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Most roundups on this topic are written by people who've never sat in a brainstorm session that actually mattered. We make a brainstorming tool. We have strong views on what works and what doesn't. Here's the honest breakdown.
Most roundups on this topic are written by people who've never sat in a brainstorm session that actually mattered.
They list the same tools, quote the same pricing pages, and conclude that everything is great and you should try them all. That's not a guide. That's a list of hyperlinks with opinions rented from a press release.
This one's different. We make a brainstorming tool. We have strong views on what works and what doesn't. And we'll tell you exactly where our product fits, and where it doesn't, because that's the only way this is worth reading.
Here's the honest breakdown.
Before picking a tool, it helps to understand what you're actually choosing between. The market has sorted itself into three camps:
Visual collaboration platforms (Miro, Mural, FigJam): whiteboards that bolted AI onto an existing canvas product. Great for teams that need to see ideas spatially. Less useful for generating ideas that weren't already obvious.
General-purpose AI assistants (ChatGPT, Notion AI): conversation tools that can brainstorm if you know how to prompt them. Fast, flexible, and deeply generic unless you invest time in building good prompts.
Specialist ideation tools (BrainstormingApp.ai and others): tools built specifically for a type of thinking — lateral, provocation-based, structured — rather than trying to do everything.
Knowing which camp you need narrows the field fast.
Miro is the dominant whiteboard platform, and for good reason. Over 60 million users have made it the default choice for workshops, sprints, and visual collaboration. The AI features — clustering sticky notes, generating summaries, suggesting next steps — are genuinely useful once ideas are on the board.
The honest limitation: Miro's AI helps you organise and develop ideas. It's less useful at the start of a session when the board is empty and nobody knows where to begin. That's not a flaw, it's just not what the product was built for.
Pricing: Free tier (3 boards). Starter from $10/user/month. Business from $20/user/month (annual billing).
Best for: Teams that work visually and need a shared space for collaborative sessions.
Not ideal for: Solo ideation, or breaking through a session that's gone flat.
Mural has always positioned itself around facilitation rather than freeform collaboration. The templates are more structured, the workflow guides more opinionated, and the AI features are built for teams that run formal workshops rather than scrappy brainstorms.
If your brainstorming looks more like a structured design sprint than a whiteboard free-for-all, Mural fits better than Miro.
Pricing: Free tier (3 murals, unlimited members). Team+ from $9.99/user/month. Business from $17.99/user/month (annual).
Best for: Teams running structured, facilitated workshops with a defined process.
Not ideal for: Fast, unstructured ideation or solo work.
ChatGPT is the most widely used AI tool in marketing and creative teams right now, and for good reason: it's fast, flexible, and generates ideas at a pace no human can match.
The problem is what it generates. Ask ChatGPT for campaign ideas and you'll get ten competent, forgettable ones. The output is shaped by everything it was trained on, which means it trends toward the familiar. For generating a high volume of starting points to react against, it's excellent. For producing ideas that actually surprise you, less so.
The other issue is prompt dependency. How useful ChatGPT is in a brainstorm is almost entirely determined by how good your prompts are. Teams with strong prompt skills get strong output. Teams without them get lists that could have been written by a marketing intern.
Pricing: Free tier. ChatGPT Plus at $20/month.
Best for: Fast idea generation, solo prep, expanding on a direction you've already chosen.
Not ideal for: Teams who want structure, or anyone who wants provocation rather than suggestion.
Notion AI is effective precisely because it lives where your thinking already is. The brainstorming features are tightly integrated with your docs, wikis, and project spaces, which means it can pull context from your existing work in a way that a standalone chat tool can't.
For teams who run their strategy, briefs, and notes inside Notion, the AI is a natural extension. For everyone else, it's a reasonably capable but not particularly distinctive brainstorming assistant.
Pricing: Add-on from $10/month per workspace. Bundled in some Notion Plus plans.
Best for: Teams whose work already lives in Notion and want AI woven into their existing workflow.
Not ideal for: Teams who need structured ideation methodology, or anyone not already using Notion.
FigJam is Figma's whiteboard product, and it earns its place in any list of brainstorming tools for one reason: it's where designers already are. If your brainstorming sessions involve wireframes, references, or visual concepts, working inside FigJam keeps everything in one place instead of bouncing between tools.
The AI features handle the basics — clustering, summaries, voting. The real case for FigJam isn't the AI, it's the workflow integration with Figma and the fact that you're already in the tool where the design lives.
Pricing: Collab seats from $3/month. Full editing from $16/month (Professional). Organisation tier from $55/month.
Best for: Product and design teams who brainstorm and design in the same workflow.
Not ideal for: Pure marketing and advertising teams, or anyone who doesn't use Figma.
We built this, so we'll be straight about what it does and what it doesn't.
BrainstormingApp.ai is not a whiteboard. It doesn't do project management, sticky notes, or workflow integration. What it does: takes your brief and generates 30 to 40 lateral provocations: challenging questions, unexpected framings, and directional triggers across creative, PR, media, and experiential territories. In seconds.
The output isn't ideas. It's the questions that lead to ideas you wouldn't have reached in a normal session. That distinction matters. If you've read our piece on how to break creative block in advertising, you'll know the argument: teams don't fail because they can't think. They fail because they keep asking the same questions.
The pricing is also different from everything else on this list. One dollar, once, no subscription. We don't take investors. We don't run ads. The model only works if the tool is genuinely useful.
Pricing: $1, one-time payment.
Best for: Advertising strategists, creative directors, and agency teams who need to break through a brief rather than organise an existing set of ideas.
Not ideal for: Teams who need shared visual workspaces, project management, or async collaboration features.
Most serious teams end up using more than one of these. The workflow that works in 2026 tends to look something like this:
The mistake most teams make is skipping step one and starting at step two. You end up with a beautifully organised whiteboard full of mediocre ideas, which is the most expensive way to get nowhere.
Studies on human-AI collaboration consistently show that hybrid groups outperform both AI-only and human-only groups in brainstorming productivity, but only when the AI is used to generate genuine variety rather than reinforce what the team already thinks. The tool choice matters less than the intent behind it.
What is the best free AI brainstorming tool in 2026?
ChatGPT's free tier is the most capable free option for general brainstorming. Miro and Mural both offer free tiers for visual collaboration. BrainstormingApp.ai costs $1 as a one-time payment, which is functionally as close to free as a paid tool gets.
Is Miro better than Mural for brainstorming?
Miro is better for freeform, unstructured collaboration. Mural is better for facilitated, methodical workshops. The choice depends on whether your sessions are open-ended or process-driven.
Can ChatGPT replace a dedicated brainstorming tool?
For solo work, yes, if your prompts are strong. For team sessions, no. ChatGPT produces ideas, not structure, and it has no shared canvas. Teams that need to collaborate spatially, vote on concepts, or track the evolution of ideas across sessions need a dedicated platform alongside it.
What makes a brainstorming tool good for advertising specifically?
Advertising brainstorms need lateral thinking, not just ideation volume. The difference is that lateral thinking deliberately seeks angles that break expected patterns, while general idea generation tends to produce more of what already exists. For advertising teams, the most useful tools are ones that force a reframe of the brief rather than simply generate executional options from it.
Do AI brainstorming tools actually improve creative output?
Yes, with caveats. The research supports the conclusion that AI-assisted ideation produces more variety and volume than unassisted sessions. The caveat is that volume without quality filters produces noise. The teams who get the most from AI brainstorming tools are the ones using AI to generate starting directions and then applying human judgment to select and develop them, not treating AI output as finished thinking.
BrainstormingApp.ai is a lateral thinking tool for advertising strategists, creative directors, and agency teams. One dollar. No subscription. No investors. Try it here.
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