Microsoft Threatens Mural's Business

Microsoft changes the buying question from which whiteboard is best to whether a separate whiteboard vendor is needed at all. Mural sells a premium workflow for facilitated workshops, retros, and planning sessions, but Microsoft can make basic brainstorming good enough inside Teams, with Whiteboard already turned on for many Microsoft 365 users and Copilot adding idea generation, grouping, and summaries inside the same place meetings already happen.

• The pressure is economic as much as product based. Mural was at about $125M ARR in 2024 after growth slowed sharply from 200% in 2021 to 8.7% in 2024, which means it has less room to outrun a bundled rival through pure expansion. Microsoft can improve Whiteboard without needing it to be a major standalone revenue line.
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• This is the same bundle dynamic that specialized tools often face. Adobe could not dislodge Figma with XD even with massive distribution, but Figma survived because designers treated it as indispensable. For Mural, the test is whether enterprise buyers see facilitated collaboration as mission critical enough to pay for on top of Microsoft 365.
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• Mural still has a concrete wedge. It is built around structured sessions, templates, governance, and repeatable workshop outcomes, while Microsoft mainly lowers the friction of opening a canvas during a Teams meeting. That makes Mural strongest where a bad meeting is expensive, such as strategy offsites, cross functional planning, and design thinking programs in large enterprises.
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The market is heading toward separation between included whiteboards and high consequence collaboration systems. As Copilot makes bundled canvases more capable, Mural will need to win by proving that its boards produce better decisions, faster alignment, and more repeatable meeting outcomes than the default tool already sitting inside Microsoft 365.