

A digital app should have a practically unlimited canvas size so you can make a mind map as big as you want. One of the main downsides to using paper is, well, the paper. The app should just fade into the background-the same way your web browser does. After a short learning period to get up to speed, you shouldn't have to stop and think to create a node, or dig through menus to connect two ideas. No app is ever going to be quite as simple, but they should come as close as possible. Mind mapping with a pen and paper is ridiculously easy. For an app to make this list, we dug past the marketing and made sure it was designed from the ground up for brainstorming, not drawing. These kinds of apps generally lack features that make mind mapping easy, like automatically linking nodes, brainstorming modes that let you get a lot of concepts down quickly, and search. While it's true you can make a mind map in them, you could theoretically also use PowerPoint, Photoshop, or MS Paint. A lot of drawing, diagramming, and charting apps are marketed as mind mapping apps-but they aren't. While every one of the mind mapping tools on this list has its own unique benefits, they all meet at least the following criteria: Yes, it has some downsides, but for a mind mapping app to really be better, it has to bring quite a lot to the table. Mind mapping with a sheet of paper and a pen is an incredibly intuitive and natural way to work.
#FREEMIND FREE MIND MAPPING SOFTWARE SAFE FULL#
For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. What makes for great mind mapping software?Īll of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. SimpleMind for not having to subscribe to anything

Stormboard for in-person mind mapping sessionsĪyoa for a modern approach to mind mapping Scapple for fluid, non-traditional mind mapping MindMeister for collaborating on a mind map with a team One of them is sure to be the right way to map your mind. We reviewed close to 40 different mind mapping tools, and after thoroughly testing them, here are the nine best. That's why, if you do a lot of mind mapping, you should consider going digital and using an app. You're limited by the size of the sheet you start with, there's no easy way to digitize it and make it searchable, you can't undo any mistakes or easily make edits, and if you lose your mind map, you don't have a backup. Of course, mind mapping on a piece of paper has its downsides. From those nodes, you draw yet more lines branching deeper into the different concepts, and you keep going, branching out more and diving deeper, until you're out of ideas-and the relationships between things appear. Then you draw lines branching out into new "nodes," each with its own related idea or theme. File mode enables you to browse the files on your computer, seeing the folder structure as mind map.To make a mind map, you start by writing a central idea or theme in the middle of a blank sheet of paper.Low costs of risk of switching away to another mind mapping tool, because FreeMind stores maps in XML format.Possibility to decorate nodes with built-in icons, colors and different fonts.Possibility to use and edit long multiline nodes even with newlines.Find facility, where found items are shown one by one as you do "find next", and the map is unfolded only for the current item.Smart copying and pasting from, including plain text and RTF (MS Wordpad, MS Word, MS Outlook messages).Smart copying and pasting into, including pasting of links from HTML or structuring the pasted content on the basis of the number of leading spaces in a line pasting of lists of selected files.Smart Drag'n Drop, including the possibility to copy nodes or copy style of nodes dragging and dropping of multiple selected nodes dropping of texts or list of files from outside.Fast one-click navigation, including folding / unfolding on one click and following links on one click at the same time.From very early versions, Freemind supports folding which is its essential property.Fully functional following of HTML links stored in the nodes, be it www links or links to local files.
