Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm, make a plan, or turn ideas into the steps needed to make it real. Thankfully, there are great tools out there to help you build mind maps, organize them, and save them for later. Here's a look at five of the best, based on your nominations.
Earlier this week, we asked you which mind mapping tools you thought were the best. We tallied up your nominations, and now we're back to highlight the top five.
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Best Free Mind Map Tool For Mac
The Best 100% Free Mind Map Tool for PC & MAC A 100% free mind map tool that is easy-to-use yet powerful. The predefined mind map symbols, prepared templates and advanced formatting tools enable users to create mind map faster than ever. Keywords: tiny memory, cross-platform, Java-based, intuitive UI. Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux. Freemind is a Java-language free mind map software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems using tiny memory.The minimalist style shows their positioning on rich inner rather than fancy graphics.
The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these five great mind mapping tools took the top spot, head over to our Hive Five Followup post! There you can read about and discuss the winner!
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Mindjet (Windows/Mac/iOS)
Mindjet is more than just mind mapping software—it's a total suite of applications and tools designed to help you and the people you work with brainstorm, stay on top of projects, collaborate on tasks, and stay organized together. It's more like a complete project management and collaboration suite. It has an extremely powerful mindmapping and brainstorming tool however, designed from the ground up to help you organize your projects, assign different arms of your projects to different people, flesh out all of the individual to-dos and jobs required to make the whole project a success, and it works just as well if you're working with a hundred people, a dozen people, or just organizing your own to-dos. Plus, it integrates with web services and tools you already use, like Microsoft Office, Box,net, and more. Anyone familiar with the old tool MindManager will be happy to learn it's been rolled into Mindjet's individual apps. Most of Mindjet's users are companies willing to pay for it though: It's $15/mo per user for the individual plan, and $30/mo per user for the enterprise plan.
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XMind (Windows/Mac/Linux)
XMind has been around for a good long time, and it even made the roundup the last time we looked at mind mapping apps. It hasn't lost its power though; it's still extremely flexible, works great on any desktop OS, and makes it easy to organize your ideas and thoughts in a variety of different styles, diagrams, and designs. You can use simple mind maps if you choose, or 'fishbone' style flowcharts if you prefer. You can even add images and icons to differentiate parts of a project or specific ideas, add links and multimedia to each item, and more. If you're a project manager, you can even use XMind's built-in Gantt view to manage tasks in a way your colleagues may be familiar with. Best of all, XMind is completely free and open source. If you have some cash to spend, XMind Plus and XMind Pro offer some additional import/export and presentation features, along with some featured targeted at project managers and businesses who want to use XMind on the enterprise level. Plus will set you back $79 one-time, Pro is $99 one-time, and a subscription to Pro and all of its updates is $79/yr.
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Coggle (Webapp)
Coggle is a completely free, simple to use mind mapping tool that's easy to get started with. Sign in with a Google account of your choice and you're off and away. Double-click on any item to edit it, and click the plus signs on either side to add branches to your mind map. Click and hold to drag them around the canvas to design your mind map any way you like. Coggle will automatically assign different colors to your branches, but clicking on a branch will bring up a color wheel so you can personalize it yourself. When you've finished a map, you can download it as a PDF or PNG, share it with others who can just view it or, if you allow it, edit your mind map. You even get auto-saving and revision history, so if you want to see what your mind map looked like before someone you invited started working with it, you can. Best of all? Coggle is completely and totally free.
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Freemind (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Freemind is a free, GNU General Public Licensed mind mapping app built in Java, so it runs on just about anything you throw it at. It was the winner of our last poll, partially because of its flexibility, and because its features and performance are pretty consistent regardless of the operating system you use with it. It's a pretty powerful mind mapping tool too, offering complex diagrams and tons of branches, graphics and icons to differentiate notes and connect them, and the option to embed links and multimedia in your mind maps for quick reference. Freemind can export your map as HTML/XHTML, PDF, OpenDocument, SVG, or PNG. Compared to a lot of the newer tools it may look a little dated, but it's still powerful and useful, especially if it's function you're looking for, not form.
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MindNode (Mac/iOS)
MindNode is an elegant mind mapping and brainstorming app for OS X and iOS. The iOS version is designed to work well on touch devices, specifically the iPad, and makes it easy to drag branches around, add new nodes, connect nodes, share documents with others, and more. The Mac app is similar, and supports sharing your mind map with others and exporting as PDF and as a Freemind project. MindNode can automatically hide branches that have nothing to do with the items you're working on, embed images and screenshots onto nodes, create links on nodes, and even automatically organize your branches for you if they get messy. It can also support linked mind maps. The UI is relatively clean and hides a lot of its features in order to keep things clean, but that doesn't mean it's not powerful. Many of you who nominated it pointed out it's one of the first mind mapping apps you've seen that really does things right on a tablet. MindNode is $20 for the Mac app, and $10 for the iPhone/iPad app.
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Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all out vote to determine the community favorite.
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Honorable mentions this week go out to Scapple and MindMeister, both of which just missed the top five by one or two votes each. Those of you who nominated them praised them for their ease of use. We recently praised Scapple for bringing dead simple mind mapping to the Mac, and we've loved for MindMeister for years. It made the top five the last time we asked you, so it's still a great tool. Also, props go out to Pen and Paper (or whiteboards, if you prefer), which many of you said were your brainstorming tool of choice.
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Still, the nominations were so close this time, we're willing to bet you have a favorite that may have been left out! If so, let's hear what it is and why you love it in the discussions below. Include a screenshot or a photo of the app in use if you can, just so we can see what's so great about it!
Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.
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The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Title photo by Marco Antonio Torres.
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What Is Mind Mapping Software?
If your teams and key creative workers are getting bogged down by an increasing workload of rote tasks or maybe simply swamped by too much information in this new world of interconnected big data, then mind mapping software might be able to help. These solutions focus on helping workers ideate, innovate, and even eventually execute.
This review roundup focuses on leading mind mapping software solutions in overlapping subcategories. None of the products in this category are name brands but most of them have impressive customer lists. At the low end, applications cost just a few dollars per user, and those costs extend to several hundred dollars for enterprise-worthy versions.
Two products, Bloomfire and Front & Main Honey, emphasize social aspects of traditional knowledge management approaches. Both products have a similar user experience (UX) to those of Facebook and Reddit. You could think of these as social intranets in other words. Their general use involves posting a series of online surveys, questions, or suggestions for colleagues' consideration. Colleagues, in turn, post answers and comments. Anyone can search for past discussion topics, and there's typically a way to 'like' and share the most useful threads.
For example, a product engineer could post an early draft of your company's latest widget to get department-wide feedback. A saleswoman could answer negotiation questions posed by junior staff or the entire team could have a discussion about their upcoming holiday party. Traditionally, such activities would happen by email or, at best, by using an intranet message board (if not physical memos). Modern software makes these collaboration tasks easier.
Bloomfire has some integration with Salesforce Chatter. But we think the general opportunity for Bloomfire, Front & Main Honey, or similar products is limited to the extent that tech giants such as Facebook fail to make headway in selling private installations to businesses.
Three other products—Mindjet MindManager 2016 for Windows, Expert Software Applications Mindomo, and XMind—are designed with mind mapping as their main function. Such apps are a mixture of flow charting and project management tools. Among these three, XMind stands out for being based on an open-source platform. Take the same scenarios as stated earlier. Rather than just discussing company ideas in a social environment (perhaps with kludged diagrams), the mind mapping tools let colleagues consider every detail of a plan in a very formal way. They aren't nearly as fun but their structure is more appropriate for conservative corporations—which is to say, most offices, even if the social products are sexier.
Expert Software Applications Mindomo is the Editors' Choice winner in this review roundup. It has all of the same basic features as XMind and Mindjet MindManager 2016 for Windows, but also includes a basic level of social networking. It's pricey but not to an extent that would intimidate many organizations. Plus, it can ease a business into a more social decision-making mindset.
The Mind Mapping Concept
Image credit: tonybuzan.com
Mind mapping is simply a visual way to convey your thoughts and ideas. As a concept, mind mapping is widely attributed to inventor Tony Buzan who believes they are the best way to take notes. Buzan says a mind map 'harnesses the full range of cortical skills—word, image, number, logic, rhythm, color and spatial awareness—in a single, uniquely powerful manner.' In the book, The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential,' co-author Buzan describes mind maps as 'being constructed in a colorful, tree-like fashion.'
And in his article on mind maps, PCMag's Rob Marvin explains mind mapping as a 'visual means of organizing information, typically through a web-like diagram,' and describes ways in which project managers can use mind maps to visualize every moving part of their project workflow.
Ideas for Improvement
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We have a few suggestions for how mind mapping products could be more even more useful; these suggestions center around adding artificial intelligence (AI) and wiki integration and beefing up security. In the social-first services, we think an interesting addition would be AI software that scans users' browsing, customer relationship management (CRM), email, and database activities to automatically suggest when useful information should be captured.
Because these products are all intended to help manage your team members' big ideas, we think they should include tools for integrating with a wiki. Other than the Bloomfire/Salesforce.com partnership, these products don't yet work deeply with CRM software and human resources (HR) products.
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And, other than normal cloud service log-ins and a way to password-protect various tidbits here and there, none of the apps focus heavily on security. Some businesses may be leery of buying a product specifically to hold their employees' best ideas unless there are extremely strong security pitches. There should be an option for marking content as only accessible when you touch your device's fingerprint sensor. That way, even if you lose your phone when it's in an unlocked mode, the person who finds it still cannot access your company's best ideas.
Still, any of the mind mapping software solutions in this review roundup will be helpful to your business as they currently stand. Giving employees a structured way to record and share their ideas with each other solves the problem of good ideas being lost to cliques and unproductive meetings or at the proverbial water cooler.
Products such as Front & Main Honey have an extremely low barrier to entry, XMind has impressive developer tools (and can be improved by letting your programmers run wild with its open-source code base), and Expert Software Applications Mindomo represents the beginning of what could be, as the subcategories of social intranets and mind mapping software discover each other. Bloomfire is a powerful cloud app, and Mindjet MindManager 2016 for Windows has strong Microsoft Office integration. The field decidedly lacks an app that does all of these things very well, but it will be interesting to check back in 12 months to see where things stand.
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Featured Mind Mapping Software Reviews:
Expert Software Applications Mindomo Review
MSRP: $36.00Pros: Social and mapping features combined, not just one or the other.
Cons: Six-month licensing.
Bottom Line: Mind mapping software solution Expert Software Applications Mindomo is the Editors' Choice winner for its Comments feature that strengthens its social prowess and mind-mapping power.
Read ReviewBloomfire Review
MSRP: $9.00Pros: Gamification incentives. Strong analytics.
Cons: Limited enterprise integration.
Bottom Line: Mind mapping software solution Bloomfire is a good choice for visual-centric teams that need performance analytics.
Read ReviewIdeaflip Review
MSRP: $16.00Pros: Appealing, easy-to-use user interface (UI). Easy to collaborate. Guests invited by paid members can access boards for free.
Cons: No analytics.
Bottom Line: Ideaflip is a great mind mapping tool for capturing ideas and building mind maps, though it lacks analytics tools that some teams may require.
Read ReviewCorso Innovation Management Review
MSRP: $3.00Pros: Integrates ideas with your company's roadmap. Can set up challenges and mind maps.
Cons: Some learning curve involved.
Bottom Line: Corso Innovation Management mind mapping software offers features to manage all of your business processes including idea generation, but it's not the easiest to use.
Read ReviewMindjet MindManager 2016 for Windows Review
MSRP: $349.00Pros: Microsoft Office integration.
Cons: Built-in spreadsheet and browser are intriguing, but probably not necessary for most users.
Bottom Line: Mind mapping software solution Mindjet MindManager 2016 for Windows is a solid idea management and mind mapping performer.
Read ReviewDatastation Innovation Cloud Review
MSRP: $28.39Pros: Uncluttered user interface (UI). Lots of reports. Phone support available. Most features are customizable.
Cons: Separate websites and separate targets for regular and enterprise plans is a bit confusing;
Bottom Line: Datastation Innovation Cloud simplifies the process of collecting ideas from employees, but if you're looking for mind-mapping software, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Read ReviewiMindQ Review
MSRP: $9.19Pros: PC- and Mac-compatible. Free online version.
Cons: Collaboration only available via Microsoft SharePoint. Dated user interface (UI).
Bottom Line: iMindQ is easy to use and includes a lot of great brainstorming tools, but its collaboration features are limited.
Read ReviewXMind Review
MSRP: $79.00Pros: Good features for developers. Evernote integration. Portable installation.
Cons: Not the speediest application.
Bottom Line: Idea management software solution XMind is a good idea mapping application if your IT team can tweak it as needed.
Read ReviewFront & Main Honey Review
MSRP: $4.00Pros: Very low cost. Easy to use and learn. Alternate email interface.
Cons: Limited feature set.
Bottom Line: Idea management software solution Front & Main Honey is a useful service for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and organizations that want a low barrier to entry.
Read ReviewIdearium Review
MSRP: $214.64Pros: Lots of plans. Helpful onboarding walkthrough.
Cons: No phone number. No response from email support. Pricey.
Bottom Line: Idearium is a decent product with a variety of plans from which to choose, but it's rather pricey, especially considering the company is unresponsive to contact attempts.
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