Among its numerous uses, Explain Everything is also ideal for tutoring. Using this digital whiteboard, you can either record learning materials and any necessary topic explanations or present them live. Explain Everything can also be a platform where you meet 1-on-1 – thanks to its collaborations features. Explain Everything for online tutors.
- On Tuesday, December 1, Apple's App Store presented its Best of 2020 winners. Explain Everything Whiteboard was awarded in the App Trends Category for Leading the Classroom.
- As allegedly used at Apple (so why no support for M1 Macs?), Explain Everything is a powerful whiteboard solution designed for both offline and online use.
1. DrawPile
DrawPile is an open-source and free whiteboard app available on Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms. It has no mobile version available. At its heart, DrawPile is a sketching tool with collaboration features. Inviting is a different story. You will need to share your external IP address and password for that. DrawPile offers a nifty guide on how to host a collaborative session.It carries a unique ability to record your screen while you are collaborating with others on the whiteboard. That can help understand the process and usable for reference later. You can save it as a video or a series of images. The app is completely free to use.Download DrawPile2. Draw.Chat
One of the main features of Draw.Chat is the messaging feature where you can send text messages to other participants. You can also send audio and video messages, which are even cooler that the verbose text explanations. Recently, the developers of the app added a video conferencing feature.Draw.Chat comes with plenty of drawing tools that can be too much for Microsoft Whiteboard alternative seekers, but many will find these options useful. Best part is that there is no registration required and you get 10MB cloud storage where you can save whiteboards for up to 1 month before downloading them. There are plenty of keyboard shortcuts to make your life easy.Two interesting features include the ability to draw/highlight on maps and annotate PDF files. The app is completely free, and you can create multiple whiteboards at the same time.Download Draw.Chat Also on Guiding Tech Use A Web Whiteboard For Quick Online Sketching and Collaboration Read More3. Miro (Earlier RealtimeBoard)
Miro is a platform-agnostic professional whiteboard app that works on desktops and smartphones. You can begin with a blank whiteboard or choose a template based on your needs. Miro's UI very polished, and there are many elements that you can add to a whiteboard.You can drag and drop every element wherever you want. Also, you can zoom and pan around the board. Team members can chat with each other using text, audio, and video or just share screen inside Miro. You can also connect many third-party apps like Slack, Drive, Teams, Trello, and more. There is a Miro Marketplace for all sorts of plugins for extra functionality. Enterprise users will be happy to know that there are administrative controls for users with permissions to control the workflow.Miro has a free plan for up to 3 whiteboards and some basic stuff to try out. Meanwhile, the paid version at $8/month unlocks several features such as larger team support, collaboration, private whiteboards, and so on.Download Miro
4. Explain Everything
Explain Everything works a little like the whiteboard option in Zoom or Meet, where you will create a whiteboard and send an invite code to others. There are no desktop apps, but it works on any browser and has dedicated mobile apps. It was created to help teachers and others who give presentations to explain how things work. It also supports audio and video recording.You will create a whiteboard and then draw, add shapes, and other elements, all while explaining how things work. You can share the finished video with anyone. That doesn't mean you can't invite people in real-time and collaborate with them on a single whiteboard. You can do that too, but those who couldn't attend the whiteboard sharing session can watch the video instead. The video can be created using a mix of media file types like PDF files, audio or video messages, and of course, all the elements that you will use on the whiteboard itself.Apart from the video format, you can also save the whiteboard in PDF or some popular image formats. Like Miro, this Microsoft Whiteboard alternative integrates with many cloud storage apps. It is free for up to 3 projects, and pricing begins at $7 per month.Download Explain Everything Also on Guiding Tech #productivity Click here to see our productivity articles page
5. OneNote
Some Reddit users suggest using OneNote as a Microsoft Whiteboard alternative. OneNote is a popular note-taking app, also from the house of Microsoft. You can take notes in a variety of formats like text, audio, and video, share and collaborate on a single note, and there is a handy toolbar with drawing tools.While not a traditional whiteboard app, there are some benefits of using OneNote. You can create detailed notes, lists, draw, record, share, collaborate, and later search that sea of notes to find what you are looking for easily using keywords or tags. We have covered OneNote is great detail on GT before. Do check out our take.Download OneNote
On-Boarding Whiteboard
Did you know that video conferencing apps like Zoom come with a whiteboard feature built-in? Unlike OneNote, which was built primarily for taking notes, Zoom was built for video conferencing and collaborating first. That's another way to use a whiteboard apart from what we have shared above.There are plenty of other Microsoft Whiteboard alternatives, and the one you use will depend on your particular requirements and use case. I suggest you try a couple of them, preferably the free version, and choose one that works best for you.Next up:Did I catch your attention with Zoom's whiteboarding feature? Click on the link below to learn how the whiteboard feature in Zoom works.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
Read Next
9 Best Microsoft Whiteboard Keyboard Shortcuts to Boost Productivity
Love using
The new normal involves increased use of collaboration and remote working tools such as Trello, Slack, Notion, WebEx, and Zoom. But what other tools can your teams use to collaborate remotely on complex ideas?
Perhaps these digital whiteboard apps can help.
While many of these solutions are aimed at educational professionals, they should be useful to any knowledge worker attempting to explain something and for group collaboration within teams.
The following all support iPads (most of them also support iPhones), some offer a native Mac client, and many also support additional platforms.
It is worth noting that Mac users with an M1 Mac (such as the fantastic Mac mini) should lobby app developers to request M1 Mac support. Where an iPad app is also available on the Mac App Store for Apple Silicon Macs, I've noted this. Expect Apple Pencil support in most of these, but do take a look at the developer's websites to verify you get the tools you need.
InVision
iPad, iPhone, available at Mac App Store as an iOS app.
InVision is a powerful and fully featured solution custom-built to support brainstorming and digital product design. It offers numerous tools in addition to standard digital whiteboarding, including the capacity to present and mirror files on any device and collaboration.
All users can add text and upload files (including Photoshop and Sketch files), add shapes, and more. There is a presentation mode in which one person can make their point. The tool integrates with industry standard solutions including Slack, Photoshop, Sketch and Teams. It's free for up to three users, otherwise $7.95/user/month. Enterprise plans are available.
Miro
Mac, iOS, Windows, Android, Web.
With a range powerful drawing tools, a plethora of templates, and rich integration with third-party apps via the Miro Maketplace, Miro is as useful for classic brainstorming at it should be for the creation of high-quality whiteboarding, brainstorming and presentations across an infinite canvas. You can invite collaborators using email or Slack, and chat in real time or asynchronously with collaborators from within the app (for a $10/month fee).
Miro boasts more than 10 million users and is used across some of the world's biggest companies. Prices range from free to $16/month per user.
IPEVO Annotator
iOS, available at Mac App Store.
IPEVO Annotator is a well-featured interactive whiteboarding tool. It includes drawing, pen, shape, and stamp tools, along with useful editing tools and the capacity to let two users work together at once. It comes into its own as a tool for document presentation and real-time mark up, though there's no test entry, which is a drag if using a mouse.
This solution is a really useful tool to develop ideas and work together on documentation. It's also free.
Explain Everything
iPad/iOS, Android, Chromebook, Web app
As allegedly used at Apple (so why no support for M1 Macs?), Explain Everything is a powerful whiteboard solution designed for both offline and online use. It provides tools to draw, present, and animate your ideas; lets you connect and collaborate with others on almost any device in real-time and asynchronously; and lets you record sessions as shareable videos.
The tool is free for up to three projects ; paid plans start at $6.99/month.
Whiteboard For Mac Os
Inko
iPad/iOS, Macs
A collaborative whiteboard that lets you work on projects with others via your Apple device, Inko is a lightweight, yet well-featured, app that's one of the best for brainstorming, creative projects, or to add an interactive element to an online meeting. For a fee, you can collaborate remotely ($3.99/month) or over the LAN ($1.99/month), and host up to eight participants in your encrypted collaboration sessions.
Drawings are sharp and drawing is fast, thanks to the use of Metal, and there is a virtual pointer tool to help point things out.
Whiteboard App Mac
GoodNotes
iPad, iOS, Mac.
More than a whiteboard, GoodNotes is a powerful note-taking solution that includes shareable notes and documents. It also offers handwriting recognition, which means notes written using your Apple Pencil become as searchable as anything else. You'll also find PDF and PowerPoint annotation tools, a nested folder-based file system, and a range of additional tools designed to make GoodNotes a powerful project workbook and compatibility solution.
ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard
Available for iPad and at Mac App Store.
Best Whiteboard App For Mac
ShowMe is a simple and free whiteboarding solution that lets you create, record, and share whiteboard tutorials. It's quite limited in what it can do in comparison to other apps in this collection, but does provide a simple, low-cost whiteboard to supplement a Zoom meeting or FaceTime chat. There's also a fairly costly (for what you get) collection of in-app purchases, including ShowMe Premium ($79.99), which lets you upload more content and share items across closed study groups.
Explain Everything Whiteboard Mac Download
Please let me know how you fare with these solutions, and if you think I've missed a particularly good offering that delivers both iPad and Mac support, drop me a line.
Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic's bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.