by Jeffrey Alan Schechter

After COVID-19 closed down professional TV and film writers' rooms there was a mad scramble to find an app that could keep the television industry's showrunners, writers, support staff, and producers working remotely.   While many rooms began to rely on Google Docs and Google Sheets for convenience, it became increasingly clear that these were not up to the challenge of the professional writers' room.  Additionally, in our increasingly security-aware creative environment in which studios and companies are facing literally dozens of attempted hacks a day, trusting some of the most prized IP in the world to solutions from Google and others started to be seen like a bad idea.  Over the past 6 months, two web-based applications have emerged as the go-to apps for writers' rooms: Miro and WritersRoom Pro.  

Miro is a fantastically well-designed app.  As a general purpose whiteboard app, Miro is slick, looks good, works smoothly, and does many things well.  WritersRoom Pro is also a fantastically well-designed app developed by a TV writer and showrunner that is slick, looks good, works smoothly and does one thing well by design: copies the look and feel of traditional corkboards and index cards used in professional writers' rooms.   And while Miro can approximate the same look of the boards in the writers' room, doing so is a process that is time-consuming, inefficient, complex, unintuitive, and extremely unsatisfying.   I'm not blaming Miro for not being better for writers at what it does anymore than I would blame a hammer for not being a screwdriver. 

I know I'm biased towards WritersRoom Pro, but that doesn't make my conclusion that WritersRoom Pro is a better solution untrue.  Looking at a direct comparison of the most important features to writers and writers' rooms makes it easy to pick a winner in each category.  Let's start with setting up a new project:

The difference in these set-ups goes beyond just the difference in time both took.  The Miro setup created 12 disconnected boards with none related in any way to another.  WritersRoom Pro knows that episodes relate to each other as well as the season board and character board, and allows for easy and logical navigation between episodes and boards.  Additionally, WritersRoom Pro has unlimited 'Scrap' boards; blank boards for ideas, locations, stories, etc; anything that doesn't have a home on one of the other boards.  (Note: Unlimited Scrap boards is a feature in the professional editions of WritersRoom Pro.  The Individual and Partner editions are limited to a single Scrap board.)

WINNER - WritersRoom Pro

WORKING WITH CARDS

While WritersRoom Pro is clearly better at setting up and managing your boards, the bulk of the work done after those boards are set up is working with cards.  Let's break down some key functions, one by one.

Because of it's pedigree as a whiteboarding tool, Miro has a wide selection of cards, sticky notes, and shapes which -- and I stress that I'm only judging Miro for writers' rooms --  is unwieldy and confusing and adds to Miro's steep learning curve.  I've been told that rooms that use Miro have only one or two people who use it on behalf of the team with the rest passively observing out of fear of messing it up.

WritersRoom Pro, on the other hand, is completely intuitive and creates cards automatically when and where you need them.  The design philosophy of WritersRoom Pro is to emulate as closely as possible the look and feel of corkboards and index cards.  Because of this, WritersRoom Pro has nine (9) types of cards you can create: regular text cards, text cards with a title, image cards, image cards with a title, cards with images on the left and text on the right (with our without a title), cards with images on the right and text on the left (with our without a title), and picture cards for cast headshots.  

Another critical pain-point when working with Miro is adding more cards to either a row or column.  Not only do you have to do this manually but also resize the board and reformat the rows and columns afterwards.   Not so in WritersRoom Pro as the boards are limitless in size and automatically expand and reformat themselves as you add however many cards you'd like.

Finally, learning how to work in Miro is complex and not intuitive.  WritersRoom Pro can learned in 30 minutes. In rooms that use WritersRoom Pro all writers can use it without fear of not knowing how to use it or of messing the boards up.

WINNER - WritersRoom Pro

DOCUMENT HANDLING & REPORTING

MIRO - None.  No seriously...none.  With Miro, the best you can do is create .pdf images of the boards themselves, and if you want high resolution images you need a higher subscription level however there is absolutely no ability to output the contents of the cards to any sort of word processing program or scriptwriting software.  In order to go from a Miro board to a Word or Final Draft document you have to copy the contents of each card individually and then paste that content into Word or Final Draft, one text block at a time.  I cannot imagine for a moment how this isn't a deal-breaker for every professional writers' room that wants to generate an outline or a script from the contents of their cards.

(MOST) EVERYTHING ELSE

Miro and WritersRoom Pro share some additional common features, including unlimited collaborators (depending on your Miro and WritersRoom Pro license), a built-in chat window, the ability to see where on your boards your collaborators are working in real-time, live updating of cards, a navigation window, non-destructive editing, and a change log (to mentions the biggies).  Miro also has a raft of other features and templates, however none that are pertinent to writers' rooms.

I'm sure there are diehard users of Miro who have created a workflow that satisfies them, but I still can't understand why when every move of a card requires digital gymnastics, your project is a wild-eyed collection of unrelated pieces, you can't output your work, and Miro has a learning curve slightly less steep than that of a single-engine plane.  

The obvious answer is...

...COST

At first glance, Miro appears much less expensive than WritersRoom Pro in a professional setting.   Twelve 'members' on a Miro Team account will cost $1,152 dollars a year.  For the average show of 10 episodes, Writer's Room Pro will cost more than that.  This perceived savings vanishes when you consider the following: on the average TV show (my last one, for example) money vanishes at the rate of $10,000 an hour during production.  As I hope I've show above with ease of setup, ease of editing, and most importantly, the ability to output documents with a few clicks instead of copy and pasting individual cards every time you want a document, if using WritersRoom Pro instead of Miro saves production just one hour in the course of a full season, WritersRoom Pro will have more than paid for the difference in price.

Also, and this is critically important, for most studios, broadcasters, and networks the Miro Team account will not satisfy content protection requirements.  In a world where studios are facing literally dozens of attempted hacks a day, content protection is a top priority. WritersRoom Pro has undergone the most stringent security reviews in the industry and has passed content protection protocols at every studio.  In order to get Miro's closest matching license in terms of security profile you need their Company license, the pricing of which is only available by custom quote but is somewhere in the range of $6000 per year.  At that price point, WritersRoom Pro is now very competitive and very often will be cheaper.  

WINNER - Tie

CONCLUSION

I have great appreciation for Miro and all the things it can do, much the same way that I have great appreciation for a McLaren GT.  It's an amazing car...until you want to take it off road.  Then it's useless because it wasn't designed to do all the heavy-lifting you need to do when off-roading.  Miro is similar; it isn't useless by any means, it's just not designed to do all of the heavy lifting that writers and showrunners need in the writers' room.

WritersRoom Pro is a tool with a specific function which it does better than any other available solution, Miro included.  From setting up projects, to working with cards, to manipulating the boards and especially outputting cards to documents, there is really no comparison.  WritersRoom Pro is the winner.

I'm convinced that, once users learn about WritersRoom Pro and compare it point to point against Miro, WritersRoom Pro will be preferred every time.

Check out our DEMO VIDEO to see WritersRoom Pro in action or call 833-477-7761 for more information.