Thursday, October 2, 2008

Freemind vs Mindmanager

I've long been a fan of mindmapping for work and just general idea management. I am a big fan of Mindjet's Mindmanager software having found it very handy when preparing proposals, particularly heirarchical representations of website information architecture. However I have also found also found it to be very expensive. So after evaluating several different versions, installing and uninstalling them, I recently experimented with a piece of software called "Free mind". Before this, I hadn't been able to find anything quite like Mindjet's offering.

Freemind does most of what Mindmanager does, the main difference being that it is free and runs just as well on any platform and the XML support is much better for integration with websites. Freemind even allows you to import mindmaps directly from MindManager. While the interface isn't as slick as Mindmanager (certain things like linking nodes, icons and notes can be tricky at first), and I still haven't figured out how to get all the tree nodes on one side, Freemind still holds its own.

I'm interested to see what other people use and if there is anything better out there or if people really feel that Mindmanager is worth the money they are paying for it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

vym

Anonymous said...

Whew, this is a must try mind mapping software. Currently I'm using XMind. It's free and has a good visual look. But it seems that XMind consume lot of memory even all map is closed.

Thanks for the information, I'll try FreeMind.

Dominic Voyer said...

Instead of pressing "Insert" to add a node, Press "Enter"... They will come right under it.

Dominic