Freemind vs. Freeplane vs. Personal Brain

[Ajay Gautam]

Hello,

I used Freemind for about an hour recently (on Mac), and think its a great tool, and a very useful one. Thanks for the music :)

I came to these forums to complain (ubuntu package did not install an app icon in the menu), but see here a fork of the project and got introduced to Personal Brain.

For an end user, such as myself, what are the differences between Freemind, Freeplane, Personal Brain?

What I have been able to understand:
- Personal Brain is free, but not open source, and the free version seems to be a subset of pro. Personal experiences would be helpful.

- Freemind seems like a mature project with packages for Mac and Linux. Its included in the standard distro repositories.

- Dimitry was unhappy with Freemind, so he forked Freeplane. Nothing release yet, but under active development. Would the file format for Freeplane be compatible with Freemind. Would compatibility be ensured for future release / or some sort of import / export exchange format with Freemind?

All comments / feedback would be highly appreciated.

Thanks

Ajay

PS: I have already read the "Freemind fork" thread (https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2565581&forum_id=758437), would like to welcome feedback not already listed in that thread.

[Peter Davis]

I also wonder about the overlap with MindMeister which seems more like a commercial version of FreeMind than Personal Brain is.
I have been using FM for a few months and it answers many of my needs, though is not as Mac ready as I hoped.

[Eric L.]

Hi,

both PersonalBrain and MindMeister are not related in any way to FreeMind/Freeplane, and both aren't free (no source code available, PersonalBrain is shareware, MindMeister is solely a web service).

Regarding FreeMind vs. Freeplane, the differences are currently limited and the fork was due more to differences in development approach, than in the product itself.

Regarding the file formats, the first released version of Freeplane will have the same file format as FreeMind. For future version, the Freeplane team foresees the need to extend/modify the file format, whereas it would be really nice to have an open/shared file format so that interoperability could be kept (something like OpenDocument for MindMaps), but this is a topic the team hasn't finished to discuss internally and even less started to discuss with Chris (FreeMind developer).
I personally think that this would be an exciting possibility, but time will tell.
In all cases, we'll strive to have export/import capabilities between FreeMind and Freeplane.

Hope this clarifies the situation,
Eric

[Ryan Wesley]

Hi,

Following on from Eric ... Personal Brain has a striking appearance but I don't know how useful it is for keeping a personal knowledge base, writing essays, or taking notes at work or at school. The best thing is to try working with different programs and see which you prefer.

Also, I think I can safely say that FreeMind and Freeplane will always provide all features for free, and never ask you to pay for extra functionality (though I don't speak for anyone except myself, and Chris and Dimitry have the right to adopt whatever development model they want).

Regarding FreeMind and Freeplane. It will be up to users to try both and see if they have a preference.

Ryan

[Ervin Nemesszeghy]

I am using both Freemind and Personal Brain. Both are having nice features.

For me, the main strengths of PersonalBrain are the many to many relationships (all nodes can be connected to all nodes), and the search capabilities.  The search function even include the attached text files to the search, and gives a "google-like" result-window where the Nodes can be brought to visibility by clicking the text.  Finding a Node with PersonalBrain is very easy.

Freemind strength is to help learning and storing details about a particular topic, because it gives a static visual view of the Nodes.  PersonalBrain moving nodes did not give me the static view I need to visually learn the subject; and if you dodn't know what you are looking for, PersonalBrain won't show it to you.

So I usually combine them together.  For high level topics I use PersonalBrain, but when I need to go in to detail about a particular topic I use Freemind. And I put the Freemind file as an attachment to a PersonalBrain Node.

And because Freemind file is a text file, it will come out at a PersonalBrain search, if there is a hit.