Compare The 10 Best Mind Mapping Software Of 2022

Whimsical is a mind mapping software that's built for real-time (or asynchronous) team ideation. Users can comment on individual connections and follow another teammate's cursor around the map. Your mind maps can be integrated with other Whimsical files so you can switch between mind maps, wireframes, projects, and docs.

Whimsical also gives you the ability to create mind maps without over-complicated styling options. Keyboard shortcuts help with organizing your ideas, which you can add in the form of text, images, links, and even icons from Whimsical’s library.

You don't have to download any additional apps or browser extensions to use Whimsical mind maps as all functionality is available within your browser.

Whimsical has a direct integration with Github and can be embedded in Notion docs. It also supports two-factor authentication with any authenticator app.

Whimsical costs from $10/user/month. You can create up to 1,000 items in Whimsical for free

Lucidspark provides real-time collaboration and facilitation features including sticky notes, freeform drawing, comments, tasks, automatic sorting, Breakout Boards, a laser pointer, a timer, and voting. Users can start with a blank canvas and easily add sticky notes and other shapes, or they can start with templates for brainstorming, mind maps, meetings and workshops, strategic analysis, project planning, and Agile development.

Users can quickly embed PDFs, PNGs, and other files onto the canvas, as well as create presentations and frame-by-frame paths to guide collaborators through content. Lucidspark has a simple and customizable UI that can be mastered in a few minutes. Users can access all features from the toolbars, as well as take an onboarding tutorial and view all keyboard shortcuts.

Lucidspark is ideal for individuals and teams looking to collaborate in ways that lead to decision-making and action. It’s a flexible application that allows you to brainstorm, plan, and make decisions in a way that’s best for your team.

Lucidspark offers integrations for leading apps like Zoom, Slack, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Smartsheet, Confluence, and others.

Lucidspark has a free version available for individual users. Paid plans start at $7.95/month with a 7-day free trial.

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard with over 1,000 templates including mind maps, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, product wireframes, research boards, and flowcharts. It’s trusted by 99% of the Fortune 100, and used by teams at TransUnion, HP, Upwork, Cisco, Qlik, and Atkins. Miro’s visual platform is built for hybrid work, and has robust resources for continuous learning like Miro Academy, online events, and a community forum.

Try one of Miro’s top templates — Mind Map. It’s a fast, intuitive way for teams to capture, organize, and structure ideas. Mind mapping empowers in-person, remote, and hybrid teams to brainstorm, plan projects, map out information architecture, create org charts, and develop sales strategies. Plus, on Miro, communication is seamless with chat, comments, and the ability to auto-organize and add content to your map.

At The Digital Project Manager, we use Miro to map out content clusters and to visualize content workflows from start (brainstorming ideas) to finish (publishing the content on our site).

Miro has integrations with a whole suite of tools, including Zoom, Figma, Asana, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Box, Airtable, Notion, Azure, and Webex. Some integrations are limited to paid plans only.

Miro is free to use for unlimited members with up to 3 editable boards. Paid plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually).

InVision Freehand is a free online whiteboard that can be used for collaborative mind mapping, note taking, and wireframing. It's used by teams from Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, American Express, and KPMG.

From product managers and marketers to recruiters and engineers—Freehand’s simplicity makes everyone feel at home from the first time they try it. Whether you’re brainstorming, planning, or facilitating a meeting, Freehand allows you to spend more time contributing than figuring out how to contribute.

You can draw a variety of shapes quickly and easily with intuitive tooling and connect shapes with snapping line connectors. Then, add sticky notes and collaborate with others in real-time on a shared canvas. Integration with Microsoft Teams allows you to co-create during a live meeting or asynchronously through chat.

Some noteworthy features included: pre-made templates from leading companies; facilitation features like voting, present mode, and sticky notes; Advanced controls like locking and version history. Enterprises plans can access custom templates, SSO, SCIM integrations, audit logging, and a dedicated customer success team

InVision Freehand is free to use for up to 10 users and 3 projects. Paid plans cost from $7.95/user/month and come with a free trial.

Creately is an online visual workspace with advanced capabilities to make drawing mind maps online quick and easy. It's suitable for both individual and team use, and can be used in any industry, from marketing to education.

It has an infinite canvas, simple drag-and-drop functionality, and the ability to create shortcuts to visualize and organize information and ideas. With its context toolbar, you can also easily color code and format mind maps. The tool has an extensive library of mind map templates apt for all kinds of scenarios including brainstorming, design thinking, problem-solving, documenting research, and more.

Creately allows you to copy and paste or drag and drop images and graphics from your device, or browse and add more elements with its built-in Google image search option. You can also add hyperlinks which can be displayed right within the app with an iFrame, to make your mind maps more resourceful.

You can also collaborate with others on your team, or with your clients in real-time using in-app video conferencing or in-line comments which also serve as an in-app chat function.

You can track changes other teammates make on the canvas with real-time change previews and live mouse tracking. Additionally, you can export your mind map in SVGs, PNGs, JPEGs, or PDFs for printing or publishing, or you can embed them as images in a web page or document with a secure link.

Creately also has plugins for Slack, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Confluence, and a desktop version. However, Creately’s free version only allows 3 collaborators; if you have a larger team, you will have to consider switching to a paid version.

Mindomo is an easy-to-learn concept map generator geared towards teachers and students, but it’s useful for small businesses and corporate agencies. It offers a suite of mindmapper tools with an emphasis on collaboration, providing users with the ability to easily co-create, share, and present their mind maps.

Some of Mindomo’s most useful mind mapping tools include real-time collaboration, a template library, the ability to add links, video, and audio to mind maps, and the ability to easily search for web images directly within the app. You can quickly turn mind maps into presentations with their Presentation Mode feature, or you can export in various formats (pdf, .docx, .pptx, .txt, .opml, .mpx, .html, .zip, .png.)

Overall, Mindomo is a practical, user-friendly mind mapping software that focuses on doing one thing and doing well. Their native mobile apps make it all the more convenient to use this tool, enabling users to create and edit mind maps while offline from any mobile device (Android, iPad, iPhone, etc). Additionally, Mindomo integrations are more numerous than most other mind mapping software, including Google Apps, Office365, and LTI integrations with education apps like Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, itslearning, Schoology, and others.

Mindomo pricing works out to $6/user/month, and they also offer a free mind map software supporting up to 3 mind maps.

Ayoa is a cloud-based mind mapping software tool that brings together the creative power of mind mapping with visual task management and collaboration. Ayoa is suitable for both individuals and teams who want to unleash their most creative ideas and turn these into reality.

Unlike other mind mapping tools, Ayoa provides an all-in-one platform where users can create beautiful mind maps, monitor projects, and to-do lists, and collaborate with others. Ayoa’s uniquely visual interface is designed to inspire creativity and spark great ideas.

Ayoa has a unique variety of Mind Mapping styles inspired by the traditional, hand-drawn mind map, choose Organic Mind Maps for smooth, curved branches. You can choose Speed Mind Maps for auto-layout and box branches to capture ideas quickly. Their newest feature, Radial Maps, allows you to present your ideas in a visual pie-chart and add structure to your goals and ideas.

You can create mind maps and collaborate in real-time by inviting colleagues and friends to your maps where you can brainstorm ideas together. You can even set your map to ‘Public’ and share the link with multiple people – even if they don’t have an account! The ‘auto-hide’ feature allows you to focus on selected branches and hide the clutter for professional presentations. Easily export and print Mind Maps with the click of a button. Ayoa’s intuitive interface allows users to easily navigate around the app and quickly switch between viewing styles.

Ayoa integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Contacts. You can also transform your notes from Evernote into actionable tasks with Ayoa. With Google Calendar, you can automatically sync your Ayoa projects. Email2Task allows you to send an email straight to Ayoa and it will appear as a task.

Ayoa costs from $9/user/month. They also offer discounts for teams, a limited, free version, and free webinars and demos. In-app tutorial videos are available and weekly webinars to help you get started.

MindMeister is an award-winning mind mapping tool with powerful integrations. It will optimize your team’s brainstorming, ideation and web-based collaboration: visually capture, develop, and share ideas virtually.

The map editor is a blank canvas with endless customization options. With version history, you can revert back to whichever previous iteration you preferred. No eye for design? Choose from an extensive range of beautiful palette themes. The easy-to-access styling toolbar lets you connect ideas visually; add comments, notes, media and attachments; customize fonts, topics, borders and connecting lines; and add tintable icons and emojis.

Customization goes further—format topics as mind maps, org charts or lists (even on the same map), position topics as you please with free topic positioning, or switch effortlessly to Outline Mode to view your mind map as a bulleted list.

Deadline looming? Use Focus Mode for distraction-free mapping: it’s also an ideal solution for presenting your brightest ideas to your team or external stakeholders.

MindMeister integrates seamlessly with the Meister Suite. Embed mind maps into your notes in MeisterNote, or turn ideas into actions by converting topics to tasks and assigning them directly to your projects in MeisterTask. Efficient end-to-end workflow has never been easier.

MindMeister costs from $4.99/month or choose the free-to-use basic plan.

MindGenius is a combination of a concept map creator and a project planning tool. It’s designed for use in educational settings as well as for freelancers, small businesses, and agencies.

MindGenius’ suite includes drag-and-drop mind map creation, along with project planning features like Gantt charts, kanban task views, and some basic project reporting tools. They include several features for making mind maps more useful, with filtering, highlighting, and labelling tools to help you organize and present your mind maps effectively. MindGenius also integrates with Microsoft Office, so you can easily export project data and mind maps to Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint and Microsoft Project.

Overall, MindGenius is a useful brainstorming tool that helps you convert your mind maps from simple brainstorming documents into tools for managing your projects and business. They consistently roll out cool new features; most recently, their MindGenius 2019 version offers ways to share information with others with integration to MindGenius Online, Twitter, Facebook and Dropbox, One Drive and Google.

MindGenius offers two pricing models – Perpetual and Subscription. Perpetual is $256, Subscription is $160 in year one followed by $56 annually from year 2 onwards. A subscription includes upgrades to all future revisions of MindGenius.

From Microsoft Visio is visual diagramming tool that works well for mind mapping as well as creating many other graphical representations. If you’re already using Office 365, Visio is a top choice because it can pull data from Office 365 and let you visualize it in real-time with the charts you’ve set up in Visio. This functionality sets it apart from other tools, as Visio enables you to bring you data to life in dashboards that display data-linked diagrams. It does more than simply help you illustrate your ideas on a screen.

Much more than a simple brainstorming app, Visio provides ready-made templates to create block diagrams, flowcharts, timelines, flowcharts, floorplans, engineering designs, and Specification and Description Language (SDL) diagrams (and it also supports AutoCAD drawings). Users can share their diagrams as a link, attachment, image, or PDF and can collaborate through the comments and annotations features. Additionally, unlike a lot of the other mindmap software, Visio allows multiple users to collaborate simultaneously on the same mindmap.

Overall, this is one of the more robust mind mapping tools out there. Keep in mind, it does have a steeper learning curve than many other tools, and it definitely offers more than you need if you’re just looking for a simple interface to make an idea map. However, for technical teams, engineers, architects, and business intelligence use cases, Visio is a top choice—as long as you’re willing to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft offers Visio through a one-time purchase (Visio Standard and Visio Profession) or as a SaaS (Visio Online).

Visio costs from $6.40/user/month. A one-time license costs from $459.