Stormboard

Jun 4, 2024

Stormboard Review 3.5 My Experience I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized , has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack. The Bottom Line The affordable whiteboard app Stormboard helps teams brainstorm, map out ideas, and otherwise work together. It's efficient, but lacks the latest features of newer competitors. Per User, Per Month, Starts at $10.00 Pros No support for charts or graphs Some fussy features With more people working remotely than ever before, teams should be looking to improve how they meet, work together, and make decisions in the remote context. Stormboard has long been one of the top collaboration apps for distributed teams. It was particularly popular among students in its early days. Along the lines of the whiteboard included in Microsoft Teams , Stormboard gives you an online space that lets you and your collaborators brainstorm, plan product roadmaps, and even hold team-building activities. While Stormboard isn't the most cutting-edge when it comes to features, it does have a wealth of tools for exporting content into reports, and its price is competitive. For the latest and greatest, however, try Editors' Choice winner Miro . How Much Does Stormboard Cost? Since we last reviewed Stormboard, the company has simplified the options for purchasing it. You now choose from three options: Personal (free), Business ($10 per person per month or $99.96 per person per year), or Enterprise (custom pricing). You Can Trust Our Reviews The free Personal plan gives you five digital workspaces that can have up to five collaborators (including yourself) each. You can integrate with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to connect to files, but you can only view—not interact with—those files on your boards. Personal plans come with basic export options, access to templates, and the ability to integrate with other supported apps . Personal users will also find that some features are locked to them. Business plans include everything in Person but let you have unlimited boards and unlimited people collaborating on them. You can also invite 10 guests, who can view boards but not collaboratively edit them. If you integrate with Google or Microsoft apps, you can fully edit files that you pull into your Stormboard boards. Other features that are locked to Personal plan users become unlocked at the Business level, too. Similar Products Enterprise accounts get everything in Business, plus support for single sign-on, new AI tools, advanced options for allowing guests to collaborate and edit boards, options to use Stormboard on Microsoft Surface Hub devices, and more. Stormboard's prices are competitive. Most other whiteboard apps charge about the same or more, around $10 per person per month, for a plan suitable for small businesses or teams. For example, Miro has a free account and charges the same as Stormboard for a Starter plan ($10 per person per month or $96 per person per year) but more for its version of a Business account ($20 per person per month or $192 per person per year). Mural , which similarly has a free account, charges more for Teams+ ($12 per person per month or $119.88 per person per year) and Business ($215.88 per person per year with no monthly option). Lucidspark has a different pricing scheme, but it generally works out to be about $9 per person per month. (Credit: Stormboard/PCMag) Stormboard Apps and Integrations Stormboard is available on the web as a Windows 10 app and as an Android and iOS app. While you can use Stormboard on a smartphone, whiteboards and other visual collaboration apps work best when you have a larger screen. While you might comfortably interact and view boards from a tablet, doing so from a phone won't give you a great experience. As mentioned, Enterprise account holders can access their content on Microsoft Surface Hubs, which could be useful for in-person collaboration. As to integration options, Stormboard can connect to Azure Dev Ops, Box , Dropbox , Jira, Rally, Slack , Zapier , Webex , and Zoom (in addition to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, which I mentioned previously). Enterprise customers can create additional custom integrations. Getting Started With Stormboard To create a Stormboard account—which you can do without divulging any financial details—you need to either enter an email address and password or authenticate through Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Single Sign-On. If you want to get a free 30-day trial of one of the paid plans, though, you will have to provide details of a credit or debit card. (Credit: Stormboard/PCMag) Every account includes access to templates. Stormboard organizes its templates according to these unusual headings: Categories, Use Cases, Teams, and Frameworks. There's overlap among those four sections, but that's good because it gives you multiple ways to find what you need. With every template, you have a choice of whether to include sample content. If you do not include sample content, you get the basic structure and page elements for just the template. If you're unsure how you're supposed to use the template, opt for the sample content. A newer option is to use Stormboard's new artificial intelligence, called StormAI, to create a template. It first asks you what kind of template you want to create, and then you fill in a description of the task at hand. As with all AI chatbots , it might take multiple attempts for you to describe the task with sufficient detail for the template generator to come up with something useful. (Credit: Stormboard/PCMag) Interface Once you set up an account and begin using Stormboard, you get a dashboard, which you see whenever you first log in. It's the place where you find all your boards as well as folders for organizing them (for paid accounts only). The app also suggests videos that show how to use all its features. The boards you create in Stormboard are called Storms. Within any Storm, you can also have a whiteboard, which is essentially a board within a board. The primary difference between a Storm and a whiteboard is which tools you get to create and build in them. Learning this fact and learning where to find the tools you want (toolbars are often unintuitively on the bottom of the screen) are two little hurdles to using Stormboard, and they're both quickly surmountable. Other minor inconveniences crop up, too, such as not being able to press Ctrl-Z to undo your last action. For example, if you accidentally add a new Section to a board by pressing a single plus button (a Section is essentially a series of cards in a row), the only way to get rid of it is to delete each card one by one. So it's one click to add a section but multiple clicks to get rid of it. To a Storm, you can add text, a whiteboard, images you upload from your device or a cloud storage service like Dropbox, a video (from YouTube), an index card, or a file you upload. To a whiteboard, you can also create shapes and lines, draw with a pen tool, highlight anything with a highlighter, and erase your marks with an eraser. (Credit: Stormboard/PCMag) Adequate Core Features One of Stormboard's signature features is that its sticky notes come with the option to add comments, votes, and tasks. Comments make sense, as they allow you and your collaborators to make notes on a specific idea or piece of information. Votes can help you run team activities, such as having everyone vote on top ideas or priorities. Tasks allow you and your collaborators to use Stormboard for managing follow-up actions that need doing after you finish working on a Storm. All three of these features are adequate, but none is especially compelling or unique. There are some interesting reporting features, which are connected to voting, but the voting itself could use a lot of improvement. From the interface, you can see the tally of votes as well as look up where you voted on sticky notes, but it's otherwise impossible to manage the voting process. For example, you can't select which sticky notes can receive votes because every sticky note can. Plus, all collaborators on the board can put multiple votes on any single note, whereas if you had proper voting or polling tools, you might set a rule about how many votes each person gets or whether they can use ranked voting. There's a lot of potential for building out a better system here, but it doesn't exist yet. Stormboard includes a timer, which most whiteboard apps offer. In both Stormboard's case and in other apps, it would be more accurate to call it a stopwatch because the timer doesn't record time you spend in the app. It merely helps teams limit the amount of time they spend working on something synchronously by counting down from a time you set and ringing an alarm when the time runs out. Flexible Report Creation As mentioned, one piece of the voting feature that is different and compelling is the ability to generate a report summary of votes. To see this summary, you have to go into the Reports section of a given board and select Votes. Stormboard then creates a professionally formatted report in Microsoft Word, which you can download, convert to a PDF, or print. The report has a cover page, table of contents, and then sections for Top Ideas, Favorite Ideas, and Vote Summary by User. If your primary use case for a whiteboard app is voting on ideas with a large group and then presenting the results, then these features in Stormboard will make your life easier. Stormboard lets you output quite a few types of reports in different formats, which is a point of differentiation between Stormboard and most other whiteboard apps. For example, with a paid account, you can generate a Microsoft Excel file with data you select, which can include statistics, Storm data (ideas and index cards), comments, chat content, connectors, and votes. Separately, you can output all tasks to an Excel file. Another report that both paid and free users can generate is a PNG file word cloud , a visual display of words sized according to how often they appear on your board. Stormboard also has tools for outputting data to PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Word, CSV, XML, among other formats. Fussy Features Stormboard works well enough once you get the hang of it, but many features seem like they should do more or be easier to use. Adding a connector (that is, a line) to show a relationship between objects is not intuitive. There's a pop-up tip to explain it, but otherwise, it's not something you can figure out on your own. To make a connector, you click on one object to reveal tiny triangles around it, and then you can click on one of the triangles and drag to the other object to make a line between the two. It seems like an ordinary line tool with smart guides to snap the ends into place would be more efficient. In testing, I embedded a YouTube video but didn't see a way to resize it from the tiny preview that shows up on the page. When I clicked the preview, the video played in a window that was approximately four times bigger but still rather small, and there was still no way to resize it. You can change the size and dimensions of shapes, like triangles and circles, that you draw on the whiteboard, but most other elements, like text boxes, can only be moved or made longer or shorter—not fully resized. Pasting text never worked in my testing—not when I copied it from another page and not when I copied it right from the very whiteboard where I was working. Copying and pasting an object to make a duplicate of it did work, though. I would have put up with these nuisances 20 years ago had I been using a free online tool, but in 2024, I expect a smoother user experience from an app that costs money. Simple Collaboration Stormboard's collaboration is straightforward and works in real time. You can invite people to join your board by email or send them a link. Paying customers also have the ability to add people to their team, which makes it easier to collaborate with them. If you send someone a link to a Storm and they aren't part of your team, they do have to create an account to access the board. That's true not only for collaborators but also for anyone you give view-only access to (for paid accounts only). In the context of remote work, visual collaboration boards let you share ideas and discuss information both synchronously and asynchronously. In other words, you can create a Storm and simultaneously edit it with your colleagues, or you might find that people join the board and share their ideas at different times when other people may not be logged into the board. Stormboard gives you an in-app chat tool, which is especially useful when collaborators synchronously access the board. The app doesn't, however, have any built-in video or audio calling, which Miro offers; Mural has audio calling only. All three (Miro, Mural, and Stormboard) let you integrate with mainstream video conferencing apps, like Zoom, which is probably what most businesses want nowadays, anyhow. Verdict: An Affordable, Reliable Whiteboard App Stormboard has been available much longer than many other visual collaboration apps, as the company was founded in 2009. As a result, it gained an early following of loyal users, including many educators and students, though it's grown since then. Its age shows, however. It's not as fluid and intuitive to use as other, newer whiteboard apps. If you're a Stormboard user and you're happy with what it offers, there's no pressing reason to switch. But if you're newly in the market for a whiteboard app or visual collaboration app, we think you'll be happier with Editors' Choice winner Miro . Stormboard