Why modern lifecycle marketing teams choose Plot over Miro

We’ll go into the specific details later in this article, but the main difference comes down to who and what Plot and Miro are built for.

‍Miro is a shared virtual whiteboard for teams across all disciplines to share and collaborate on ideas. It houses a robust suite of tools and templates for meetings, brainstorms, strategy sessions, flowcharting, mind-mapping, and more.

Plot, on the other hand, is built specifically for CRM, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, and retention teams, as well as the creative teams and cross-functional stakeholders they collaborate with. While one of Plot’s central features is flow mapping, its capabilities go far beyond a virtual whiteboard. 

‍Teams use Plot across the entire lifecycle of lifecycle (see what we did there?) to accelerate strategy, alignment, content production, stakeholder management, QA, campaign deployment, measurement, and iteration. If you’re looking for a tool that will help you and your team launch more high-impact customer journeys faster, and at scale, you need Plot.

Launching a new marketing automation typically begins with a mapping exercise—sketching out the flow’s components and logic as a decision tree or flowchart. Miro, with its extensive library of mind-mapping and diagramming capabilities, seems like an obvious choice. But having too many options actually has the opposite effect and creates unnecessary complexity.

The Plot canvas contains a simple set of 5 predefined node components—delay, split, touchpoint, action, and linked flow—that are rearrangeable, duplicable, and snap seamlessly into place (no more criss-crossing spaghetti lines!).
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Split nodes automatically create branches that can be reordered, renamed, and joined. Touchpoint nodes come with templates for email, SMS, push notifications, code previews, and more. Linked flow nodes let you connect flows to one another and build relational visualizations of how users progress through your journeys.

Because Plot is built specifically for your work, you’re able to map at the speed of thought without being bogged down by formatting rectangles and drawing arrows.

While Miro’s infinite canvas allows for endless ideation, it still remains a flat, two-dimensional view. Teams have expressed to us that their lifecycle boards quickly become cluttered and chaotic, especially as they bring in screenshots of emails and messages, snippets of subject lines and other copy, and tables and charts documenting performance. Stakeholders reviewing or approving in these Miro boards are often confused and lack navigational context. The lifecycle leads, themselves, are overwhelmed by the disorganization and sheer amount of manual upkeep.

Unlike Miro, Plot introduces a third dimension. Behind every single node in a Plot flow sits its own unique editor. Our split view—canvas on the left, editor on the right—gives you (and anyone else) simultaneous visibility into both the high-level flow and the details within each node.

This does two important things:

‍Plot gives you a simplified and organized canvas to work from: By eliminating clutter, we clear your mind for thought and creativity. You can toggle to full-canvas view to focus on mapping, switch to full-editor view to hone in and wordsmith one specific subject line, or opt for split view to work strategy and details side-by-side.

Plot drives context and alignment: Because Plot accompanies you and your team through each stage of flow creation, design, and deployment, its purpose evolves as a project progresses:

In the earliest stage, share a flow as a visual brief to get your copy, design, and implementation teams on the same page. As the project moves into production, each teammate can contribute their part with continued understanding of the whole, helping you keep the project moving on track and in the right direction. As you near completion and deployment, Plot seamlessly transitions into a tool for stakeholder review, feedback, and QA.

Finally, after a journey is launched, Plot becomes an automated repository of historical and active flows, providing company-wide visibility into your customer communications. Easily share one or all of your Plot flows to empower customer service reps or coordinate with your product team.

At every single point in this process, everyone has the full context of the customer journey—what a user’s last received message was, what their next touchpoint will be, and how they get there.

Miro doesn’t have prototyping capabilities—what you put on a board is what you get, what you share, and what you present.

For lifecycle teams, this isn’t enough to effectively communicate your strategy and work. That’s why we built Plot’s Play view. Each flow in Plot can be turned into a magical, interactive experience with one click of the Play button, with no code at all. You’ll get:
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Each Play view is shareable with anyone in your workspace, or you can generate a public share link for external guests. It’s an intuitive, clear, and stunning way to present your work and ensure it’s understood by every stakeholder.

‍But Play view isn’t limited to presenting high-fidelity, final work. In fact, we encourage prototyping early and often—at every stage of the creative process. Customer journeys are nonlinear, so thinking about and creating them shouldn’t be either. By putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and experiencing your flow as they would, you’re able to see your work from a new angle. Teams on Plot catch inconsistencies and flawed flow logic far earlier, avoid countless hours of repeat work later on, and ultimately produce more optimized and engaging content.

If you’re looking for a collaborative whiteboarding tool, Miro is an excellent choice. But if you’re seeking a modern platform to help you bring organization, alignment, and speed to your lifecycle planning and production process, Plot is the platform you need.