MindManager and NovaMind, two of the better mind mapping software packages for Mac, have recently been upgraded. For a few months, I’ve been using NovaMind 3, and I followed the upgrade path to NovaMind 4. This morning, I had the privilege of participating in a web seminar demonstrating the new capabilities of MindManager 7, and this evening I’ve been working with a 21-day demo copy of the software.

To make a long story short, the improvements in MindManager 7 outstrip those in NovaMind 4. MindManager 7 is easier to use and more Mac-like than NovaMind 4. NovaMind 4’s advantage is in cross-platform correspondence between the Mac and Windows versions. For a more detailed review, follow the “Continue Reading” link below the image.

Here’s the current version of my mind-mapped course plan for Religion 101, created with MindManager 7.


What follows are some head-on comparisons between MindManager 7 and NovaMind 4.

Both NovaMind and MindManager have a toolbar at the top of the window that somewhat mimics the look and feel of the toolbars in Apple’s Keynote and Pages applications. Here’s the NovaMind screen for a new, blank document:

Now here’s the MindManager screenshot for a new, blank document:

By the way, when you create a new document in NovaMind, you are prompted to select a template for your map, much in the fashion of starting a new Keynote or Pages document; the software offers seven map templates in three categories (business, personal, and study). However, NovaMind neglects to give you the option of a simple blank page. For that, you must click “Cancel,” which is completely unintuitive. MindManager, on the other hand, gives you a fresh, blank sheet, but it also has a “New from Template …” menu item that offers you 14 different map styles, the first of which is a blank map. In this regard, MindManager gives a better startup experience and offers more assistance if you want it, whereas NovaMind assumes (like a Microsoft product) that you want assistance unless you specifically decline it.

In the screen shots you can see that both products have toolbars similar to the iWork applications’ toolbars. Both allow you to customize the toolbar, just like an iWork application. However, MindManager offers more tools for you to put on the bar (and its icons are more aesthetically pleasing). Notice, however, that MindManager’s Inspector opens in a palette, just like Keynote and Pages. NovaMind puts a bunch of controls off to the side too, but—in a stark departure from Mac conventions—puts these neither in a palette nor in a drawer, but in a pane in the main window.

Traditionally, mind maps are read clockwise, beginning at the 12:00 or 1:00 position (if the map were superimposed on a clock face). Some of the tutorial materials included with both products talk about this convention. However, only MindManager actually follows this convention. Here’s what the raw entry of my outline looked like in each program, with me doing nothing but straight-up data entry following the course sequence.

Here’s the map that NovaMind generated:

And here’s the map that MindManager generated:

There’s just no comparison. NovaMind put my first branch at the 6:00 position, second at 12:00, third at 3:00, fourth at 9:00, fifth at 5:00. Not only were these out of order and in violation of the normal mind mapping convention of working clockwise from 12:00 or 1:00, they also overlapped one another crazily. Switching to NovaMind’s “Controlled Layout” fixed the overlap problem, but did not fix the sequencing problem—and in “Controlled Layout,” you can’t move your branches around. Moreover, when I turned on NovaMind’s Outline Numbering just to see what would happen, it numbered my branches in the proper visual order, starting at the 1:00 position and going around clockwise. However, since NovaMind had arbitrarily put my branches in a different order than I entered them, the outline numbering was, of course, incorrect.

Typing labels on a map is similar in the two programs, but the behaviors are different enough to merit some comment. In MindManager, pressing the return key creates a new child topic if you have the central idea selected, or a new sibling topic if you have anything else selected. This is generally convenient but slightly unintuitive due to the inconsistency. If you press the tab key, you select the next topic in sequence; shift-tab moves backwards. In NovaMind, pressing tab creates a new child branch, and pressing shift-tab creates a new sibling branch; pressing the return key puts a line feed in the branch label. This one is more or less a matter of taste, but I prefer MindManager’s behavior here. To me, pressing tab should move you through the existing elements, not create new ones.

Images can really spice up a mind map, and for image handling the contest is split between these two contenders. To get an image into MindManager, you use a menu command to insert the image; if you’re willing to take a few additional steps, you can put the image into the MindManager Library for repeated use. MindManager doesn’t seem to allow you to drag-and-drop an image from the Finder or iPhoto into a map, nor to copy an image from Photoshop and paste it into the map—desirable functions, all. NovaMind integrates with your iPhoto library and allows drag-and-drop from the Finder, and its built-in libraries are more extensive than MindManagers. However, NovaMind treats your images differently from its own “adornments,” such that you can only arrange your text above, centered on, or below the picture—not to the right or left of the picture—and to make this adjustment you have to click on one of three radio buttons in the branch control pane; “adornments,” on the other hand, go only to the left of your text. In MindManager, you can place the picture above, below, to the right of, or to the left of the text (and this is the correct way to think about it; MindManager has you position the image, while NovaMind has you position the text), and you do this by dragging the picture to the place where you want it. Both programs give you resize handles by which you may enlarge or reduce the image, but only MindManager follows the Mac convention of preserving the aspect ratio if you hold down the shift key while dragging on a resize handle. Resizing a dropped graphic in NovaMind is maddening for this reason.

Both programs allow you to view your map as an outline. NovaMind claims to put your outline in a “panel,” but in fact it’s in a palette, which means that it disappears whenever NovaMind loses focus. This is pretty annoying when you’re trying to edit a document other than a mind map with input from the notes you’ve stored in NovaMind (this drove me crazy while writing my Psalm 51 paper recently). In NovaMind, the “Outline Panel” and “Branch Notes Panel” buttons on the toolbar actually open the same palette, which itself has three icons to represent three different views: outline, notes, and combo (outline on top, notes on bottom). In MindManager, the outline view completely replaces the map view in the main window. Only MindManager allows you to drag-and-drop lines in your outline view to rearrange elements on your map (with completely Mac-like behavior, including the horizontal line to show you where you’re dropping the element), and the graphical map redraws very nicely to accommodate your changes. MindManager wins hands down on outline handling.

Both programs allow you to attach notes to specific branches. I’ve already described how NovaMind handles notes in a separate palette. MindManager puts its notes in a pane in the main document window; you can choose whether this pane appears on the right-hand side of the map or at the bottom, and like any good pane in a Mac window, you can resize it. Both use the Mac system text editing engine, so both have right-to-left Unicode support equivalent to that in Mac OS X itself, which is not perfect, but much better than anything we’ve had before.

Both programs also have features that allow your mind map to become a kind of “to-do” plan. In NovaMind, you can toggle a checkbox in the branch pane to show a checkbox at the right-hand edge of any branch. Then you can toggle the checkbox on the map itself. In MindManager, you can click on any branch, and choose a percentage completed in the Task Information Inspector. The choices are 0%, 10%, 25%, 35%, 50%, 65%, 75%, 90%, and 100% finished; 0% is represented by an empty box, 10–90% are represented by boxes partially filled in the manner of a clock face, and 100% is represented by a a box with a red checkmark. These boxes appear at the left-hand edge of the branch, which I think is a better position than at the right-hand edge of the branch as in NovaMind. MindManager allows you also to set a start date and due date for your branches; you can see what it looks like in my course plan at the top of this post, where I have start dates (but not due dates) defined for each class session. MindManager also allows you to attach priorities and resource lists to your branches; if you can do this in NovaMind, I haven’t figure out how. I do, however, wish that MindManager allowed you to define the duration of your project in minutes, or at least let you use fractional hours; neither is currently possible, but the task info you can define in MindManager is still head of that in NovaMind.

That brings up the issue of help. NovaMind delivers a help system in your web browser, which I pretty much despise whether it’s a small company like NovaMind or a giant like Adobe doing it. MindManager uses the standard Mac help system to deliver its help files.

Suppose you don’t like MindManager’s rounded rectangles, or NovaMind’s plain lines? It’s easy to change the appearance in either program. In NovaMind, click on the branch you want to alter, and then click one of the shape buttons in the branch control pane. In MindManager, click on the branch you want to alter, and then select your desired shape from the Shape menu on the Formatting tab of the Format and Spacing Inspector. NovaMind offers four different shapes; MindManager offers eight. In NovaMind, you can click directly on any branch to alter its properties; in MindManager, you have to click on a topic, and altering its branch properties alters all the branches that connect that topic to its children. MindManager doesn’t seem to have the ability to form curving branches where the words trace the arc of the branch, as NovaMind does.

When I started investigating mind mapping software for the Mac three or four months ago, NovaMind 3 had a few advantages over MindManager 6. One of the most important was the price: NovaMind 3 standard was only $99, and the manufacturer offered a generous educator’s discount; MindManager 6 was $229, if I remember correctly, and I don’t think there was any educator’s discount available. Now that situation has flip-flopped. NovaMind 4 now comes in three flavors: Express for $49, Pro for $149, and Platinum for $249. There is an upgrade path for NovaMind 3 users, and the company still offers educational discounts (but you can’t combine an educational discount with an upgrade discount). Mindjet has gone quite the other way: MindManager 7 for Mac costs only $129 retail, or $99 for a single-user educational license. So while NovaMind is increasing prices by creating a tiered family of products, MindManager is lowering its prices to make the software more accessible.

I have really gotten a lot of benefit from using NovaMind over the last three months, but MindManager 7 has so many advantages over NovaMind 4 Pro that it will almost certainly become my mind mapping software of choice. NovaMind still has a chance to come back and dethrone MindManager with NovaMind 4 Platinum, which is anticipated to include some features to enhance the use of NovaMind as a presentation tool—something I’m very interested in doing with my mind mapping software. But at the moment, I’m sold on MindManager 7 over NovaMind 4 Pro.

Update: Macworld gives MindManager 7 four-and-a-half mice. Their only real complaint is the lack of Microsoft Office integration, but this is a limitation of the available APIs on Mac OS X and really not the fault of the MindManager development team. I personally don’t really care about Office integration on the Mac, since I’m trying to become Microsoft-independent. I’m much more interested in presentation features.