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We decided to test out all the online sticky-note, brainstorming, and decision-making tools we could find to figure out just which ones work best for quick collaborative sessions during a meeting.

But, how do you do the sticky-note thing online? You can find dozens of online sticky note and brainstorming applications, but not all of them work well as part of an online meeting.

The Strategic Planning Meeting Essentials Pack designed by Anna O'Byrne includes a series of online brainstorming and decision-making exercises. If you run these meetings face-to-face, you'll use sticky notes, markers and a whiteboard for those steps in the process.

You may also want to check out our all-encompassing post on making decisions in meetings -- it's a great companion piece to this article.

This list was originally published in 2015. Every tool listed below is active as of April 2020, but the descriptions below may be out of date.

Last updated April 14, 2020 For this update, we added several new tools and removed a few that are no longer in business. You'll find helpful replies and information from the companies listed here embedded in the full list at the end of the post.

When you brainstorm, you want to get everyone's ideas in the conversation. At Lucid, we strive to make our software work for people with disabilities who may use assistive technologies, and for those joining on phones or other devices. We're far from perfect here, but it's a goal, and one we'd hoped to find shared by any brainstorming tool we'd recommend. Sadly, with one very qualified exception, this was not to be.

Most effective working sessions in the business world involve 3 to 10 people meeting for less than 2 hours. We wanted to find something that worked well at this scale. Some of the products we found were clearly intended for individual use, and others optimize for big conference events with hundreds or even thousands of participants; not what we're after.

Since you type your ideas into these tools in the first place, it seemed like it should be a no-brainer to get them out again. Shockingly, not so.

When you use real sticky notes, someone has to type up the big ideas afterwards. Right now, we're focused on strategic planning, so we definitely want to put the ideas from our brainstorm to use!

Techniques like the KJ-Method naturally engage everyone in the meeting. When you're together, it's very obvious if someone isn't enjoying the process or simply isn't participating. We wanted to find something that encouraged this kind of energy and transparency in an online setting.

None of the products we explored had support for team audio or video, so we're assuming you'll also be running online meeting software at the same time. There needed to be a way to put a simple link in the meeting that everyone could just click to access the brainstorming tool, or some other really easy way to get everyone connected on-the-fly.

Also, anything you ask a team to try in front of each other needs to be easy to figure out. If it's confusing, people will get frustrated and embarrassed, and that's no good for your meeting.

We're after something a team can use regularly. Something developers can use in retrospectives, executives can use to plan, and sales can use to explore requirements with prospects. This means it has to be super easy to set up a new session.

Obviously the tools we recommend would have to support the process (many don't). Beyond that, we were seeking tools that met as many of these criteria as possible.

All of this is easy enough with sticky notes and markers - but a bit tricky online!

Similar processes ask a team to prioritize each concept against pre-determined criteria, such as importance and urgency, then select the ideas that rank the highest. The strategic planning templates call for ranking ideas like that when planning goals and strategies, so we looked for tools that could support that too.

The team then votes on which concepts matter most. Each person gets a set number of votes (or “dots”) that they can place on the concepts they care most about. The concepts that get the most dots win.

Working together, the team makes groups of similar ideas or concepts. Each group then gets named with a single word or short phrase that best captures the core concept underlying the ideas in that group.

People take turns sharing the ideas they've written and posting them to the group space.

Everyone spends 3 silent minutes writing down their ideas. Each idea goes on a separate note.

Our Test Use Case Starting Question: What should we look for when planning our next company retreat?

Our test was based on a technique known as the KJ-Method . While you may not know it by that name, you've probably been in a meeting that used it, because it's simple and it's really handy any time you need a group to quickly sort through a bunch of ideas.

We quickly decided to cut all the simple virtual whiteboards and the mind mapping tools from the list, as they just weren't meant to support the kind of process we need for our meetings. We also cut any product recently acquired by another company, those products that were too buggy for our test, and those that we couldn't figure out. Our final list includes 30+ tools.

First, we scoured the internet for all the online meeting tools we could find that seemed like they might work. We searched for brainstorming tools, tools used in agile retrospectives, “online sticky notes”, decision support software, and more. Our original list contained over 50 different products. Then, we began signing up for free trials and running each product through our test use case (described below).

Just as there are lots of ways to use real sticky notes, there are lots of ways to use online sticky note tools. Right now, we want to find those that work best as part of a real-time meeting.

If you already use one of these visual management tools, you can also use it for quick brainstorming. But if you're looking for something specifically to support engagement during meetings, you'll have better results with a product purpose-built for brainstorming and decision support.

These are all very cool products for visual management as a core part of your business. Anyone using a Lean manufacturing process, building a user experience map, or laying out a visual strategy will find these products useful.

If you wanted to run a real-time brainstorming session during a meeting using one of these tools, you could do so following the same steps we outlined for simple sticky note tools. With a few exceptions: Mural, Stormboard and iObeya include easy-to-use features for grouping ideas and voting. But really, you should look seriously at the products in this category only if you want a way to visually manage your work on an ongoing basis.

At first blush, these tools sound pretty much the same as their simple sticky-notes relatives. But make no mistake - these are the city mice, with more sophisticated features, complicated options and higher expectations than their country cousins.

The products in this category work great for visual planning and management. Think of them as the digital equivalent of a war room, where the walls are covered in notes and drawings and pictures, all interconnected and evolving over the course of the work. Each note represents some concept or piece of work in progress. The notes fill out the “information radiator” - a big whiteboard where people can walk up and see the project status at a glance.

These products give you the benefits of having a trained facilitator armed with packets of sticky-notes on staff. If you can afford it, learning to use a dedicated decision support tool can add a level of richness, engagement and effectiveness to your meetings that you can't achieve any other way.

Not all of the tools in this category have a free trial, but GroupMap does, so we'll use that for our example.

The virtual meeting tools in this category explicitly support processes like the one we're trying to test, and many other related group techniques too. Most include built-in templates that walk the group through each step, and all of them generate detailed reports. That said, tools in this category aren't right for everyone.

For the non-technical folks or those working with people outside your team, collaborative documents or decision support tools are a better choice.

For development and design teams collaborating on internal projects, these products provide an excellent combination of simple process support, low cost, and no-fuss customization.

Designed by software and web developers for software and web developers, these products do a great job supporting the collaboration processes used in agile development meetings.

These products have more process support than simple sticky-note tools, but not as much as the decision support products we'll discuss in the next section.

These online sticky notes tools look like they're designed for personal use, and some may even be good for helping small teams create visual task boards. But for any team trying to brainstorm and prioritize ideas at scale, we'd suggest using a different type of tool.

The dividing line between simple sticky notes and virtual design spaces (also featuring sticky-note-esque boxes) is a soft blurry one. We've separated the groups based on how we'd use each tool - your mileage might vary.

When you imagine what an online sticky-notes tool might look like, you're picturing one of these. Yellow, green and pink squares with writing on them, “pinned” to a board with, yes, a cork-inspired background image. Teams can add items all at once, and click to drag the notes around.

Collaborative editors are a solid choice when working with a small team and you know how to set up and lead the exercise you're using. These were the only really easy option for teams with accessibility requirements.

So, what did we like about using collaborative editors, and what were the drawbacks?

Anna taught us how to use Google Docs for brainstorming, and it works pretty well with a bit of advanced set up. These steps would be the same for the other products in this category.

Collaborative document editors let teams write documents together in real time. These tools aren't intended for brainstorming specifically, and they don't have anything that really looks like a sticky-note, so we were surprised at how well they worked in our test.

We'll explore each category in turn, explaining how to run the sample process using those tools and screenshots of our favorites. Then, we'll list our top picks and details about the full list of products we tested at the end of the post.

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Recommended for designers and others managing work visually. Mural and Miro fully support our process as part of a larger, deluxe visual management platform. Neither platform is free nor lightweight, but both can be an excellent choice for teams who benefit from visual collaboration both during and outside of meetings.

Recommended with reservations. These products support our test process and offer a good alternative to development teams. But they lack the flexibility, power and finesse of our top choices, and didn't provide the reports we were looking for.

Free collaborative editors are our top-pick for small teams or traditional facilitators who need to prioritize easy technology instead of high-volume replies or any decision reporting support.

That said, these products were harder to use with large groups, as participants quickly get concerned about writing over each other's contributions. Importantly, these products do nothing to support your process, so all of the organization and facilitation is entirely up to you.

Brainstorming in a co-edited document worked better than we expected, and starting with a product everyone already knows how to use eradicated the learning curve. These are also the only viable option for those of you with accessibility requirements. Finally, free is a very good price!

Powernoodle and MeetingSphere are also excellent choices, especially for enterprises and organizations seeking a product that will support a rich virtual facilitation practice over time. Many of the professional facilitators certified by the IAF swear by MeetingSphere .

Both GroupMap and Stormz offer a free trial and a monthly subscription option. Occasional users probably won't experience big differences between these platforms. Both are easy to use and generate really useful results. Lucid Meetings customers should consider Stormz, using our integration to ensure the results from your brainstorming session get stored with your other meeting records.

We loved the ease of use, attractive design, clarity of the process, and excellent reporting provided by our top recommendations.

After all that, here are the products that stood out from the crowd. We recommend adding one of these to your online meeting toolkit.

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The Full List: Details & Screenshots for 30++ Tools

April 2020 NOTE: There were 25 tools on this list when we first published it in 2015. Some have passed on and new ones have emerged. Every tool in the list below still works, but some of these descriptions may be out of date.

To see the latest features offered by each company, visit their website. To see other types of meeting technologies (and our most comprehensive product lists) visit our List of Meeting Tools

In alphabetical order.

1000Minds www.1000minds.com

Decision support tool with a free trial, so you can try it yourself. Some templates included, and they offer customizable processes too. 1000Minds focuses on helping groups prioritize alternatives based on pre-determined criteria, rather than brainstorming, so we don't recommend them for facilitating free-form online meeting sessions. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for decision support software, though. This screenshot from their website shows just one step in the decision making process. Screenshot: 1000Minds walks teams through making important decisions using clear criteria Response from 1000Minds founder Paul Hansen It would be easy to run a group session with 1000Minds to choose “where to hold our next company retreat” - your test scenario. Read more ... All that people would have to specify (and enter into 1000Minds by creating a “decision model” for this application) would be the criteria for the decision and the alternatives (locations) being considered; and then answer some trade-off questions in order to arrive at a ranking of the alternatives. That could be done in a meeting – e.g. in a single location; and indeed doing it as a group of people can be fun and good for team-building. In addition, it would be easy to apply some of our distributed group decision-making processes (see www.1000minds.com/decision-making/group-decision-making-software ) to perform these activities in a distributed fashion (e.g. people in different locations; also ensuring privacy and anonymity, if desired).

CardBoard cardboardit.com

It looks like sticky notes (cool!), but sticky notes with purpose. CardBoard is specifically designed to help product teams map out customer journeys. They explain it all nicely in their demo video.

Cardsmith Added October 2015 cardsmith.co

Cardsmith is a new entrant in the visual management category. Cardsmith includes unique features that make it easy to organize cards in grids for planning, and to enrich each card with additional fields for capturing all kinds of planning details. Think of it like Excel + Sticky Notes. Like most of the visual planning tools, Cardsmith doesn't fully support the KJ technique. They lack explicit support for grouping and voting. That said, you can certainly use this to support your meetings if you're already using it for ongoing planning. See their response below for details

Screenshot: Cards include special fields used to add details & sum up information for planning Response from Cardsmith founder Monica Borrell How Cardsmith can support the KJ process: 1. Individual Brainstorming.

In Cardsmith, you could setup each person with an individual board and let them just get ideas out of their head in either Tile View, or Freeform View. Read more ... Alternatively you could create a Grid View on a Shared board and have all participant put their cards in a single column. You could suggest other participants "Hide" the other attendee’s columns to get them out of sight while doing their own individual brainstorming. 2. Sharing Ideas.

If using individual Boards, the meeting moderator would now share a shared Board with everyone, and going around the ‘room’, have people move their cards into the Shared space while they discuss. Alternatively you could ‘unhide’ one participants Column or Row if using the Grid View on a Shared Board from the Start. I prefer the Freeform board for this however because it will allow for easier clustering/grouping of similar Cards later on. 3. Grouping / Clustering.

Using the Freeform Board, you would place similar Cards together. They can overlap slightly just like sticky notes. 4. Voting.

You can do this now using the honor system by having a number field on the face of the Card. Or you could put tick marks. Here is how I see Cardsmith meeting your criteria (of course I am biased) Easy to use with minimal setup.

I would give Cardsmith an A- here. It takes about 10 minutes to figure out how to use ALL of the Cardsmith features if you make use of our online tutorial videos. And once you know how to use it, it takes about 1 minute to setup a new Board for a meeting. You can add whatever fields you want to a Card (such as points, votes, notes). Easy to invite people.

You can invite 10 people to a shared board by entering 10 email addresses (if they are not already users of Cardsmith). I’d give Cardsmith a C+ here. Engaging.

Cardsmith is truly real-time collaboration. It works like Google Docs. One person adds a card to a board, and everyone sees it immediately on their screens. Moving/dragging Cards is also seen real-time. Plus the lack of visual clutter and colorful options for Cards has shown to be quite engaging for teams. Each person could chose their favorite color to use in the Brainstorm. I’d give Cardsmith an A+ here. A way to export.

We have an export to .csv feature. And, more interestingly, you can easily move your brainstorming cards into a visual project plan or prioritized feature list, or some other type of Board for further action. I’d give Cardsmith an A here. Scaled to fit the working meeting.

The 5 to 10 person sized team is exactly our audience. Inclusive of design and accessibility.

We have not considered (yet) accessibility factors for visually impaired and such. We are sadly lacking here today. F.

Conceptboard conceptboard.com

Conceptboard provides a robust visual collaboration and management tool, ideally suited for marketing teams working with other departments and remote clients. If your team would benefit from using a tool like this as part of your core business process, you should also use it to run quick brainstorming sessions during meetings. If you only need support for meetings, though, see our recommendations above. See Conceptboard's overview video.

Conteneo Weave weave.scaledagile.com/

We've participated in online innovation games in the past, and know that theoretically, you could configure one to support our test process. They've since become one with Conteneo, which has a very clear Enterprise focus. We don't recommend this platform for simple in-meeting brainstorming, but you may find some of their decision game templates worth checking out.

Definitive Pro® Added April 2020

www.definitiveinc.com/definitive-pro

Definitive Pro provides a collaborative process for making data-driven decisions in situations where multiple participants need to evaluate multiple options against multiple criteria. Screenshot: This is a heatmap that summarizes the team’s scoring of each alternative project investment against each criterion (i.e. strategic objective), and the overall results via the orange mini bar chart.. Details from Definitive Business Solutions President John Sammarco Definitive Pro® provides a collaborative process to build consensus and make complex, multi-criteria decisions in a wide range of scenarios. Stakeholders can participant anytime, anywhere, using any device. It uses the leading theory in multi-criteria decision making (the Analytic Hierarchy Process), which provides the ability to synthesize quantitative and qualitative factors and set priorities. It also employs a state-of-the-art mathematical programming solver to find the most favorable solution and optimize the allocation of resources. It also includes an optional financial business case (FBC) module, which provides a time-phased cost vs. benefit analysis.

Draft Added April 2020

draft.io

Draft provides an online canvas where you and your team can share ideas as notes or images, group these ideas, and visually manage your work. Several pre-built templates support common activities for product managers, agile teams, and group ideation. Screenshot: organized notes with simple voting and status indicators. Details from Alexandre Beauchet at Draft Draft.io is a visual and living document with the power of a flexible and collaborative blackboard. It’s a perfect environment to investigate, solve problems creatively, and document just what it takes to move forward. Every day, many innovative teams make the most of Draft’s digital universe for Agile Project Management (visual management, story mapping, retrospectives, etc.), Product Management (product discovery, user flow, etc.), or any other visual problem-solving and creative thinking work.

Dropbox Paper dropbox.com/paper

Dropbox paper works very similarly to Quip and Google Docs when it comes to supporting our use case. This is a newer product and a good choice for teams that already use Dropbox. Screenshot: Look! I've got a lightbulb emoji right there. I think that's a delightful touch.

Etherpad https://etherpad.org

Recommended

Etherpad is an open-source collaborative document editor, and a good choice if you aren't already using Google Docs or Microsoft Word Live. Personally, I find it a bit faster and easier to use than either of the name-brand options, but you will need to either use this on a publicly hosted site (you can find several public instances here), or host it yourself. Here's a screenshot of our test setup. TIP: you can copy & paste this setup into your own document when you visit the public Google Doc linked below. Screenshot: Using a public Etherpad for brainstorming.

Google Docs www.google.com/docs/about/ Recommended (if you already use Google Docs)

Here's a sample Google Doc we set up for our test. Screenshot: Setting up Google Docs to share in our test.

Google Jamboard Added April 2020

jamboard.google.com/ Google offers two products called Jamboard. One is an interactive display–or a big touchscreen monitor you can put in a conference room. The other is their free, simple whiteboard application designed for use on that fancy display. The good news for Google users: you can set up a Jamboard whiteboard in your browser and use if from the computers you already own for free. Here's a sample Jamboard we set up for our test. Screenshot: Virtual sticky notes added to a Jamboard

GoWall Added April 2020

www.gowall.com GoWall comes with several pre-built brainstorming and decision support templates which fully support our test process. Video from GoWall

GroupMap www.groupmap.com

Highly Recommended

GroupMap directly supports every part of our test process with a simple, clean and easy-to-use interface. I recommend experimenting with the different templates before your first meeting, as each map-type works a bit differently. Screenshot: Three types of "Maps" in GroupMap. Response from GroupMap founder Jeremy Lu Here are some videos that help show how to set up GroupMap and use the feature that teams need to run the KJ Method. Expand to view the videos ... Using GroupMap to Create a Lean Business Model Canvas Creating a New GroupMap

Hoylu Added April 2020

www.hoylu.com Hoylu provides an online digital whiteboard that teams can use through a browser or in a conference room equipped with HoyluWall projectors. Screenshot: Running a team meeting in Hoylu

IdeaBoardz ideaboardz.com

Recommended with reservations.

IdeaBoardz supports all the steps in our test process, which you would expect for a tool designed specifically for agile retrospectives. It was a little clunky to use (the animations rendered slowly for us at times), and I can't honestly endorse the use of that font, but it's free, simple, and does the job. Screenshot: IdeaBoardz had just the features we needed, and no more.

IdeaFlip Updated June 2017

ideaflip.com Recommended

This is our favorite of the simple sticky note applications, because it's really fun to use. Colorful stickies, stickers, and shapes. Surprise tip: hold shift when you click on something to re-size or spin it around. Spinning is fun! Recent updates to IdeaFlip make it even better. New features include an in-meeting timer (super helpful for keeping those brainstorming sessions on track) and a way to lock the board, which reins in the chaos. Finally, the "Follow Me" feature lets the meeting leader control which part of the board participants are viewing. This solves the annoying challenge of trying to get people to follow the conversation; no more of the "No, Jim. In the bottom left corner. Scroll down. You have to use your mouse," back-and-forth. Screenshot: Setting a timer for an IdeaFlip session.

iObeya Updated July 2019

www.iobeya.com Recommended for Lean and Agile Organizations

iObeya helps organizations who already practice visual management take their visual boards online so they can be shared across locations. A program manager at a local agile development shop pointed us to iObeya, and asked for our opinion on whether it would be a good tool for managing retrospectives. At the time, it wasn't there. Today, it is. Over the past few years, however, iObeya's dramatically increased their support for smaller teams and more nimble processes. iObeya now fully supports brainstorming and voting (including my favorite activity timer with an animation reminiscent of champagne bubbles). You can absolutely run a meeting using the KJ Technique here. The new Instant Meeting feature means you don't have to futz with the software in advance to pull it off, either. More importantly, you can now invite people to join your meeting on the fly, even if they don't yet have an account in the system. While we don't recommend iObeya as a first choice for groups looking to run a one-time workshop, iObeya is one of our top recommendations for groups looking to run Dan Prock's Value Stream Mapping workshop or other long-term visual processes with a remote team. Also, check out this sweet demo video.

Klaxoon Added April 2020

klaxoon.com Klaxoon bills itself as the best collaborative solution for leading the meeting revolution. Features include online whiteboarding, gamified collaboration, portable interactive displays, and more. Also, they have a hot pink semi truck. Video from Klaxoon

Lino.it en.linoit.com

We put Lino in the “simple sticky-note” category because it didn't have obvious support for grouping or voting, but that categorization is a bit misleading. Lino's virtual boards can include all kinds of rich media and layers, and we actually found it a touch overwhelming. Screenshot: The tutorial board for Lino.it.

MeetingSphere www.meetingsphere.com

MeetingSphere masters our test process and many other similar decision-making processes. We know many professional facilitators dedicated to the use of MeetingSphere for their online training and workshops, as it does a nice job balancing simplicity for meeting participants and powerful controls for meeting leaders. Screenshot: Ideas grouped and ready for comment and dot voting in MeetingSphere. Details from MeetingSphere CEO Neal Bastick How MeetingSphere meets the evaluation criteria 1. Easy to use with minimal setup

To create a new meeting, participants merely click the plus button, name the meeting and share the meeting’s URL. Read more ... MeetingSphere includes browser-based voice conferencing and screen sharing by Dolby. On entry, participants join the voice conference over the internet or by dialing in. If the meeting requires more than a conversation, Leaders add the required workspaces, building an agenda. Workspaces are ready to run once the question or instruction is added and MeetingSphere also helps with that. The Brainstorm workspace, for instance, provides a drop down of typical Brainstorm questions. Rating sheets provide ready-made rating criteria and rating methods. While default settings work most of the time, leaders can, of course, tune their workspaces to support very specific meeting processes and methodologies. Organizations often provide templates for frequent or important use cases to make things even easier and promote best practice. 2. Easy to invite people

MeetingSphere leaders simply send out the URL to the meeting, which they can customize at will. Meetings can be secured by an access code which facilitators can make as complex as they like. 3. Engaging

What could be more engaging than the ability to contribute at will and the freedom to ‘say’ what one really thinks and knows? In MeetingSphere, most of the work is done in writing. This means that participants do not have to wait their turn to speak. MeetingSphere leaders can offer anonymity which lets participants speak out and makes it much easier to judge contributions on merit, not by whom they were made. This freedom to get to the point, to build on each other’s ideas and insights and to actually engage with critical arguments and questions rather than just brush them off as opposition is at the heart of MeetingSphere’s extraordinary productivity. 4. A way to export the results; no copy and paste!

Between MeetingSphere meetings and workspaces content can, of course, be moved around by copy and paste. What would be easier? For documentation, MeetingSphere provides a verbatim meeting report in Word at a click. For processing in other tools and systems, content can also be exported to Excel. 5. Scaled to fit the working meeting

MeetingSphere focuses on meetings from 5 to 30 people but supports much bigger conferences. There is no limit on the number of meetings leaders can run or participants they can invite. 6. Inclusive Design & Accessibility

MeetingSphere is an HTML5 browser application designed for accessibility with native screen reader support.

Milanote Added April 2020

milanote.com Milanote provides an online canvas for sharing notes, images, and content. Team members can comment on content and turn ideas into tasks. Screenshot: A Milanote board. Details shared by Nichelle Antoque from Milanote Milanote is a tool for organizing creative projects into beautiful visual boards. By design, it feels a lot like working on the wall in a creative studio–visual, tactile and sometimes a bit messy. Milanote is a great fit for designers who work in teams remotely. Key Features: Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web

Organize visually using the flexible drag and drop interface.

Boards by default are a private place to think, but with a single click you can create a shared workspace for collaboration with your team

Milanote is filled with hundreds of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from creating a moodboard to writing that perfect creative brief.

Miro miro.com

Miro has the features you need for ongoing planning and visual management, and many useful integration that help you incorporate information from your other business systems into your boards. If you already use Miro for planning, you can also use it for brainstorming during meetings, but there is no explicit support for the decision making process (grouping, ranking, voting, etc.) We found the infinite canvas concept to be challenging in a meeting - and hard to capture in a screenshot! It was a bit too easy for people to accidentally find themselves looking at different parts of the canvas during the discussion. Response from Miro representative Anna We have a Screen sharing mode (in Premium and Team accounts), that allows you to demonstrate the screen during the meeting and avoid misunderstanding when looking at the board. In the near future we are planning to show other participants' cursors, so you'll never get lost on the board.

Microsoft Word Live office.live.com/start/Word.aspx

Recommended (if you already use Office Live)

See the example setup for Google Docs above, and copy that into your online Word document to get started.

Mural mural.co

Recommended for designers

MURAL was our favorite of the big concept design tools. When we tested our brainstorming process, we found you could select multiple sticky-notes at once and move them together - very useful in the grouping step, and not something most of the other tools supported. They also have built-in support for dot-voting. Those of us with experience using tools like PhotoShop found the interface very intuitive. Our non-designer colleagues had a bit more trouble getting oriented, but still found this to be easier to use than some of the other products in this category.

NoteApp noteapp.com

NoteApp saved all our changes (see Note.ly)! There's no support here for anything but adding stickies to a board, so if you wanted to use this in a meeting, you would need to copy & paste to group items, and find a way to mark your votes. Team sharing, more than one board, and advanced options are only available with a paid subscription. You can see a screenshot here, or follow this link to play with a live version of this test board. Screenshot: NoteApp's clean and simple sticky note board.

Note.ly note.ly

The quintessence of simple sticky-noteness. Perhaps too simple. Although the feature list here claims otherwise, we could find no way to collaborate, scroll the view on smaller screens, or even correct typos on the to-do list we made. :( Sorry, no screenshot for this one. When I clicked to read the help, all my changes went away, and I'm not doing that again.

Nureva Added April 2020

nureva.com Nureva offers several collaboration products. Their Span Workspace product includes multiple collaboration templates where teams can add images, sticky notes, and more.

Padlet padlet.com

Padlet is packed with clever touches. You can share each pad with your team, and the “Jetpack” upgrade looks like it adds all kinds of bling. That said, there's no process support here that would help you run through brainstorming and decision making in a meeting. Here's a public link to our test board, which you can see in the screenshot below. Screenshot: Pictures and notes on a Padlet board.

Pinup Updated April 2020

pinup.com

PinuP says it supports "Online Sticky Notes, super fast, free, and easy". True that. The app is clean, free, and simple to use. While you can invite people to a board, there was no support for the group or vote parts of our test process. Consider this for personal use, classroom use, and group idea sharing, but look elsewhere for tools to support more advanced decision-making processes. Screenshot: This is the tutorial board; we didn't run through our test process with this one.

PowerNoodle Updated June 2017

www.powernoodle.com Recommended for the Enterprise

Powernoodle provides decision support architecture to enterprise companies. In a recent demo, we confirmed that you can indeed use Powernoodle to easily run the KJ technique described above. Powernoodle walks groups step-by-step through a tailored decision making or stakeholder engagement process. The interface for participants is drop-dead simple, and facilitators get detailed reports in multiple formats. Powernoodle is more mature and more powerful than our top recommendations, supporting a richer variety of decision making techniques. This platform is enterprise grade and enterprise priced, working beautifully both before and during meetings so teams can keep meeting time focused on discussion. Organizations operating at a higher level of decision making maturity, or in high stakes environments like finance and health care, should consider adopting a tool like Powernoodle to improve the quality of decisions across the enterprise. Screenshot of cards and card detail in Powernoodle

Quip quip.com

Quip provides elegant, mobile-friendly co-editing and collaboration. Of the co-editors on our list, Quip has the prettiest UI, the most understandable folder structure, and the slickest integration of task lists, spreadsheets and rich media. That said, it seems this was the only co-editor that didn't have obvious accessibility support. To use Quip for brainstorming and decision making in a meeting, follow the steps we outlined for Google Docs. Screenshot: Adding ideas to a document in Quip.

Retrium Updated April 2016

www.retrium.com Retrium is intended specifically for supporting retrospectives; meetings which happen to rely on the process described in our test. The product is pretty new, and it lacks both a grouping feature and the configurability we'd need if we were going to use it to plan our company retreat. No fault there - they don't claim to support anything beyond a growing set of pre-defined retrospective techniques. If you need a tool specifically for retrospectives only, keep an eye on Retrium. It's a promising start. Screenshot: Voting on ideas using Retrium's Like, Learned, Lacked retrospective template. April 2016 Update from Retrium founder David Horowitz Retrium has come a long way since you reviewed it on your site. We now have grouping functionality. We now have action plans. Something unique to Retrium is the flow from retrospective to action plan and back again. In other words, retrospectives lead to the creation of action items, but then in your next retrospective, you start with your existing action plan rather than from a blank slate. As such, Retrium action plans are living documents as opposed to one off exports. Retrium is fairly unique in that it helps you facilitate your retrospectives. All Retrium retrospectives start with private brainstorming, move on to grouping and affinity theming, continue with dot voting, and end with prioritized discussion and the creation of an action plan. Unlike online whiteboards, Retrium isn't "freeform space". After all, retrospectives aren't free-for-alls either. Good ones have a flow to them. Retrium helps keep your participants engaged with that flow throughout the retrospective process.

Stormboard www.stormboard.com

Stormboard supports all the steps in our process. You can use it to add notes, combine them into groups (or “index cards”), and cast votes for your favorites. They even had an event planning template we could use as a starting place! Our free Stormboard account didn't allow us to test the reports or some of the settings, and we found some features a touch disorienting, but in general it all looked promising. This tool straddles the line between products like ConceptBoard and Miro, and the more process-oriented products like Lino.it and GroupMap. While not one of our top recommendations, Stormboard should work nicely in meetings for any team willing to spend time getting used to the interface.

Stormz Updated June 2017

stormz.me Update: Lucid Meetings integrates with Stormz!

Now you can add and launch Stormz workshops right from your Lucid meetings to support workshops like the Strategic Planning sessions. Learn more! Highly Recommended

Stormz provides everything you need to prepare, ideate, share, vote, evaluate, wrap-up, and report on a decision making session. There's a limited free version useful for learning the system and the pre-built templates covering many common decision-making processes. The templates come with great instructions, and they're easy to tweak to match the specifics of your meeting. Stormz offers more import, export and integration options than most others, and a way to deploy the system on a local network, which is great for those times when you can't ensure a reliable or secure Internet connection. Stormz met all our evaluation criteria but one; they don't have any meaningful accessibility support. That said, only a few of the products on this list do. If that's not a big issue for your group, I recommend trying out both Stormz and Groupmap to see which you prefer. This screenshot from their website shows just one step in the decision making process. Screenshot: Stormz makes it obvious how to add new ideas during this step of the process Response from Stormz founder Alexandre Eisenchteter Beyond the core features, I would like to highlight 5 things that make Stormz stand out from its competitors. Read more ... Guided Collaboration: each template acts as an integrated collaboration guide for the participants, including detailed step-by-step instructions; you can have text, images, and videos in the instructions of each step. This is especially helpful when running multi-day sessions, where participants can work on the Stormz asynchronously. Process Flexibility: contrary to most of the process-based tools on the market, Stormz does not enforce one specific kind of process. This enables you to design from the simplest to the most sophisticated sessions. So if I want to converge before diverging (and there are some use cases to that) or if I want to have 99 steps of divergence/convergence, I can do it. This is also why you can do brainstorming, design thinking, retrospective or decision making with the same tool. Idea Development: most of the other tools focus on generating and selecting ideas. The “section” feature in Stormz is a unique feature that enables to go beyond the initial idea and improve it using any kind of framework. For example, the simplest one would be Pros & Cons but you can use many others. That is also called "Greenhousing" ideas. Visualizations: the “post-it note on a canvas” paradigm is cool, but Stormz has many other views that can be used to step back and analyze the data: the bar chart (vote), the bubble chart (evaluation) and the insight cloud. Multi-language: Stormz is currently available in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. New languages can be added easily. Stormz Box: a local server and wifi for in-person workshops when you need reliability (with large groups) or confidentiality (no cloud).