WHITEBOARDING
Mural is a US-incorporated company under US jurisdiction — the CLOUD Act applies regardless of where your data is stored, and Mural does not offer a self-hosted option today. Polybase gives you EU cloud, your own VPC, or air-gapped self-host.
Polybase Canvases live inside your workspace channels. Your retro canvas sits in the retro channel, next to the conversation it came from — and when the retro ends, outcomes become tracked tasks in one click. Canvases support live cursors, follow and spotlight modes, connectors, templates and version history, with the whole workspace deployable to EU cloud, your own VPC, or an air-gapped server.
Mural is the enterprise workshop whiteboard. Its facilitation toolkit — timers, private mode, anonymous voting, celebrations — and its deep template library for design sprints and retrospectives make it a favourite of facilitators and consultancies. But it is a standalone SaaS tool priced per member, with no self-hosted option today: after the workshop, outcomes are typically exported to Jira, discussion moves to Slack or Teams, and the mural goes quiet until the next session.
Review how Polybase and Mural approach the work your team needs to do.
Based on publicly available information about Mural as of August 2026. Products evolve — plans and features may have changed; please verify details with the vendor. Spotted something out of date? Let us know at [email protected].
A practical sequence for planning the change, moving the useful material and introducing the new workspace.
List the murals your team actually returns to — living retro boards, planning canvases, active client engagements. Most workspaces hold a few living boards and many finished workshops. Migrate the living ones; export and archive the rest.
Set up a Polybase channel for each team, project or client engagement that runs workshops. Every channel comes with canvases, chat, task management and documents — the workshop and its follow-up share one home.
Recreate your recurring formats — retrospectives, planning canvases, brainstorm boards — as Polybase Canvases with sticky notes, connectors and templates. draw.io diagrams import directly. We provide migration assistance during onboarding.
This is the structural difference: after a session, convert canvas items into tracked Kanban tasks with assignees and due dates in one click. No exporting to Jira, no retyping action items into another tool.
Hold your next retrospective on a canvas inside the retro channel: call in the same channel, notes in a linked doc, outcomes as tasks on the channel's Kanban. Once the loop closes in one place, retire the per-member Mural seats.
The additional workspace capabilities to consider when comparing Polybase with Mural.
A mural is a destination you visit; a Polybase canvas is part of the channel where the work happens. The canvas sits next to the conversation that produced it, and its outcomes become tracked tasks in one click.
Mural sessions are reached through shared links, apart from your team chat. Polybase Canvases open inside channels — discuss a canvas element in the same thread where your team already talks, before, during and after the session.
Mural workshops usually run alongside a separate Zoom or Teams meeting. In Polybase, you start the call in the same channel as the canvas and keep sketching together while the call floats in its own window.
Mural runs as SaaS under US jurisdiction, with no self-hosted option today. Polybase deploys to our EU-region cloud, your own VPC, or a fully air-gapped server — workshop content about strategy and clients stays under your control.
Mural is a standalone whiteboard priced per member on top of your chat, task and video tools. Polybase Canvas is a €5/user add-on to a workspace that already includes chat, tasks, calls and drive — one stack, one bill.
Common questions about switching from Mural to Polybase.
Miro is a standalone whiteboard. Polybase canvases live next to your chat, tasks and docs in the same workspace.
See the comparisonFigJam is Figma's whiteboard, US cloud only. Polybase puts canvases next to chat, tasks and docs — self-hostable.
See the comparisondraw.io makes free diagram files you park in Drive or Git. Polybase Canvases are live shared spaces inside your team's workspace.
See the comparison