Alternatives

Let’s be precise about what Miro can do, because it’s more than people think. Miro has private mode with anonymity and host-controlled reveal. It has configurable voting — anonymous, timed, with a max-votes-per-person setting. It has a countdown timer with built-in music. It has content locking including Protected Lock. It has attention management — “Bring everyone to me,” follow a collaborator, bring a specific individual. These are real facilitation tools, and they work.

What Miro doesn’t have: readiness checks. Guided meeting flow that connects write > reveal > group > vote > actions as an integrated sequence. Dynamic mid-session facilitation controls — toggling private writing on and off, changing participant tool visibility, force-revealing hidden stickies.

In Miro, the facilitator assembles the meeting manually. They start private mode, then end it. They create a voting session, then end that. Each tool is independent — the facilitator toggles them one at a time. In Ludi, Activity Frames let the facilitator hide and reveal sections of the board, herd participants to the current activity, run readiness checks, and manage the flow without verbal instruction. The facilitator runs the meeting; the tool gives them the controls to do it well.

Miro has over 5,000 templates via Miroverse — a community library that includes contributions from well-known agile practitioners and consultants. For Scrum Masters who actively rotate formats every sprint and want creative variety, Miroverse has more to browse.

Ludi has 125+ templates, expert-curated and designed specifically for agile meetings. One template per format, ready to run. No configuration, no sifting.

The quality variance in Miroverse is worth knowing about. Community-submitted templates range from polished to abandoned. Search “sailboat retro” in Miro and you get nine results — in Ludi there’s one, and it’s ready.

Ludi has built-in action tracking. Any sticky note becomes an action item with an assignee, due date, status tracking, and automated email reminders. Actions live in a dedicated dashboard where teams can batch-update, filter, and create new actions outside of boards. Actions import into the next board automatically — so the team reviews what they committed to last time before starting a new retro. Actions can also be pushed to Jira.

Miro has no native action tracking. You can write actions on sticky notes, use @mentions in comments for assignment, and tag items — but there’s no due date system, no reminders, no dashboard, and no carry-forward. Actions live on the board and, in most teams, they stay there.

This is the clearest single feature gap. If your retros regularly produce action items that nobody follows up on, this is the feature that changes that.

Both tools have two-way Jira sync. The functional overlap on the core planning workflow is high — pull backlog items, estimate collaboratively, sync back. Where they differ is price, context, and Jira depth.

Ludi’s advantage is that estimation happens inside the same guided meeting flow as the rest of the session — not a separate app you invoke alongside other canvas tools. And it costs a third of the price: Ludi’s Jira integration is on the Business plan at $6/member/month, while Miro’s requires Business at $20/member/month.

Miro’s advantage is deeper Jira integration. Miro additionally has a Dependencies app for mapping relationships between Jira cards, intelligent widgets that auto-update Jira fields, and the ability to embed Miro boards inside Jira issues. If Jira integration depth is your primary criterion and budget isn’t a concern, Miro’s is broader. If your planning sessions are straightforward estimate-and-commit workflows, Ludi covers the core workflow at a considerably lower price.

Both tools are whiteboards, but they’re designed for different people. Miro is designed for the person building the board — power users who create complex layouts, diagrams, and workflows. Ludi is designed for the ten people who show up to use it.

In Ludi, click-drag pans the board. Double-click creates a sticky, auto-coloured by the zone it’s in. No toolbar, no palette, no tool selection. Sticky notes are fixed-size. Each person gets a unique handwriting style, so you can scan the board and immediately see who wrote what. These are deliberate design choices for a 60-minute meeting where every minute spent figuring out the tool is a minute not spent on the work.

Miro has live emoji reactions (6 options), hand raising, a spinner wheel, an alignment scale with anonymous voting, flip cards, and polls. These are useful facilitation widgets, and the spinner wheel and alignment scale are genuinely clever additions.

Ludi was built around the idea that remote meetings need energy to work. Beyond the basics: there are interactive icebreaker games (not just prompt questions), a jukebox that plays music to the whole board, confetti cannon, virtual hats, a buzzer with sound effects, a spinner, a counter, and a timer gadget you can place anywhere on the canvas. Object trays let you pre-set items for participants to grab. Voter panels put customisable mood and number voting directly on the canvas.