Many people I meet use one of the following three mindmap tools to make digital mindmaps.
They either use MindMapper, Mindmanager or FreeMind.
The first two tools are premium tools which offer a lot of features and are used by many business people all around the world. The third tool is a free mindmap solution.
MindMapper (USB) is a tool that allows you to create mindmaps on your computer and use them in many business situations (meetings, presentations, brainstorming, etc.). Mindmanager is a business tool which uses mindmaps to show the information.
MindMapper maps look by default more like mindmaps. Mindmanager maps are out of the box more spider diagrams because of the way the branches are created/drawn. Both are very good products.
Both are not cheap products when you look at their price only. They are however offering a lot of quality and options for what you invest in them.
When people are a little bit hesitant to spend a lot of money on ‘just a mindmap tool’, they often make the switch to FreeMind. This is an open source and free software tool that offers also a lot of features.
In between these two price ranges, there are many different other tools.
I have a question for you. When you want to buy a premium tool many people use, like MindMapper or Mindmanager for example, but you don’t want to spend lots of money right away… would you be interested in this:
Are you interested to invest in a mindmap tool and pay on a monthly basis?
This is just like your mobile phone where you pay every month a fixed price to have your connection. The best thing about paying for your mindmap tool on a monthly basis would for instance be that you get to keep your license after a certain number of months. It is almost like an installment plan. The only thing good about this is that you can stop anytime.
I am really interested to hear what you think about this. I look forward to hearing from you!
Tags: applications, computer mapping, mindmap software, premium software
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612 days ago
Hi,
I’m currently using xMind for my mindmaps, it’s free, so I’m not interested in a premium services concerning Mind Maps.
610 days ago
Thank you Geoffrey for bringing XMind to my attention. True, this is a very good tool as well. I believe they are doing wonderful things with a model where you can get a free product and you pay for additional features.
612 days ago
I think you have a very interesting and helpful pricing idea. There are several market segments that would like a payment plan over making a full purchase.
People who are not sure of the benefit of using a product would like to pay a little for more time than just the free 30 day trial. After 3-6 months they would know for sure if they want to keep using a product long-term.
People who have a well-defined short-term need, such as for a planning project, could benefit from having a short-term license.
Both of these groups are probably individuals or work for a small business where the full license cost is significant. However, evaluators at corporations are able to buy one license very easily. In fact, their sales rep will likely give them one full license if there is an opportunity to sell, say, 1,000 copies.
One of the fears that people have with licenses controlled from a vendor’s server is loosing access to what they have bought. Amazon.com highlighted this problem when they turned off the authentication server for PDF e-books just before they launched their Kindle e-book reader. Customers who had bought hundreds (or thousands) of PDF books suddenly found that they couldn’t open them.
Major corporations have had similar problems when their accounting and payroll software quit working when because didn’t pay a technical support payment.
Software as a service (SaaS) is accepted by the market primarily because it connects people via the Net, and secondarily because it’s a metered service based on some usage metric.
For non-Net products, it’s hard for the benefits of low periodic pricing to overcome the fear of loss of all use of the product. It can be done, but it’s hard.
For example, mobile phone companies subsidize the cost of mobile phone handsets in hopes that the customer will pay their monthly fees for longer than 24 months. Solar energy product companies are doing a similar thing.
Again, it can be done, but it’s hard.
610 days ago
Many thanks Cliff, great points you are making. I also think that having access to the tool for a longer period of time is something very important. Perhaps the monthly payment should be offered as an additional way for people to purchase the entire license, but not paying for it at once. It will be more like a payment plan.
Thanks again for your ideas and input!