It's not searchable, and you can't easily undo things or make edits. Unless you have a gigantic whiteboard knocking around, you're limited to a fairly small piece of paper. While it's hard to beat for convenience, it does have its downsides. You just start drawing and go from there with almost nothing in your way. Mind mapping with a sheet of paper and a pen is an incredibly intuitive and natural way to work. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Who'd have thought before we started brainstorming that Alice Cooper flipping burgers at a family BBQ (or maybe in a fast food joint?) could make for a killer summer ad? I didn't, but I'd definitely buy one. 'Family time' could also link to 'Good weather' and 'Vacation.' 'Burgers' could link to 'Summer jobs.' But by getting all these branching concepts down on paper, you can start to see the relationships between different things and generate new ideas. Some ideas will also connect back to other ideas. 'BBQs' might lead to 'Family time,' 'Good food,' and 'Burgers.' 'School's out' could lead to 'Summer jobs,' 'Extracurriculars,' and 'Alice Cooper.' For example, if the central theme was 'Summer' (say, for a marketing campaign), the first five or so nodes might be 'Good weather,' 'BBQs,' 'Vacation,' 'Air conditioning,' and 'School's out'-or whatever else it is that you think of when you think of summer.įrom each node, you then repeat the process, drilling deeper into the different concepts. Then the fun starts: around your central theme, you create 'nodes' connected by lines, each with its own related idea or theme. You start by writing a central idea or theme in the middle of a blank sheet of paper.

Traditionally, a mind map is done with a pen (or, ideally, loads of colored pencils or markers) and paper.

MindMeister for collaborating on a mind map with a teamĪyoa for a modern approach to mind mapping The 5 best mind mapping toolsĬoggle for mind map beginners and occasional use Pen and paper set a very high bar to clear, but these are the five best mind mapping apps that manage to clear it. I've also made dozens of mind maps myself, both on paper and digitally. Over the past several years of updating this list, I've tested close to 50 different mind map tools, many multiple times as they've been updated and added new features. (It's a weird hybrid approach, but it works for me.) I do most of my mind mapping digitally-and even when I don't, I often recreate a paper mind map online so that I can have it safely stored and easily searched.

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