MindMeister vs. OmniGraffle

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

As I said earlier in this review, OmniGraffle does an excellent job with arcs if they are created in OmniGraffle. The same is not true if the drawing I'm working on was imported from Visio. In that case, I need to just start all over with the arc lines, and that is not often a reasonable option.

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

• The ability to easily map out process flows for users of a wide range of tech comfort levels—The design is intuitive enough for even people with lower tech comfort levels to visually chart process flows. We have never had to do significant onboarding for less tech-savvy colleagues—this is a huge timesaver!
• Collaborative mind mapping—OmniGraffle is a great platform to get together with people and brainstorm ideas in the early stages of a project, then link ideas together to create visual relationships to inform business and product design decisions.
• Communicating strategy to stakeholders—Communicating the complexities of a workflow to stakeholders is a lot easier and more effective, with a diagram that clearly shows the relationships between factors rather than showing them a PowerPoint that, because of its slide-by-slide nature, makes it difficult to consistently show how different factors play into an overall workflow.

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.

• No support for team collaboration. I would really like to see a way to share files to iCloud so that others can access and edit.
• Better print settings. If you're trying to print a document across many pages, it's not easy to make this happen.
• No ability to pre-configure settings. For example, I have to manually change the unit of measure from "inches" to "pixels" when I create a new document, would like the ability to change that fundamentally.

Incentivized

Best product for my needs on the market

Incentivized

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

OmniGraffle is an excellent application for chart and diagrams development. Been using it for a while now and it's a multiple platform application.

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

Because we're primarily a Mac shop, Visio was a non-starter. (It's monstrously complex compared to OmniGraffle, which works against the quick-and-dirty just-enough-documentation ideal common on agile teams.) We've used draw.io on internal projects and when coordinating with external teams, but a web-based tool was too awkward for heavy use and bogged down with complex documents. For us, OmniGraffle sits in the "sweet spot" between complex data-driven modeling tools and lightweight "drawing" programs that force too much manual labor when doing heavy diagramming work.

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

• I've created multiple OmniGraffle template files that I use constantly. I create covers for our proposals in OmniGraffle with pictures of the the client's buildings or sites. All I need to do is drag and drop the image into the template, change the title and client name and address accordingly and it's ready to go.
• Using templates in OmniGraffle has saved lots of time.
• Using OmniGraffle to design drawing details for construction documents has allowed us to land projects, purchase orders and new clients to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Incentivized