10 Best Free Mind Mapping Software In 2023

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.

What's free: a free plan for individual users with 3 editable Lucidspark boards and unlimited shapes per Lucidspark board.

Paid plans start at $7.95/month with a 7-day free trial.

Canva is a design tool that has become one of the mainstream platforms for building marketing collateral. Despite this, not many people know it can be used to build great mind maps in a collaborative way.

One of the reasons Canva is so popular is because of the vast amount of templates and stock images it offers. The free version of this software is not the exception. Just to give you an idea, I got 292 template options for the keywords “mind map”, which is how I found the one you see in the image above. Other templates require you to upgrade to a paid plan.

Regarding security, Canva offers single sign-on and ISO 27001 compliance and certification as part of their security package. This, unfortunately is included in the Teams plan.

Features & Integrations

Features include a drag-and-drop editor, over 250K free templates, and collaboration through invites to design. The tool offers over a million stock photos and other services, like printing.

Integrations are available as a way to amplify the platform. Therefore, you will find common productivity apps like Slack, Mailchimp, Tumblr, Pardot, Gain, Hubspot, and many others.

What's Free: Free plan available with over 250,000 templates, 5g storage, and 1 million photos and graphics.

Freehand is a collaboration app by Invision that has a free version perfect for creating mind maps and collaborating with up to 30 active users.

The interface is simple, with a bottom navigation bar that has all the options you need to build your first mind map. The free-hand tool will let you create your own visual elements, the chat bubble will give you a view of all comments on the project, and the 3 dots display all other integrations and fun widgets you can add to your boards.

The thing I liked the most about this free version is that the only obvious difference compared to the paid plans is the security features available. Everything else is there. Great experience!

Features & Integrations

Features include custom templates, polling, exporting work as a .png file, version history, and guest permissions. Also, you can post reactions with emojis on any place in the canvas and insert gifs to make your maps more entertaining.

Integrations include Vimeo, Trello, Microsoft 365, Loom, Jira, Asana, Adobe XD, and more.

What's free: Free forever plan with voting features and guest permissions.

Mindomo is a mind mapping software with a free version that will let you work on your project planning in a fun way. Its interface is colorful & minimalistic, leaving most of the functionality hidden in keyboard shortcuts or right-click menus.

The free plan allows you to build a mind map, concept map, organigram, tree organigram, timeline, or Gantt chart with a limit of 3. However, this free version is very limited as uploading multimedia, exporting as a PDF, and collaborating with other people are limited to the paid plans. Therefore, with this software, you will have to go at it solo.

Features & Integrations

Features this free version offers are a playback diagram history that will show a video of all changes the diagram has gone through, a full-screen view if you want to present your map, keyboard shortcuts for anything you can think of (available in the top left menu), and a search feature where you can look for any word in your diagram, and it will be spotlighted.

Integrations mostly focus on your file uploads, so if you get a paid plan, you will be able to upload multimedia files from Dropbox, G Drive, and OneDrive.

What's Free: the free plan is available with 3 diagrams.

Ayoa is a next-generation mind-mapping tool that has a wide range of features. This mind mapping tool first and most users will subscribe to an Ayoa plan to use this functionality. The cheapest plan is the Ayoa Mind Map with easy-to-use features, including freehand organic mind maps, speed mind maps, radial maps, capture maps, and extensive image libraries. Subscribing to Ayoa Ultimate gives users access to AI-powered mind maps that can be tested using the 7-day free trial.

The Ayoa 7-day free trial gives users access to basic and advanced mind mapping tools, including multitudes of templates to choose from. Once the free plan is over, users will need to subscribe to either Ayoa Mind Map to get the basic mind map features or Ayoa Ultimate to continue using the AI-powered mind mapping features.

When looking for a feature-heavy mind mapping tool, it’s easy to see that the available paid plan features are extensive enough for most users to consider this as an ideal solution for many businesses. The Mind Map and Ayoa Ultimate are cheap enough plans for individual users to opt for these after they’ve evaluated the trial version.

Features & Integrations

Features Mind maps incl. organic maps, radial maps, speed maps & capture maps, freehand drawing to produce hand-drawn digital mind maps, unlimited sharing and collaboration, and extensive image libraries.

Integrations 

What's Free: a 7-day free trial is available.

MindMeister is a collaborative mind mapping tool with support for unlimited subtopics, so you can explore your thoughts and projects to their full potential. Their free version offers a maximum of 3 mind maps and limited functionality.

This experience was a bit disappointing, to be honest. The free version is extremely limited and takes away from the beauty of having real-time collaboration enabled in this free plan. Embedding multimedia is locked, as well as PDF exports and any attachments. What you see in the image above is the maximum variability I was able to introduce with the available features. I wasn’t able to drop elements in any part of the whiteboard as they have to be associated with a node.

Expert tip: Every node you add to the canvas has a locked layout by default. If you want a bit more freedom to move the nodes, select them using shift, go to the layout option on the right navigation bar and disable the alignment option.

Features & Integrations

Features that need to be highlighted include an outline mode to display your information differently, icons and emojis so you can complement your visual representation of concepts, comments and real-time collaboration with notifications included.

Integrations include all Meister Suite products like Meister Task, and Meister Note. Also, Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams.

What's Free: free plan with Up to 3 mind maps.

Gitmind is a mind mapping and brainstorming tool for PC and mobile devices that helps capture ideas in a single place. Their free software has 2 great things: one, it has all the features available and two, it has support for all platforms.

Using the tool was a unique experience because it looks like it’s an unrestricted tool when in reality, it’s a bit of the opposite. The interface is based on objects that serve as containers. Therefore, any element you want to add to the canvas has to be associated with a container. For example, an image or icon cannot be placed in an empty space, it has to be placed within a text box.

Features & Integrations

Features that I noticed are available include image uploads, a focus mode that hides all toolbars and leaves you to create everything with left and right clicks, an option to reverse the mouse click behavior for left-handed people, and a version history log.

Integrations have not been developed at this moment.

What's Free: a free plan with 10 mind maps.

Mindmup is a free mind mapping tool where you can create your diagrams in a public environment without the need for an account. The software has a paid version that is account based and makes it possible to create private maps.

This is an odd one, I must say. The fact that I didn’t need to sign up to create my project felt strange. Throughout the entire project, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Anyway, the tool is great! Although maybe it's because it presents itself so badly both on the security and UI front.

However, when it's time to download your map, they explicitly mention that the file is sent to their servers and secured using Amazon standard S3 security mechanisms, so your information is transferred safely to a server for conversion and download. That file then lives on the server for the next 24hrs before being deleted.

Features & Integrations

Features included in this tool are multimedia embedding within any node, placing multimedia as child nodes, reactions to nodes using emojis, and exporting to popular file types such as PDF and JPG.

Integrations include the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, Dropbox, Zapier, LUMA Workplace, Slack, Google Calendar, Webex, Jira Cloud and more.

What's Free: a free plan with unlimited mind maps + Google Drive storage for your files.

Coggle is an online software for creating and sharing mindmaps and flowcharts. As an online tool, they focus on ways to improve collaboration across teams, whether it’s in the same or different time zones.

The free plan gives you up to 3 private diagrams so you can safely test the tool. Honestly, this version is very limited and not as friendly as you would expect. Adding images or changing to bolded text will make the app display code that will turn into the real thing once you click outside of the element you’re editing.

The one thing I will say I enjoyed is the search feature on the chat window. It becomes very useful to find parts of your conversation as the interactions between your team increase.

Features & Integrations

Features included are an unlimited number of multimedia uploads, auto-arranged branches, a full change history log, and exports to PDF and image files.

Integrations have not been developed for this tool so far.

What's Free: a free plan with 3 private diagrams.

Figma is a design-centered diagramming tool that can help you create attractive mind maps, application mockups, design kits, wireframes, and much more. Their whiteboard feature, called FigJam, will be your go-to for mind mapping.

My first impression of this tool is that it is robust. From the loads of templates that they gave me as an option to start a FigJam board to the in-app collaboration features, Figma is a top tool even in their free version. The only limitation really is the number of files you can create, as it has a limit of 3 Figma + 3 FigJam files.

Expert tip: For quick collaboration, type “/” and watch a text box appear next to your cursor. Everyone on the board will see what you write in real time! Use it for quick communication.

Features & Integrations

Features for the free version include unlimited collaborators, personal files, and mobile app access. Also, it offers fun and interactive elements like a timer to keep everyone on track, stamps for reacting, quick vote and live poll widgets, and multimedia file attachments.

Integrations include multimedia platforms like Vimeo, Youtube, Spotify and Loom.

What's free: Free forever plan with mobile app functionality.