MindManager Product Review & MindManager License Key Free Trial

MindManager is a cross-platform diagramming and charting tool for personal and business use. It has rich templates for maps and charts for structuring and organizing information. You can use it just by yourself for brainstorming ideas, understanding concepts, and planning projects. Or you can use it with your friends or colleagues for collaborating on projects.

MindManager has been in existence since 1998 and you might have heard of it before as "Mindjet Mindmanager". Corel acquired Mindjet in 2016 and rebranded this popular mindmapping tool as simply "MindManager". Now, Alludo has acquired Corel and therefore MindManager. Alludo's portfolio also includes other popular tools like Parallels, CorelDraw, WinZip, Painter, VideoStudio, and WordPerfect.

In this article, we will review the features, use cases, pricing, and versions of MindManager. After reading this article, you will develop a better understanding of the powers that MindManager can bring to your life and business.

1. Why is MindManager an Important Tool for Business?
2. Personal & Business Use Cases for MindManager
3. Various Maps and Charts Templates in MindManager
4. Productivity and Operational Features of MindManager
5. Pricing and Versions of MindManager
6. Popular Alternatives to MindManager
7. Final Words

1. Why is MindManager an Important Tool for Business?

In Business, there is a huge need to manage, design, monitor and improve processes, strategies and roadmaps. Complex and lengthy projects are undertaken that can easily go overbudget and require more time than planned. With so many moving parts and different interdependent tasks delegated to people in different departments and even timezones, it can be easy to lose sight of the progress. There is a constant need to get everyone on the same page, and this ends up in lots of meetings that can drain time without adding much value.

MindManager works on all devices and can be used by teams of all sizes, from 1 to 1000+. With in-built templates for common charts and diagrams, it becomes easy to plan workflows, design processes, draw organizational and matrix charts, etc. You can capture minutes of the meeting in a mindmap, assign tasks to different team members, share documents and links, use budgeting and dependency automations to plan business logic and resource allocation. In the next few sections, we will cover the different chart types and powerful features of MindManager that can boost the clarity, productivity, resourcefulness and coordination of your team and company.

2. Personal & Business Use Cases for MindManager

Information and Knowledge Management: Connect Ideas in New Ways

What is the limitation of word documents? Linearity and Verbosity. Ideas and our world, on the other hand, are non-linear and interconnected. By capturing ideas in a visual way, we can accurately depict the relation between different topics. It is better to express the logic of a process using charts and diagrams.

Creativity and Problem Solving: Turn Complexity into Clarity

How do you manage the flow of communications and collaboration in your company? Isn't it overwhelming to have documents, plans and ideas scattered in different inboxes, chat sessions and across different devices? How will you solve problems and come up with new ideas in such a mess? By using diagrams, maps and charts, you can go from the big picture to the tiny details on one digital whiteboard. This helps to turn complex concepts, strategies and problems into logical and manageable nuggets that provide you with clarity and actionable points.

Productivity: Augment Your Intelligence and Save Time

Our left brain is logical and right brain is creative. Logical intelligence deals with language and maths. Creative intelligence deals with abstract concepts and feelings. By combining words with pictures, we can spark our complete cognitive and emotional facilities. And with this augmented intelligence, we can solve problems and accomplish our goals faster and efficiently. Being able to do this in a collaborative way with your entire team or even company brings even more synergy. By boosting the productivity of your entire team, you can save time and resources.

Task and Project Management: Go from Idea to Implementation

Mindmanager's charts and maps will help you during brainstorming in online and in-person meetings. While planning your projects and tasks, and then during the execution of your strategy. You can easily reuse, filter, search and modify parts of your diagrams. This lets your entire team flow together from the initial ideation stage right to the implementation and delivery of your projects.

Business Planning: Peace of Mind for Your Business

You can capture your business logic, project requirements, and budgetary constraints using charts and maps. MindManager has inbuilt calculation and scorecard tools with conditional formatting. This lets managers and team members find problematic areas with a glance. From jotting meeting notes to assigning tasks and setting deadlines, to doing presentations and analyses, MindManager has all your professional needs covered. And with integrations and enterprise-scale deployments possible, it fits and blends beautifully with your existing tools stack.

3. Various Maps and Charts Templates in MindManager

Mind Maps

Captures ideas in a nonlinear, hierarchical manner that closely resembles how we think. It helps boost creativity and clarity. Useful in business planning, meeting notes, project management, and knowledge management.

Organizational Charts

Captures your company's reporting and delegation hierarchy. Easy to represent how different teams within your company are structured. It is a map of the people and their roles in your organization. Useful for onboarding new hires, staffing decisions, resource planning, career planning, and restructuring your teams.

Timelines

Captures historical and future milestones, events and actions in a chronological manner. Helpful to depict the logic, dependencies and progress in a project. Useful for product development roadmaps, project management, and planning events.

Flowcharts

Captures business logic, processes or workflows. Where to begin, what steps to follow, what are the options based on different conditions, and what can be defined as success or failure. Useful in identifying inefficiencies in a process, planning steps required to complete a task or project, or providing easy to follow instructions in a visual manner.

Concept Maps

Captures the relationships and parts of complex concepts, systems, and phenomena. Useful in knowledge management, outlining complex papers or projects, organizing study notes, exploring market opportunities, and streamlining department workflows for improving efficiency.

Venn & Onion Diagrams

Captures similarities and differences in different parts or concepts, and hierarchy and dependency between them. Useful to understand how various teams or processes are structured, and what parts should be included or excluded from other bigger parts.

Kanban Boards

Captures tasks, deadlines, delegations and current status. Helpful for the entire team to visualize progress and roadmap, and make better plans and allocations in case of slowdowns.

Funnel Charts

Captures how new customers or users will flow through multiple stages in your business processes. Useful for sales and marketing teams to plan actions, delegate tasks, identify potential problem areas and set deadlines.

Matrix Diagrams

Captures how different data sets or concepts can be classified across multiple dimensions. Useful to filter and distinguish between important and urgent tasks or features. Similarly, helpful to identify strengths, weaknesses, opporunities and threats for a company, team or product.

Gantt Charts

Captures tasks, activities and events across a timeframe. Useful for project management, multi-stage projects, project updates, deadlines, and delegation of responsibilities. Helpful to depict the dependency between different features or tasks, and for identifying roadblocks.

Process Maps

Captures the various parts and flows of processes, or instructions on how to complete a given process. Helpful as a learning tool, streamlining processes, choosing additional steps for improving a process.

Spider Diagrams

Captures the divisions of a central topic. Useful for brainstorming, presentations, problem-solving, note-taking in meetings and lectures, and making connections between ideas.

Strategy Maps

Captures what the main goals of an organization are, how various goals are interrelated, and what steps are needed for achieving them. Useful for improving cross-functional awareness, risk management, increasing everyone's involvement and intentional goal-setting within an organization.

Tree Diagrams

Also known as decision trees, it captures different possible outcomes, their dependencies and probabilities. Useful for depicting cause and effect scenarios for root-cause analysis, planning scenarios, predicting potential workflow issues, and visualizing task and concept hierarchy.

Workflow Diagrams

A type of flowchart specifically used for business processes and workflows. Useful for planning, optimizing design of processes, identifying key decision points, and flow of business logic and resources.

Swim Lane Diagrams

Captures workflows and processes in different "lanes", each belonging to a person or a department. Helpful for clearly conveying roles and responsibilities of all team members.

4. Productivity and Operational Features of MindManager

Text accelerators

Use @ to assign tasks to team members and # for adding tags to separate tasks or concepts into different themes.

Drag and drop

After you quickly input your ideas on the digital whiteboard, you can easily rearrange them to organize better.

Priority markers

Set different priority levels to different features and tasks, to help you filter and prioritize urgent or important tasks.

Filtering

You can only see certain parts of your diagrams using tags, priority markers, or by different hierarchy levels or keywords.

Topic info cards

Every topic or node in your map can contain additional info. You can choose to show or hide this "topic info", to reduce clutter or provide details.

Built-in templates

Templates can be a different diagram or chart types, different styles for formatting the look or theme, as well as your custom templates for reusing quickly.

In-app tutorials

MindManager is packed with powerful features. You can learn about how and when to use different elements in a step-by-step manner using in-app tutorials and guides.

Import, export, and sync

Data in your maps or diagrams can be imported, exported and synced with other information capturing software like Outlook, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office etc.

Capture content from anywhere

MindManager "Snap" is a clipboard-like, information-capturing queue that lets you grab and store information from anywhere. And then you can pick the required information and place it on your charts or maps.

Sync with your online storage

All your files linked inside your diagrams can be synced with online file storage places like Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint, Dropbox, Box and iCloud.

Map roll ups

Combine and aggregate different maps or their parts into large mega or master diagrams.

Excel Data Mapper

Excel is great for number-crunching, and you can map the required data onto your visual maps for better understanding.

Dynamic views

You can easily change the perspective or view your information and its relationships with dynamic views. It includes switching between map view, outline view, tag view, schedule view etc.

Project cost tracking

Calculate, update and track costs of different parts of your project.

Explore flowcharting possibilities

You can combine different diagrams together, switch between dynamic views, and filter parts of the map. This gives you great flexibility in representing and understanding all your information.

Object shapes

Apart from standard shapes, MindManager also has new shapes like block arrows, chevrons, parallelograms, and trapezoids.

SmartRules and formulas

SmartRules helps you in making conditional formatting using formulas with topics and topic properties.

Cross-platform co-editing

From the web to mobile, and across all operating systems, MindManager lets you and your team members edit the same diagrams.

MindManager Snap

You can capture, receive and share information from any device and make multi-user snap queues.

Map part sharing

You don't need to share entire maps. Only the selected parts of a diagram or map can be shared and reused in other maps.

Connect through SharePoint

SharePoint Linker lets you share and edit task lists from SharePoint directly to your maps and charts.

Publishing & sharing

You can easily publish and share your updated maps with your team members and clients with dynamic web links.

Content control

You can set topic-level controls over who can view and edit different parts of the maps.

Slides

With slideshow mode, you can turn multiple maps into slide decks.

Microsoft Teams integration

MindManager is integrated with the Microsoft team communication tool.

Add-ons for MindManager

MindManager has even more add-ons for turning maps into documents with WordX, adding tools and shortcuts with MAP, or converting info from maps into task & topic tracking tools like Task Q, Task4Maps, and Topic Tracker.

5. Pricing and Versions of MindManager

Mindmanager license key for a free trial

To avail of this, you have to signup using this link , after that, you will be able to get 7 days trial of Mindmanager along with its major features.

MindManager Essentials

To use MindManager as a Web app only, and for personal use: Essentials for $99/year

MindManager Professional

Web-app + Native apps on all platforms like Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS + Teams collaboration: Professional Subscription for $169/year.

MindManager One-Time Purchase

You can also get access to ALL versions of MindManager for individual use: One-time Purchase for $349 one-time payment.

MindManager for Microsoft Teams

To use MindManager integrated as an add-on into Microsoft Teams for collaboration: $99/year

MindManager Enterprise

Large-scale, company-wide deployment and integration: Enterprise with custom quotes and discounts

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6. Popular Alternatives to MindManager

1. XMind

Contains unlimited free trial. $59.99/year annual subscription to unlock all its versions: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS/iPadOS, Android and Web

2. MindMeister

Online only mindmapping tool. Great value with very affordable monthly plans from $2.49 to $6.49 / month.

3. Miro

Online only diagramming tool with lots of templates. Trusted by 30 million+ users. Affordable pricing starting with $8/month with 20% discount on yearly payment.

4. Mural

Online only mindmapping tool for team collaboration with good product design. Billed annually on a per member basis with Team+ $9.99/member/month. Enterprise-level Business plan for $17.99/member/month.

5. MindNode

Apple only mindmapping app for iOS and MacOS. Free to install, with in-app purchases.

6. MindMaster

Cross-platform mindmapping tool for $59/year or $118 lifetime license for all platforms. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS/iPadOS, Android and Web

7. ClickUp

ClickUp is a non-mindmap alternative to MindManager. Instead of using rigorous diagramming and mindmapping, you can use task management, document management, chat, and whiteboarding tools to accomplish all collaborative and creative tasks in teams. Free forever for unlimited members with 100MB storage and some limitations in integrations. Affordable plans from $5/member/month with unlimited storage, integrations, and additional perks.

7. Final Words

MindManager is a popular and trusted mindmapping and diagramming tool for over 24 years. It is developed keeping in mind teams of all sizes, from startups to enterprise-level behemoths. It is top rated in the category of Mindmapping software on review aggregator sites like G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot. Being cross-platform, teams can use MindManager to collaborate on their projects and stay on the same page.

With pre-built templates for different types of diagrams, charts, and maps, you can visualize, understand and track information for your meetings, business plans, processes, roadmaps and strategies. It is possible to filter, reuse, and share your charts and maps as a whole or in parts. With calculation and conditional formatting capabilities, you can depict your business solutions logic, do budget planning, and identify critical areas for fixing inefficiencies. From the simplest concept diagrams to the most complex projects, you can go work with information from the big picture to tiny details.

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Your team can use MindManager integrated with Microsoft Teams, or as native apps on Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android or iOS. MindManager Web version is supported on all leading browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera. With different plans available, you can use Essentials for using MindManager as a Web-app only for individual use. Or get their Business plan to avail access to all their apps and collaborate with your team member. MindManager offers you 30 days free trial and in-app tutorials. This makes it easy and low-risk for you to get well-acquainted with the powerful features and capabilities of their tool, before making the decision to buy it.