When I open it, the app shows and empty doc and many tools, but all tools stay grey (unusable), so I have to search through the menu items to do something, but futile. The only usable item is "Help > Documentation" which closes (!) my empty doc and opens a mindmap explaining commands that simply do not work. One of the hardest-to-use and most user-unfriendly apps I've ever met. Should be called "UnfreeMind" instead! While so much great, self-explaining GUIs exist since the nineties, this 2012 app sux cog.

As a French user, using accentuated characters, I noticed that (at least) the accents are not supported during the Mind Manager Map (Try out 8) import even if all works perfectly fine (even from MMP 8)
It's too new for me to rate properly this product

My bests

Not bad. Price of Free is nice.
I've tried several. No ones got it exactly right yet.

Freemind is OK.

It feels a little restrictive in that its not totally freeform as it could be.

It doesn't lend itself to slapping "Notecard" type of boxes all over the page & connecting & organizing them after-the-fact as well as it might.

I was hoping for Inspiration on steroids.

Haven't really found any mindmappers which aren't restrictive or without an involved learning curve, while having a rich feature set. Inspiration, ThinkingRock.

There used to be a wiki-type of flow charter in the OS 8 days that had the right idea, but couldn't break away from scrollbars & claustrophobic page sizes.

Pretty good for simple stuff. It can only get better.

Nodes are auto-positioned and repositioning (using arrow keys!) is limited. Furthermore, does not follow convention of starting at 1300hr and working round clockwise.

This is a "cannot use" dealbreaker for me.

Can live without hoist facility but cannot work with inflexible interface.

The thing I really like about Freemind is that it is cross-platform, but as it stands, I cannot use it

This program has a hell of a lot of horsepower and features for a free program. I own and use Mindjet MindManager for mind mapping, and this free program has an amazing amount of the same advanced features, like filtering, notes, hot links to the web and docs, and customizable icons that allow you filter. Plus, the program is quite zippy (on my Intel iMac with Snow Leopard) even though its Java-based. (Maybe I shouldn't expect it to be slow -- Personal Brain mind mapper is also Java-based and it totally responsive with its live links and way-cool animated navigation.)

The biggest difference between this free program and something like MindManager is the overall refinement of the user interface, the look and feel, and navigation. For example, unless I missed it, I didn't see a way in FreeMind to hoist a node, or hide other nodes so I could just see a node I wanted to focus on, and I missed MindManager's nifty ability to "Fit Selection" to your screen. (In a huge mind map, being able to select a node and its children, and then hide others, and then have your selected node expanded or shrunk to "fit to screen" is a huge aid in working with your data. Again, FreeMind may do these things, but I couldn't find out how, if it does. I found the bazillion icons all around the FreeMind window hard to interpret, though each icon did have a hover pop-up -- after a while, I guess you'd get to know what the icons meant.

That said, of course one might expect a paid program of the price of MindManager to be way more refined and visually appealing, but in terms of pure functionality, FreeMind has the majority of features even a hard-core mind mapper would want. If I didn't own MindManager, I think FreeMind would definitely be my program of choice. Kudos to the open source community for making a remarkably powerful and useful program.