Cacoo vs. MindMeister

It's a great alternative to taking photos of whiteboards to save for later reference, you can just create them here. It's also the best option I've found for creating workflows and organization charts, especially complex ones. If you have just a simple workflow or chart, it's probably too robust or complicated for those needs. Save it for the trickier or messier ones!

Incentivized

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

• Creative resource for various visual support items
• The free version is robust and nice to staff who have not used it before to get to know the product
• Support has been helpful when needed

Incentivized

• 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

• UI navigation
• Connector flexibility
• Improved table object

Incentivized

• 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

Cacoo is web-based and OS independent. OmniGraffle is a local install and mac only. Microsoft Visio is a desktop app also and Windows only. Two strikes for me, as I use between 2-4 different computers daily where I expect my applications to be always up-to-date and files synchronized.

Incentivized

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

• Allowed us to diagram out our user needs, saving us many hours of collaboration
• Allowed us to diagram out our system architecture, saving us many hours of rework
• Sufficient to wireframe a UI as a guiding post to the design while prototyping. Lowers overhead of additional software adoption at early stages.

Incentivized

• 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