Compare The 10 Best Mind Mapping Software Of 2022

ClickUp is a mind mapping software for planning and organizing your projects, ideas, and more through mind maps.

ClickUp’s mind mapping features allow you to draw relationships between projects and tasks, visualize workflows and project or task structures, and easily create and manage tasks directly from your visual roadmap.

Create powerful free-form diagrams, use nodes as reference points for work to be completed, and then convert nodes into tasks. Users can create and link tasks within a mind map using drag-and-drop functionality. Share your mind maps with your team and other collaborators for collaboration in real-time.

ClickUp offers native integrations with Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

ClickUp’s free plan is robust and includes all primary features. The unlimited plan starts at $5 a month per user and offers additional functionality.

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).

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.

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.

SmartDraw is positioned as an alternative to tools like Microsoft Visio, claiming to be much easier for the layman to use while being just as powerful and more affordable. That’s a big claim to live up to, and while it’s not significantly more affordable (at $5.95/user/month it’s comparable to Visio’s $6.40/user/month), it does provide an intuitive interface with useful features that are applicable to essentially any industry, from landscaping and design to IT.

SmartDraw provides users with more than 4500 templates for over 70 different types of diagrams, including flowcharts, infographics, landscape designs, decision trees, timelines, mind maps, engineering and CAD diagrams, and much more. It offers collaborative drawing online so users can work on the same diagrams at the same time, with an intelligent formatting engine that makes automatic adjustments to maintain your diagram’s arrangement. SmartDraw integrates with MS Office, Google apps, Jira, Confluence, DropBox, Box, WordPress, and Trello.

Overall, SmartDraw is a powerful tool, a strong competitor to the likes of Microsoft Visio and arguably more intuitive for the average user to navigate. Like in the case of Visio, enterprise teams are the users who will get the most out of its many advanced features.

SmartDraw costs from $5.95/user/month on a plan with 5+ users, or $9.95/user/month for a single user.

Lucidchart is a concept map creator and general diagramming tool well-suited to businesses of any size who want to present data visually, scaling from a few users to enterprise organizations. It’s offered as a SaaS that allows users to easily and quickly create online mind maps as well as flowcharts, technical diagrams, wireframes, floorplans, process maps, org charts, ER diagrams, and dozens of other graphical representations.

This tool covers all of the bases: real-time collaboration features, easy export of projects into many different file formats, revision history, and hundreds of templates to speed up the diagramming process. You can also embed your Lucidchart diagrams into your wiki, website, or blog, and they’ll automatically update when you make changes in Lucidchart.

Overall, Lucidchart is some of the best mind map software for those who want something easy to roll out and learn to use. It’s positioned similarly to SmartDraw as a more affordable and intuitive alternative to Microsoft Visio, and it delivers. It’s the most affordable of the three solutions, it supplies an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and its pre-built integrations with Google Apps, Confluence, Jira, Jive, and Microsoft Visio make it easy to sync with existing tools.

Lucidchart costs from $4.95/user/month when paid annually. They also offer a “free forever” account with limited functionality and free trials of their paid versions.

Coggle is arguably one of the most aesthetically pleasing and intuitive concept map makers on the market. This application supports real-time collaborative drawing online, allowing multiple team members to co-create mind maps and flowcharts.

Coggle’s useful features include auto-arranging branches, image uploads/attachments, a full change history, and collaborative drawing. You can download your mind maps as PDFs or image files, and you can also export as .mm and text as well as export to Microsoft Visio. Another way to share your mind maps is through embeddable diagrams, meaning that you can display your Coggle diagrams on a webpage and make any changes to the diagram from within the mind mapper tool.

This tool doesn’t offer stacks of mind map templates (instead, you can search and repurpose the public diagrams in their gallery), nor does it support the creation of more technical diagrams like network, engineering, and architectural diagrams. However, if you’re looking for a simple, beautifully designed, easy-to-use mind map creator, Coggle should be at the top of your list. This is some of the best mind mapping software for people who are new to mind mapping and want access to all the essential tools.

Coggle costs from $5/user/month. They also offer a free mind map software with unlimited public diagrams and up to 3 private diagrams.

XMind is a popular brainstorming app used by anyone from startups and entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies. It offers several practical features for making mind maps and business diagrams (org charts, timelines, etc) more useful and accessible.

XMInd offers some unique features for speeding up the process of making mind maps, converting mind maps into outlines, and quickly turning your mind maps into professional presentations using auto-formatting and one-click slide creation. They provide styles and themes to get you started, and as you create your mindmaps you can attach files, audio, images, and links. You can also work in “zen mode”, which eliminates distractions from the interface.

The most useful XMind feature for project managers is Gantt View feature, which converts mind maps into Gantt charts (although you can find more specialized Gantt chart tools in our review of MS Project alternatives). They also have a mobile app that users have praised as being convenient easy to navigate. XMind integrations are minimal: it has an Evernote integration, but to share with other apps, you XMind enables you to export in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, RTF, HTML, Plain Text, to PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, and SVG files.

XMind costs from $1.24/month for the mobile brainstorming app. You can also buy XMind for a one-time purchase of $129.00, and you can try it before buying with a free download.

Marketed as “the world’s most powerful mind mapping software”, MindManager offers some best-in-class mind mapping and diagramming tools. It’s in use at enterprise organizations like P&G and conEdison, but they also offer a single license for purchase by individuals.

MindManager is a robust tool with many useful data consolidation tools, and it can pull data from Microsoft applications through the MindManager integration with Office 365. When creating and presenting diagrams, you can use the View Customization features to quickly and easily display the data in different ways depending on your audience.

Overall, while this mind mapping software fails to offer real-time collaborative drawing, MindManager a popular, well-supported tool that comes at a simple, sensible price (you buy a license through a one-time purchase). It’s much more than a mind map creator, providing data visualization tools for making org charts, timelines, project plans, and more. It even provides a dashboard that integrates and visually displays all of your project- or idea-related data.

MindManager costs from $229 for a perpetual license (they don’t offer a SaaS). You can try the software for 30 days with a free download.

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.