Miro: your visual workspace

Do not under any circumstances use this app! I am a teacher who tried it thinking it could work as an online whiteboard that all of my students could access at once. I paid $90 of my own money to create an account for myself to try it out. In order to access the whiteboard students needed to make their own accounts. I assumed that only the creator would need to pay for an account. I was wrong about that, but here’s where it gets worse: every time a student made an account to join the whiteboard, the company charged my card WITHOUT ever asking my approval to pay or even notifying me that I’d be charged, until I was suddenly emailed a bill for $1700! It’s also just not a great product: I ended up making about five of these whiteboards, but couldn’t use them in real time because the app was too laggy when multiple students joined it. I am currently waiting to hear from their billing dept. if they will cancel the accounts and not charge me this absurd sum. Absolute insanity that their system would allow this.

This app is fantastic! It’s basically an infinite whiteboard that you can customize to fit your needs. Personally, I’ve been using it as a timeline creator for one of my fiction stories. For a free app, I think Miro is doing a great job. However, the one thing that I hope gets fixed in the upcoming months is platform optimization. Miro was designed for a web browser so it’s no surprise that it’s a little… laggy on an iPad or iPhone. For example, whenever I open my project it will usually lag really bad. I have to zoom out and let everything load for 15-30 seconds before everything becomes smooth again. I use an app called Procreate to create big high resolution illustrations and those never lag when I open the project, so I think Miro might just have an issue with allocating RAM or something…

This app has the best concept for all sorts of collaboration and note taking. I personally would pay good money for this app if everything worked the way it is supposed to. I run into way too many bugs to the point where I cant even access the User Interface to undo or select the pencil tool. My screen often times becomes glitchy where the screen flickers on panning around the canvas or using the pencil my pen strokes flicker. I use this app for most of my work but I face these bugs way too often to the point that I am writing an online review. Half the time the User Interface doesn’t even appear on the board, I have to force restart multiple times for it to finally reset, and it doesn’t last long until the UI disappears again and I can’t access any tools or navigation icons. I hope to see changes in the near future because I really like the idea of vector based pen strokes and unlimited whiteboard space for scratch notes, as well as online collaboration with team members. I am hopeful for Miro to fix this and I hope these bug fixes are not prolonged for much longer because I simply cannot work efficiently, as I am spending more time restarting the app than I am actually working. (I use Miro on an iPad Pro 2020)