https://collabuml.com), hopefully you will
find it helpful.

------
demosthenex
Recently I've been using Openboard
([http://openboard.ch/](http://openboard.ch/)) while screensharing. Yes its
not a team board, but at least it's local. It helps me explain concepts to
others easily.

------
jacquesm
If you're into Obeya and/or Agile:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obeya)

Then check out Iobeya:

[https://www.iobeya.com/](https://www.iobeya.com/)

Does one thing and does it very well.

------
eugenekolo
Google Slides and share desktop on Zoom. No need to complicate it with yet
another piece of software.

Powerpoint and Slides are perfectly capable for drawing diagrams, or
whiteboarding. Zoom screen share is low enough latency and you're already
using it for voice comm.

------
wajsbrot
[https://app.scratchwork.io/](https://app.scratchwork.io/) is a simple
collaborative dashboard and support writing math equations by hand or with
latex. Nice for researchers or engineers.

------
montroser
We recently moved from Miro to
[https://beta.plectica.com](https://beta.plectica.com) and have been loving
it.

So much better than anything else we tried at handling hierarchy (nested
lists, sections, etc)

------
gautamdivgi
I use a Wacom tablet (the cheapest one works well). I can use sketchbook (came
with the Wacom tablet) when I want to diagram spontaneously in meetings. But
having people edit my sketches is a challenge since no one has the same setup.

------
jpallen
[https://www.ideaflip.com](https://www.ideaflip.com) \- it's nice and simple
compared to e.g. Miro, and nicely recreates the offline collaboration feeling
of working around a whiteboard

------
pbsurf
I've added shared whiteboarding to my handwriting app:
[http://styluslabs.com/share](http://styluslabs.com/share) It is possible to
deploy your own server.

------
darkerside
One by Wacom, with Autodesk sketch express. You can zoom share screen into the
app, and it's much better than Zoom's native whiteboard function. Pressure
sensitivity and functional pen buttons are so key.

------
ivankuz
Very honorable mention to this topic would be
[https://www.ryeboard.com/](https://www.ryeboard.com/).

They're moving quite fast and seemingly in the right direction.

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justincormack
I am using small (A4) physical whiteboards with an Ipevo v4k camera pointing
at them. Its not quite the same, but I do like having a physical board. And
its cheap compared to an ipad+pencil.

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mwdalrymple
Lucidchart is amazing - love the simultaneous editing. Its the best thing that
I have come across for collaborative whiteboarding. It also has great
integration with Confluence.

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fblp
Which whiteboard apps have the best integrations? I've been trying to find one
that can 2-way sync with fields in airtable so that i can build a dynamic org
chart.

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dezzeus
Among the free ones there’s [https://drawpile.net/](https://drawpile.net/) but
I haven’t tried it yet…

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nhorob67
I heard about a whiteboard app that has fading gestures that were highly
reviewed. Does anyone know which app has these?

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trenchgun
This is good: [https://app.mural.co/](https://app.mural.co/)

~~~
rl3
Not when it hijacks your browser's back button in an unethical manner.

~~~
tsieling
Agreed. Instant deal breaker.

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iameoghan
Another +1 for Miro. Super simple & intuitive. For my needs, I can get by on
the free version which is great.

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sethammons
Wacom tablet and any shared canvas, usually Zoom’s. A colleague uses an ipad
pro with a stylus.

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zubairq
Mural, jam board and lucid charts

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foobaw
Didn't know there were so many options!

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yachay
I've been using excalidraw.com

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sidcool
Mural

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atentaten
+1 for Miro

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SimianLogic2
My mom is a retired teacher, and she's been doing remote preK for my 5yo and
my niece for a couple of hours a day so the grownups can get work done.
Evaluating whiteboards for a 60-year-old and two 5-year-olds to use together
with video chat was.... not super fun.

What we've settled on:

We do the video chat on an old fullscreen iMac we had lying around. My mom and
each kid all have their own iPads. For the first couple of weeks we used a
webwhiteboard, but the littles were having a LOT of trouble with it. It's not
optimized for iPads. It's easy to click on links in the nav. Different size
screens see different regions of the whiteboard. My niece and son kept
clearing each other's work and causing fights.

I ended up building a little prototype for them with rails/websockets that
tried to solve all the dumb stuff that makes it hard to use it on iPads. Apple
really doesn't make it easy, though. You can bookmark a page to your
homescreen to get rid of the Safari chrome (URL bar is the worst for 5yos),
but then you can't have cookies and regular usage (maybe just while
fullscreen?) will prompt you that the webpage is trying to steal your
passwords (fake keyboard warning). Guided access gets rid of most of the
obnoxious gestures they were triggering by accident. I disabled most of the
multi-touch events in javascript.

I fixed the board size with selectable orientation (portrait/landscape) and
set it to scale + aspect-fits to everyone's device. I added a simple
host/guest permission model so my mom has a few teacher permissions that the
kids don't have. She can either be in teacher mode (she can draw/clear, they
can't), class mode (anyone can draw/clear), or student mode where each kid
gets their own private board that she can swap between (she can still
draw/clear on student boards).

I was starting to work on more teaching features -- the ability for her to
save/load sketches so she could do lesson plans ahead of time, the ability for
her to "broadcast" saved boards to the student boards so she could make
assignments for each 5yo to fill out. We had kind of a rough stretch where one
of the kids or the other would forget their tablet for about a week, though,
and my mom got fed up and just ordered them workbooks for all 3 of them that
they could do together.

It's still running on Heroku, but I haven't been working on it much lately.

[http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi](http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi)

I think this is the right model for small-class whiteboards, but I think you'd
have to build a native solution to make it usable for kids that small.

When it worked, it was pretty magical!

