Ayoa vs. MindMeister

It's great for small to medium business where you need to have tracked communication and conversations that can have milestones, deadlines, supporting files, and the ability to pass the task around to multiple individuals for completion. It's not exactly useful but with some work and maintenance can be used for issue tracking and work delegation

This product is well suited for making mind maps and outlining projects and ideas from the start. It can be tough if you are trying to convert something you began in Docs. It allows for a lot of intuitive creation, making your work flow easily. It can get to be a bit clunky though if you make your map too large.

Incentivized

• The user interface is intuitive and easy to learn.
• The ability to organize tasks by user, department, type makes it easy to keep on top of work.
• Ayoa is cross platform and has apps for mobile/tablet as well as the desktop app and browser version.

• The UI is well laid out and easy to use. The workflow makes perfect sense and makes creating tasks a breeze.
• The collaboration features make brainstorming not only easy but fun! Everyone enjoys using the tool, which was not the case with other collaboration software we used.
• I love being able to get all of my thoughts and ideas on the screen to see them and then be able to connect them in a logical way.

Incentivized

• The administrative side of Ayoa is very limited.
• If a user accidentally deletes a board or leaves the company, it's a bit of a pain to get that data back.
• User administration is difficult and if a use who is invited selects the wrong link after registration they may get locked out of your invite.

• I wish collaborators could add comments without having to be given editor privileges. A "Reviewer" role would be helpful.
• I would like to be able to toggle note visibility on and off. If there is a way to do it now, I haven't found it. As it is, I have to hover or use the sidebar to see notes.
• Two or three times I have seen my nodes spontaneously reverse order in a big map (over their recommended limit). Even so, they are working on tracking the issue down.

Never had an issue with customer support, though we never really needed anything major as far as technical help. I do not believe they offer 24 hour customer support but we don't need it as MindMeister is not the type of tool we need need 24 hour a day support for. Overall, very happy with the level of support.

Incentivized

I've just started evaluating Planner with out recent upgrade to Business Premium but I'm finding that it could easily be used to replace Ayoa and would help offset the cost from the MS365 Business Premium upgrade by replacing another SaaS cost. It does almost all the same things, integrates in our already existing MS365 ecosystem, and is backed by Microsoft... it's just not as 'pretty' as the bubble boards

Mindmeister has a good free plan compared with Lucidchart, and better Google Drive integration in my opinion. draw.io has a better free plan than MindMeister, but I prefer MindMeister for mindmap creation still, while I prefer draw.io for other types of diagrams. Xmind is powerful, but bloated, and requires installation on every machine that needs to open the file. The fact that MindMeister is in the cloud is a huge bonus.

Incentivized

• Communication and follow-up has gone way up since we started using Ayoa.
• Accountability has also improved considerably since we started with Ayoa.
• It has unfortunately caused some burn out on some users because it had made it much easier to 'punt' work over to someone else without any prior communication.

• Our meetings became more productive (time saving /better outcome).
• Project management activities became more efficient (time-saving/increased quality/better collaboration).
• It became easier to create online repositories to share relevant and well-organized information to our teams (before it was dispersed, incomplete, and difficult to find/manage).

Incentivized