Mindmaps are essential to visualize and conceptualize ideas in a graphical manner. It helps us understand complex way of how ideas flow and how to make a team to be in sync with what needs to be done. We had covered an extensive list of Open Source or Free MindMap tools that could greatly help business in ideating. FreeMind is one of the best MindMap tools around and due to its simplistic User Interface, extensive feature list is gaining a lot of popularity among MindMap users.  FreeMind is very useful to GTD (Getting Things Done) and other Project Management purposes.

FreeMind Feature List:

• Folding branches
• Save files as XML
• Export hypertext to HTML and XHTML
• Export document to PDF and OpenDocument
• Exports image to PNG, JPEG and SVG
• Icons on nodes
• Clouds around branches
• Graphical links connecting nodes
• Search restricted to single branches
• Web and file hyperlinks from nodes
• FreeMind browser/player for web in Java or Flash
• Transform maps using XSLT

What can you do with MindMaps?

Here is a sample MindMap created using FreeMind on benefits of MindMap. What it tells is that, MindMap improves, helps in ideating, communication, setting goals etc.

Pros:

• Extremely simple to use
• Flexible MidMap nodes and sub-nodes. This feature was not present in older versions but however, latest version has this and very much useful.
• Comprehensive Keyboard Shortcuts for various operations
• Customizable icon support, Images etc can be added to nodes or sub-nodes.
• Fast loading

Cons:

• Not really! FreeMind can even have images as nodes which is really helpful to remember things easily.

Download FreeMind here