Compliance teams shouldn’t need a US-hosted SaaS whiteboard for their quarterly retro. That’s the observation that ended up as Kontrol Board — a shared workshop canvas that lives inside the same GDPR-audited, EU-hosted perimeter as the rest of Kontrol Sentinel, priced materially below Miro on team-and-above bundles, and designed for the kind of governance work our customers actually run.
Why we built this
The market for collaborative whiteboards is dominated by three products: Miro, MURAL and Microsoft Whiteboard. All three are excellent at what they do. None of them are optimised for the workshops our customers run.
A typical Kontrol Sentinel customer is a compliance team of five to twenty people running a monthly risk retro with a mix of internal staff, external contractors, regulators and NGO partners. Half the attendees don’t have (and shouldn’t need) an account on a US-hosted SaaS product they’ve never heard of. The other half already work inside Kontrol Sentinel — they have entities, alerts, events and audit trails living in an EU-hosted platform, and the last thing they want is to pipe their workshop notes out through a separate DPA, a separate procurement review, and a separate incident-response process.
Miro is per-editor, and their per-editor licensing gets fuzzy the moment workshop attendees start editing. Microsoft Whiteboard is optimised for Teams-native audiences and assumes everyone has an M365 seat. MURAL has the same per-editor problem as Miro and prices around 25 % higher on their equivalent enterprise tier.
What Kontrol Board is
Kontrol Board is an infinite shared canvas. Organisers create a board, invite participants with a 6-character code, and everyone edits the same tldraw canvas in real time — with cursor presence and name tags so you can tell at a glance who’s doing what.
The wedge is three things:
- Per-organiser pricing. A facilitator running a workshop for thirty attendees pays for a single Solo seat, not thirty editor licences. Solo matches Miro Starter’s headline price with unlimited attendees on top; Team and Business come in materially cheaper than the equivalent Miro bundles, and dramatically cheaper for teams larger than three organisers.
- Anonymous attendee join. Participants type their first name, hit join, and they’re on the board. No email verification, no account creation, no personal data exchanged. Their identity is anchored to a per-browser localStorage token — the same primitive we use in Kontrol Interact’s live-poll flow.
- Same data perimeter as the rest of the platform. Board snapshots, participant lists and cursor state sit in the same EU-hosted Neon Postgres cluster that powers your entities, alerts and event registrations. Same encryption, same audit trail, same GDPR posture. No new vendor to onboard through procurement.
What’s in the box
Phase 1 (which ships today) covers everything you’d expect from a workshop tool:
- The tldraw canvas — sticky notes, arrows, text, shapes, freehand drawing. Familiar to anyone who’s used Miro or MURAL.
- Five ready-made workshop templates — Sprint retro (Start / Stop / Continue), SWOT, priority matrix (impact × effort), free brainstorm, and empathy map. One click on board creation and the canvas scaffolds itself.
- Live cursor presence with name tags — every participant’s cursor pulses on the canvas in their assigned colour with their name floating above.
- Custom branding per board — set an accent colour and a logo (Solo tier and above).
- Export as PNG (2× retina), SVG (vector, print-safe) or JSON (raw canvas snapshot for archival or migration).
- Events-bridge — link a board to a Kontrol Event and every registered attendee gets an email the moment you open it.
How the real-time collaboration works
Cursor positions, presence and canvas state sync via short-polling — the browser fetches state roughly once a second and pushes any local edits back. It’s not the 60 fps WebSocket setup Miro uses, but it turns out that for governance workshops it doesn’t need to be. Attendees add sticky notes at human speed, not at design-team speed, and the network latency of a real conversation dwarfs the poll cadence.
The upside of short-polling is that it works cleanly through corporate proxies that block persistent WebSocket connections — which is most of them. If a customer’s IT team has locked down the workshop hosts to just HTTPS traffic, Kontrol Board still runs. Miro and MURAL often don’t.
A CRDT-backed 60 fps mode is on the roadmap for design teams that specifically need it. But we’re holding off on shipping it until a customer asks — no point in the added infrastructure if the poll model does the job.
Pricing
Four paid tiers plus a free tier that actually works:
- Free — 3 boards, 15 attendees, JSON export, tldraw watermark visible.
- Solo, €9 / mo — 1 organiser, unlimited boards, 50 attendees, 30-day history, custom branding, PNG / SVG export, no watermark.
- Team, €79 / mo — 5 organisers, 200 attendees, unlimited history, priority support, events-bridge.
- Business, €319 / mo — 20 organisers, 500 attendees, SSO, full audit log.
- Enterprise, from €999 / mo — unlimited organisers, SAML / OIDC, IP allowlisting, EU data-residency guarantees, SLA.
Annual billing is discounted 10 %. Team and Business tiers land materially below the equivalent-size Miro bundle at Miro’s published USD prices; Solo matches Miro Starter’s headline price but includes unlimited attendees on top — if Miro rebases, we’ll re-evaluate.
What’s next
Element-level locking (so the organiser can pin the template scaffolding), CRDT-backed 60 fps mode, an AI facilitator that summarises the board into clustered themes and an action list, and per-sticky sentiment scoring for retros — all on the Phase 2 roadmap. Customer signal decides the order.
Create your first board or see the full pricing table. Free tier, no card, three boards to start.