I spent a lot of time and a fair bit of money looking for the best mindmapping tool for the iPhone. I hope that by putting a few words down here about each of them that you might learn from my mistakes.
For those of you that don’t know about mindmapping, check the wiki article on the subject. We user interface designers use them as one of many tools to help us design better UIs.
Also, I shall provide more detail and some screen shots of mind maps I’ve built with these tools as time permits.
First up we have iBlueSky. At first glance it looks like iBlueSky is the cat’s pyjamas for iPhone mindmapping; the reviews are quite good and the screens don’t look too bad. iBlueSky’s faults come in small quantity but in the end make the product less usable than iThoughts but not unusable by any stretch.
iBlueSky’s faults are simply these: there is no way to create sibling nodes without selecting the parent node and to exacerbate this, when creating a node, the program scrolls the parent node offscreen.
iBlueSky does allow the user to set colours of all branches from a beautiful palette which is bonus points in my mind. I think with a little work that iBlueSky will eventually turn out to be quite good but it needs some fundamental work. I’m keeping this on my iPhone because I feel it does have so much potential.
MindMeister is our second contender. MindMeister’s biggest selling point at the moment is its integration with its web version. So tightly integrated are the two that maps are automatically synched if you’ve entered your MindMeister account info into the iPhone app. To be sure, you can use MindMeister without an online account (though the accounts do come free).
The app itself is relatively light on features including the fact that one cannot create sibling nodes without going to the parent. One cannot colour nodes as well. All in all the app is clean and simple bit almost too simple. Creating MindMaps quickly will yield a map of overlapping nodes all hanging off one side of the parent. It’s up to the user to rearrange the nodes and one only has control over 2nd level node positioning. Changing anything deeper in the tree will more than likely move the node to a different parent.
There is no control over colour inside of the iPhone app however one can colour the nodes in the online app and then view and edit them in the iPhone version.
If you use the online MindMeister then this iPhone version would be fine for sketching a quick (and somewhat ugly) prototype map but you’d want (need) to finish it online.
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- screen shot of a mind map in ThinkingMap
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- sharing options in ThinkingMap
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- naming a new node in ThinkingMap
ThinkingMap is the new kid on the block. While it’s not yet a serious contender, it does have some pretty nifty features. First, one can attach multiple icons to any node. There is no contol over the positioning of the icons–or the nodes for that matter–but it’s nice to have this option no matter how limited. Secondly, one has control over the colour of each node chosen from a full colour-wheel.
In the end, the limitations of ThinkingMap don’t make up for these two features. The program definitely has potential though and given some good attention should eventually do the trick. Given time it might prove to be worthy but we shall see.
The only reason InstaViz is on this list is because they claim to be a mind mapping tool. Make no mistake about it, this is a flowcharting tool, not a mind mapping tool and it has issues. It might seem cool that you can draw shapes with your finger but when it doesn’t work the way you want, well, it’s a pain in the ass. Also InstaViz’s view sometimes scrolls off centre and no matter what you do there is no getting it back.
I sincerely hope that InstaViz becomes the best flowcharting tool on the iPhone. It does need some work and it looks like the company is willing to do it. For mind mapping though, it is most definitely not the tool.
Headspace is the strangest of the bunch. It’s less of a mind mapping tool than it is a cyber 3D list creator. To be sure, you can link items and groups but that is where the similarity to mind maps ends. I’ve yet to find any real practical application for this tool but if I do then I’ll update this review.
Finally we come to iThoughts. iThoughts manages to capture more than any of these other fine tools the true spirit of mind mapping. One can create sibling nodes with a button press, one can colour nodes and place up to two icons on them. The shape of nodes can be changed between a selection of three shapes and one can choose between two line styles. One can lay the map out in any manner that one chooses and can then send it via email in a whole array of formats.
iThoughts clearly comes out the winner here. If what you want is free-form mind mapping with moderate customisation then no tool performs as well as iThoughts. I hope this coverage helps you make a more informed decision.
User Interface Explorations 
Hello, Andrew here from Tenero Software, creator of iBlueSky. Thank you for the feedback – much appreciated and we’ll take it into consideration when planning for the future. It’s a shame you felt the app lacked usability as this is exactly what we aimed to focus on, rather than adding superfluous features! We’ve aimed to make iBlueSky iPhone-like, so that anyone can pick it up and just use it, following their intuition, rather than having to read FAQs or documentation.
Finally, it is possible to change the colour of branches – just select a branch, press the “Edit” button in the top right of the screen, select “Branch Colour” and then choose your new colour by dragging your figure around on the colour palette.
Thank you Andrew,
I really do appreciate you showing me how to change the colour of the branches. I’m not sure how that eluded me and I shall change the blog to correct it.
Also, thank you for such a great app. It’s worthy of use and I’m keeping on my iPhone.
Cheers.
I’m surprise not to see any comment about SimpleMind http://www.simpleapps.eu/simplemind/.
I compared iThoughts and SimpleMind and my conclusion is that SimpleMind is more suitable for mobile MindMapping Creations.
There is no so feature than Ithoughts like icons, pictures… but when I mindMap with an iphone is to draft a map while I am not in front of my computer (in train, waiting in airport, …).
Is when I am back in front of my computer that I Can download (from Web) this drafted map and continue to work on it adding more pictures, icons and so on.
So for me a best mobile MindMapping software is the one which can allow you to quickly edit maps with the minimum of feature to edit colorized and organic maps.
Thanks for your investigations in comparing those tools.
Thanks for putting together the comparison. I have been using iBlueSky for a while now but will give iThoughts a go since its about to support XMind which I use on my desktop.
Oh my god! THANK YOU.
I was trying to find a quick way to review the best mind mapping apps for iphone, and it took me absolutely forever.
Several pages into a google search, I finally found this article. Not a single app review/comparison/self-improvement/whatever site has multiple apps listed together on the same page, or even a “mind mapping for iphone” category. Makes me wonder who is getting paid by whom to list these reviews…
Mr. Cat, thank you for the excellent comparison of mind mapping ipone apps — as Kari says, a tremendous service for those of us who only want to buy one and are looking for a side-by-side comparison!
I want some of the “extras” that both iBlueSky and iThoughts have, but lsteelandt brings up a good point in that sometimes I just want to get my ideas down in mind map form as fast as possible and don’t want to take the time to mess with bells and whistles at that moment (but may want to come back later and add them in). Some desktop mm software I’ve used in the past fails in this regard either by forcing you to contend with formatting and positioning and other extra features every time you add a new thought, or by making a great pain to come back and edit what you created later.
So with these concerns in mind — both being able to just quickly capture ideas/thoughts via mind mapping without having to contend with formatting or positioning at the moment, and ease of editing/formatting them later — which would you recommend between iBlueSky and iThoughts?
Thanks again!
This post might be a bit old but talking of user interfaces I find myMind the best. I was using iThoughts before but the interface became very cluttered in the last versions. It has very intuitive gestures and a very smart thingy, an overlay map to find your way through big mindmaps.