The importance of using the right tool for the job

We’ve barely had a chance to emotionally recover from the Airtable buyout, and it’s happening again: Miro is also being bought out by Bending Spoons. 

It sounds like Miro may not have been on the most solid footing, but the fact remains: a lot of people make tech tools because they want to get bought out for millions or billions of dollars. If we want to avoid this, the folks in charge need to care enough about a project to hold onto it, or at least find a benevolent leader to pass it on to when they’re ready to tap out. 

If they don’t want to shepherd a tool over the long-term--or even if they simply make a couple of bad business decisions--these slow-death-by-buyout situations are bound to continue.

For us regular-degular users, we can take this as an opportunity to re-evaluate our tech stack, and consider whether the tool we're using is the right one for the job.

Wait, but what’s the alternative to Airtable?

When we last left off, I’d started digging into Baserow--it’s an open source (!) applications and data management tool, and their Free plan does include unlimited rows and storage.

Then, I went offline for a week in Montreal, and came back to Devin Lee’s awesome deep-dive into Airtable alternatives. Devin covers not only which tools she looked at, but how she approached evaluating and testing, so I heartily recommend taking a look and learning about her conclusions and her process.

The process really matters here, because, as is so often the case in marketing, the right answer for someone else may not be the right one for you! Devin’s use cases as a systems expert may not be the same as yours, and you may not have the same dealbreakers.

For my part, I mainly use Airtable for data management with some automations, and I’m an open-source booster. So, Baserow is still in consideration for me for a few reasons:

• You can choose to run your database through their site, or you also have the option of self-hosting. The freedom to self-host is huge in an economy where shady tech conglomerates are gobbling up promising young tech tools at an alarming rate.
• Baserow also made it easy to start shifting my Airtable bases over. You simply grab the sharing URL for your base from Airtable, copy/paste it into Baserow, and Baserow pulls in all of the data.
• Added bonus: Baserow can also be integrated into Zapier workflows, so it’ll be a cinch to connect my existing Zapier automations to Baserow.

Was Miro the perfect tool for the job? Maybe not.

Now that Miro is on life support, you’ll want to start thinking about where your boards need to go next. As an empty canvas, it seems to have a lot of potential for visually documenting concepts and processes. That can be terrific for certain use cases! For me, however, there are some good reasons why Miro didn’t quite stick for me. 

When I was first invited to use a board on Miro, the idea of collaborative, visual planning sounded awesome. In practice, however, it didn’t live up to my expectations. I sat in on group calls with participants dropping in blocks wherever they wanted. It felt like pure chaos, and visually, it looked as chaotic as it felt. 

The tool was almost TOO flexible, and my poor ADHD brain didn’t know what to focus on. I wanted to not only come up with ideas, but organize them! Eventually, I found a tool that gave me the visual planning that I'd hoped Miro could deliver, and the structure I craved.

My favored alternative to Miro: Puzzle

A lot of Miro’s vision is grounded in the appeal of a malleable, unstructured space for ideas. Puzzle even calls that out in their own comparison page: “For workshops, voting, and free-form brainstorming, keep Miro. Plenty of teams run both: sketch in Miro, then document the real operation in Puzzle.” Basically, if you’re using Miro for concrete planning, you’re using the wrong tool.

When diagramming actual, usable plans, everyone involved needs to agree on how things are organized. If we don’t, those ideas and plans won’t make sense to the people you work with, or the people you want to train up.

When I first learned about it, I grabbed an SOP doc I had and mapped it out in Puzzle. It had a lot of the flowchart-friendly, drag-and-drop capabilities that I actually appreciated about Miro, but it also offered the visual constraints and structure that make for good, usable maps. Each block has the same structure and is easily understood.

As far as importing data from other platforms, Puzzle accepts .CSVs and now has an AI tool to help you (re)build maps. Their help documentation also offers guidance for integration with Zapier. And, because being in control of your own data matters: you can, in fact, export sections in your Puzzle maps to PDF.

Is Puzzle the right move for you? As I said above, only you can answer that question--you know what functions you need most, and you know which interfaces work best for your brain. I always recommend taking advantage of free plans and trials for this exact reason. 

If you want an open space to brainstorm, then something like Whimsical or FigJam would likely suit you better, as you prepare to move away from Miro. But, if you need to lay out processes, Puzzle is worth checking out.