Many Mindmap Software Solutions

There are a huge number of really interesting, powerful, nice and handy mindmap software solutions. This can be a bliss, but also a burden. Today I want to tell you why this diversity might be exactly what we are looking for in our software solutions.

Last week I saw I huge overview of mindmap tools on a website. Of course I already knew there are many, many tools you can use. In 2002 I created a website that offered about 25 different mindmap brands to people looking for a nice tool. Yes, that’s right, 25 brands, not different versions.

As you can probably understand, that was a lot of work to keep updated and to learn about each tool. While I could find a nearly perfect tool for a person who wanted to do something special with a tool, I thought this had to change.

I decided to focus on (only) 5 major providers. These five could assist in over 95% of all tasks people wanted to do. Thank you for the 80/20 rule

Right now, I only use a couple of tools. I keep up to date with the 5 I sell. I still know quite a lot about many other tools.

The bliss in all these tools is that you can find any tool you need. There are so many!

The burden for many people is that they have to find a tool in a huge list of solutions!

Here’s my advice for you:

If you are new to mind mapping on a computer, or just new to mind mapping and you want to get started right now, go for one of the big names. You can think of for example MindManager from Mindjet or MindMapper from Simtech. They offer very good tools that help you getting the job done.

When you are already using a tool, chances are you will keep using that same tool or update to a new version. The reasons? Here they are:

You created all these (hundreds of) maps in that format already
You know how to use that tool and learning a new tool may take too much time

The first reason is an important one. The second one is something that is not that strong I think. Learning to work with a new tool usually takes about one hour. In that hour you learn how to use the tool basics and you can mindmap your thoughts and projects again.

Here’s my tip of the day for you

Since you and your co-workers may not even use the same mindmap tool (if you have co-workers that also mindmap) you can share maps by saving your maps as images.

You may even export the map to MS Word and your colleague imports the MS Word file. This of course requires this functionality in your mindmap tools.

Do share your thoughts on how you share your mindmaps right now!

Overall, I think the huge number of mindmap tools is something really good for all of us. We can decide to spend few dollars or spend a couple of hundred dollars on a tool. We can find a tool that really helps us with our particular way of working.

Since most people are Lone Rangers in mind mapping, there is usually no need to work together with others in mind mapping. Therefore, you need to find a tool that helps you most and use that!

(of course this does not really apply to companies using mindmap tools and teams working together via mindmaps – but you know that already)

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