A mindmap is a freestyle diagram for loosely organized thoughts and ideas, frequently used in brainstorming, planning, and note-taking. Mindmapping can be a quick and easy way to unleash our creative potential, by untethering us from our usual habits of structured thinking.

It’s been five or six years since I last tried using mindmapping software; at the time, I was distinctly underwhelmed. I usually found myself spending more time battling the interface than actually accomplishing anything.¹ I eventually went back to the trusty old technology of pen-and-paper.

I recently decided to give mindmapping software another try, and couldn’t be happier with the results. I was pleased to find that the state of the art has significantly improved. These are the mindmapping tools I evaluated, any of which I’d feel good about recommending:

• Mindjet MindManager – $349 w/30 day free trial; available for Windows or Mac ($319 from Amazon). Easily the most powerful and easiest to use — see my comments below.
• XMind- Free, open-source; available for Windows, Mac, or Linux. XMind Pro with extra features is $49/yr. Not as slick as Mindjet, but fairly strong on features — and the price is right.
• MindMeister – Free, Web-based; no software download or install. Premium account with extra features available. Limited features and not the greatest interface, but it’s more than sufficient for quick-and-dirty tasks.

Mindjet MindManager was by far my favorite. It’s an absolute dream to use, with a slick and intuitive interface and lots of powerful options under the hood. I’m downright giddy with how much it’s helped me accomplish in just the last week. Unfortunately, it’s (relatively) expensive; I almost certainly wouldn’t have bothered evaluating it if a kind patron hadn’t offered me one of his company’s extra licenses.

There’s also FreeMind, a Java-based app, which is why I have a (perhaps unfair) bias against it. Java apps have tend to have a clunky, sluggish user interface, and a few minutes with FreeMind seemed to confirm this. Java’s write-once, run-anywhere client apps remain better in theory than in practice.

Finally, Personal Brain is a neat mindmap-like tool with a much larger ambition: to organize all of your digital information. The interface is slick, but not especially well-suited to basic brainstorming; it’s more of a long-term investment.

Have you tried any of these tools? Did I miss any? Let me know what you think!

1. The same was true of early editions of pre-Microsoft Visio, wherein even the most basic network diagrams could become an epic battle of wills between me and the software. (I usually lost.) [↩]