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Kontrol Board

Real-time collaborative whiteboards for workshops and retros

Overview

Kontrol Board is a shared infinite canvas for workshops, retros, brainstorms and stakeholder-mapping sessions. 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. Unlike Miro or MURAL, pricing is per organiser rather than per editor, so a facilitator running a workshop for 30 attendees pays a single seat instead of thirty. Under the hood, Board rides the same infrastructure and compliance perimeter as the rest of Kontrol Sentinel — same EU hosting, same GDPR posture, same audit-trail primitives.

What it covers

  • Live participant presence with pulsing cursors and name tags
  • Canvas state — every sticky note, shape, connection and drawing saved server-side
  • Session activity — who joined, who edited, when
  • Board revision counter for optimistic-concurrency safety
  • Organiser tier limits — participant caps, retention windows
  • Events-bridge dispatches when a linked board opens

Live preview

Start

Weekly risk review with legal

Stop

Manual entity CSV imports

Continue

Monthly demo call — same slot

New idea

Auto-notify on scan failures

Key features

Anonymous join with a 6-character code

Attendees follow a link or scan the QR, type their first name, and start collaborating. No email verification, no app install, no account.

Live cursor presence with name tags

Every participant's cursor pulses on the canvas in their assigned brand-adjacent colour with their name floating above — you see the room think in real time.

Five ready-made workshop templates

Sprint retro (Start / Stop / Continue), SWOT, priority matrix (impact × effort), free brainstorm and empathy map — pre-scaffolded and ready in one click.

Full tldraw canvas toolkit

Sticky notes, arrows, text, shapes, freehand — a battle-tested modern whiteboard toolkit that anyone who's used Miro or MURAL will recognise instantly.

Custom branding per board

Set an accent colour and a logo on any board (Solo and above). Handy for client-facing workshops or when you want the board to feel like the customer's own environment.

Same data perimeter as the rest of Kontrol Sentinel

Same EU hosting, same GDPR posture, same audit trail. No separate vendor to onboard through procurement, no separate DPA to sign.

Kontrol Board vs. Miro vs. Microsoft Whiteboard vs. MURAL

A quick apples-to-apples on the numbers and the fit. Vendor prices from January 2026 published pricing pages; Kontrol Board rounded to clean numbers materially below the equivalent-size Miro bundle on team and business tiers.

FeatureKontrol BoardMiroMicrosoft WhiteboardMURAL
Pricing modelPer organiserPer editorIncluded in M365 seatPer editor
5 organisers + 100 attendees (annual)€853 / yr€893 / yr5 × M365 seats€1,116 / yr
20 organisers (annual)€3,445 / yr€3,571 / yr20 × M365 seats€4,464 / yr
Anonymous attendee joinYes — name onlyGuest editor limitsRequires Microsoft accountGuest editor limits
EU data residencyYes (Neon Postgres)Optional (Enterprise)Depends on M365 tenancyOptional (Enterprise)
GDPR postureNative, name-only sign-inEnterprise addendumInherited from M365 DPAEnterprise addendum
Workshop templatesRetro, SWOT, priority, brainstorm, empathyExtensive libraryBasic templatesEnterprise-focused library
Corporate proxy friendlyYes — no persistent connectionWebSocket blocked by some proxiesDepends on M365 configWebSocket blocked by some proxies
Export PNG / SVG / JSONAll three, from SoloPNG / PDF from FreeImage onlyPNG / PDF (paid tiers)
Included in a broader platformKontrol Sentinel (risk, events, analytics)StandaloneMicrosoft 365Standalone

On team-and-above bundles Kontrol Board comes in materially cheaper than both Miro and MURAL, with unlimited attendees included at every seat count. MURAL is priced around 25 % above Miro, so the headline gap between Kontrol Board and the enterprise-positioned options widens the larger the organisation.

Regulatory frameworks

GDPR

Participants join by first name only — no email, no account, no persistent tracking beyond a per-browser token. Organisers can hard-delete a board at any time; deleted boards are soft-deleted for 30 days then purged. Article 30 records-of-processing map onto board activity via the Kontrol Sentinel audit trail.

EU Data Residency

All board snapshots, participant lists and cursor state are stored in the same EU-hosted Neon Postgres cluster as the rest of Kontrol Sentinel — no cross-border data transfers, no US CLOUD Act exposure. Enterprise plans can pin to a specific region and add a written data-residency guarantee.

ISO 27001-aligned controls

Kontrol Sentinel's Information Security Management System covers Board the same way it covers Reputation and Events — access controls, encryption at rest, audit logging, and vendor risk management inherited from the platform rather than re-implemented per solution.

Accessibility — WCAG

The participant join flow and canvas chrome are keyboard-navigable and screen-reader-friendly. The canvas itself uses tldraw's accessibility primitives; drawing shapes requires a pointer but every other interaction has a keyboard equivalent.

Use cases

  • Quarterly risk retros with distributed compliance teams
  • Stakeholder mapping for a new supplier or partner onboarding
  • Governance workshops attached to a Kontrol Event programme entry
  • Post-mortem sessions after a compliance incident or breach
  • Third-party due-diligence workshops with external contractors
  • Strategy off-sites for board directors and audit committees
  • Training debriefs with attendee-driven takeaways captured on the canvas
  • SWOT and priority-matrix sessions for annual planning cycles

Roadmap — What's coming next

Kontrol Board Phase 1 (the poll-based multiplayer canvas, templates, branding, exports and events-bridge) is live. Phase 2 items land based on customer signal — tell us which ones matter to you and they move up the queue.

  • Available

    Poll-based real-time collaboration

    1-second cursor and snapshot sync — proven smooth enough for governance workshops and works through corporate proxies that block WebSockets.

  • Available

    Five starter templates

    Sprint retro, SWOT, priority matrix, free brainstorm, empathy map — one-click scaffold on board creation.

  • Available

    Custom branding + PNG / SVG / JSON export

    Solo tier and above. Retina-quality raster, vector print, and raw JSON snapshots for archival.

  • Up next

    Element-level locking

    Organiser locks the template scaffolding so a participant can't accidentally drag the SWOT axis off-screen. Ships with Phase 2.

  • Up next

    CRDT-backed 60 fps mode

    Switchable Yjs backend for design teams that need smooth cursor sync during long, edit-heavy sessions. Poll-based mode stays the default.

  • Planned

    AI facilitator

    Claude-powered summary of what the board just captured — turn a two-hour retro into three clustered themes and an action list without a facilitator writing it up manually. Follows the same AI-authoring pattern already in Kontrol Interact.

  • Planned

    Sentiment layer

    Per-sticky sentiment scoring on retro boards — surface the top three negative-sentiment items automatically so the facilitator knows what to double-click.

  • Planned

    Video huddle overlay

    Optional in-canvas voice/video for facilitators who don't want to run the workshop over a separate Zoom / Teams call. Enterprise tier.

Frequently asked questions

Do participants need an account to join a Kontrol Board?
No. Attendees follow a link or scan the QR code, type their first name, and they're on the board. There's no email verification, no account creation, no app to install. Their identity is anchored to a per-browser localStorage token, so returning to the same board keeps them recognisable to other collaborators without ever exchanging personal data.
How is Kontrol Board different from Miro, MURAL or Microsoft Whiteboard?
Three concrete differences. First, pricing is per organiser with hundreds of attendees included at every seat count — Miro and MURAL both charge per editor, which makes them expensive for one-facilitator-many-attendees workshops. We match Miro's headline solo price on the smallest plan (with the full attendee cap on top) and come in materially cheaper on the Team and Business bundles. Second, Kontrol Board lives inside the same GDPR-audited, EU-hosted perimeter as your other Kontrol Sentinel data (Reputation alerts, Events, Analytics, Consent) — you don't need to onboard a separate US-hosted SaaS vendor through procurement. Third, we ship with governance-focused templates (SWOT, priority matrix, empathy map, retros) rather than the design-team templates the others emphasise.
How is Kontrol Board different from Microsoft Whiteboard?
Microsoft Whiteboard is included in your M365 seat cost and is optimised for Teams meetings — it's a decent option if everyone in the workshop already has a Microsoft account and the workshop is entirely internal. Kontrol Board is optimised for the opposite: mixed-audience workshops where some participants are contractors, regulators, external stakeholders or NGOs who don't have (and shouldn't need) a Microsoft account. Anonymous name-only join, per-board audit trail, and EU data residency without a separate M365 tenancy are the wedge.
How does the real-time collaboration work under the hood?
Cursor positions, presence and canvas state sync via short-polling — the browser fetches the current state roughly once a second and pushes any local edits back. That's smooth enough for retros, brainstorms and stakeholder workshops, and light on the network so it works cleanly behind corporate proxies that block persistent WebSocket connections (which is many of them). A CRDT-backed 60 fps mode is on the roadmap for design teams that need it, but for governance-driven workshops the poll-based model has proven more than sufficient in real customer sessions.
Is Kontrol Board GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?
Yes. Boards are hosted on EU infrastructure (same Neon Postgres cluster as the rest of Kontrol Sentinel), participants join by first name only with no email or persistent tracking, and organisers can hard-delete a board at any time via the same soft-delete-then-purge workflow used for Interact sessions. Enterprise plans add data-residency guarantees and SAML SSO for organisers.
Can participants export or archive a board?
The organiser can export any board as PNG (2× retina raster), SVG (vector, print-safe) or JSON (raw canvas snapshot suitable for archival or migration). Free-tier boards can export JSON only; Solo and above unlock all three formats. Every export runs client-side against tldraw's SVG output — no separate export pipeline that could stale.
Can I connect a board to a Kontrol Event?
Yes. When a board is linked to a Kontrol Event, opening the board triggers an email blast to every registered attendee with a one-tap join link — the same events-bridge that ships with Kontrol Interact. Handy for hybrid workshops where you want the physical attendees to join the same board as remote participants without having to hunt down the URL.
What happens on the Free tier?
Everything works. You get three concurrent boards, up to 15 attendees per board, and JSON export. The tldraw watermark stays visible in the corner. Paid tiers hide the watermark, lift the participant cap, unlock long-term retention, and enable branding, PNG/SVG export and priority support.

Works well with

Kontrol Interact

Live audience engagement for events & sessions

Kontrol Events

Corporate event management for professional gatherings

Kontrol Analytics

Privacy-first web analytics — no cookies, no personal data

Who it's for

  • Risk and governance teams running quarterly retros or scenario workshops
  • Compliance officers facilitating stakeholder mapping across regulators, NGOs and internal teams
  • Programme managers running distributed retros with contributors on different timezones
  • Trainers and consultants debriefing sessions with attendee-driven takeaways
  • Facilitators of hybrid workshops mixing in-room and remote participants
  • Third-party due-diligence workshops where some participants are external contractors
  • Board directors and audit committees running annual strategy sessions

Ready to get started?

Talk to our team to see how Kontrol Board can be configured for your organisation.

Request a demoView pricing

Other solutions

Collaborative Whiteboard for Compliance, Governance & Risk Workshops | Kontrol Sentinel