Microsoft Brainstorming Tool

Every day, people use Microsoft teams to embrace how it can change the way they work by using virtual brainstorming tools like meeting notes. A great place to start when brainstorming using your team’s ideas or anyone’s else’s is to use coauthoring in Microsoft Teams. It allows for one central location for brainstorming ideas, which saves you time and energy.

This is especially true if several team members are responsible for coming up with new strategies, campaign plans or project applications. Without the right guidelines and rules in place, suggestions can easily become scattered and lost.

Some Office 365 alternatives include:

Coggle

Benefits:

Coggle is a dedicated mind mapping tool. It works as a web application, designed for teams.

The app produces hierarchical documents to help users visualize and share ideas.

From there, you can generate, analyze, and memorize ideas. Understand complex information too.

Coggle users can share mind maps with as many colleagues as they like. Several users can add or edit branches on the same diagram simultaneously. And the application automatically saves every change made.

Coggle accepts all types of information. This includes unlimited image uploads, links to files in Google Drive, text labels, and math formulas. Coggle supports markdown as well, so it’s easy to add titles, links, and formatting to text.

You can share the content you create online on the Coggle website, or export them as .PNG or .PDF files.

Coggle’s flowcharts make it possible to illustrate linear work processes. You can create multiple root items and join branches together to form loops.

The free version offers full change history and unlimited public diagrams.

Drawbacks:

Customization options are limited. There’s no function for auto-arranging branches. This means really big mind maps can get messy without housekeeping.

The free version only has 3 slots for private mind maps. All other mind maps are publicly visible, which is definitely a no-no for a lot of business applications.

Pricing:

Free version with unlimited public diagrams and 3 private diagrams is $0 “forever.”
Awesome plan for personal and professional use is $5 per month, billed annually.
Organization plan for teams is $8 per user/per month, billed annually.

MindMaster

MindMaster is a versatile and user-friendly mind mapping tool that enables you to choose structure, colors, and style to express your ideas. This application offers fishbone, timeline, sector, circle, treemap, and bubble map.

Features:

It offers more than 33 predefined themes.
This application provides 700 stylish clipart.
MindMaster helps you to customize every detail.
It allows you to conduct group brainstorming sessions.
You can filter tasks by resources.
Helps you to track progress with ease.

Cacoo

They offer real-time collaborative editing so that team members can build diagrams together simultaneously from any location. It’s easy to tell who’s working on which parts of the diagrams as real-time live cursors show exactly what others are working on.

Teams can also take advantage of their on-diagram comments feature, which makes it simple to create comment threads with the right feedback and context. You can also resolve these similar to Google Docs or Sheets.

If you’re looking for different diagrams and mind maps to choose from Cacoo offers hundreds of professional templates and shapes to incorporate in your planning process. They also just started integrating with Zapier, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Key Features:

Live, real-time editing, diagram version history, and in-diagram comments make this a great collaboration tool for teams.
There are hundreds of shapes and templates to build any type of diagram.
The dynamic charts allow you to use data visualization principles to better understand your data.
Their intuitive dashboard assists teams in organizing, sharing, and protecting projects with strong user management options and shared folders.
Cacoo is 100% cloud-based, so can be accessed from anywhere. The only thing a user needs is permissions and a link to view.

Pros:

Wide range of integrations with Google Drive, Adobe, and more
Allows AWS import
Export files in formats such as SVG, PDF, etc.
Unlimited diagrams sharing
Comes with a smooth drag-and-drop feature and Gantt charts
The robust and feature-rich free plan
Real-time feedback from the entire team
Extensive collection and usability of wireframes
14-day free trial
Offers comprehensive customer support via Live Chat and email support
Video tutorials available

Pricing:

Cacoo provides both free and paid plans for its users. Team plans begin at $5 per user per month (when billed annually).

Free – Provides a limited number of folders and sheets.
Pro – Provides unlimited diagram sheets and access to all Cacoo features.
Team – Provides unlimited folders and sheets for your team (more users) and 1:1 training sessions and prioritized email support.
Enterprise – With their Enterprise offers, you can host Cacoo yourself on a private network/server. You also get their 24/7 email support.

Canva

Benefits:

Canva is an online visual collaboration tool. It’s primarily built to help users deliver impressive visual materials for their brand. It’s packed with intuitive features and a vast archive of templates and images.

Canva also includes a free mind map maker. It offers 20+ professional graphs to work from. As well as many professionally designed templates.

Canva has a clean drag-and-drop user interface. You can customize colors and fonts. And choose from a range of elements, including frames, shapes, and lines.

Add in visual elements like images, icons, and illustrations. Canva has a large library of free visual materials and over 1 million stock photos you can use.

You can embed your mind map into a Powerpoint presentation easily. Or make it part of any other presentation mode you like. Publish, share, and download your mind map whenever you like.

Team templates allow you to create custom, reusable designs. Your team can then use them to quickly generate new mind maps.

Drawbacks:

Tweaking templates can be clunky. One example is if a template is set up for a certain text length. You might encounter layout problems if you want the text longer.

Some elements and images aren’t free. But this isn’t clearly communicated. If there’s paid materials used, you’ll be prompted to pay when you go to download your mind map.

Pricing:

The Canva Mind Map tool is free. Below is the pricing for Canva’s full stack product.

Free plan for individuals and small groups is $0 “forever.”
Pro plan for small teams is $9.95 per user/per month, billed annually.
Enterprise plan for large teams is $30 per user/per month, billed annually.

A free trial is available for the Pro and Enterprise plans.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a mind mapping app that helps you to plan and organize projects, ideas, and existing tasks for the ultimate visual outline. It also helps you to turn your ideas into actionable plans.

Features:

Allows you to rearrange your projects by dragging branches into logical paths.
You can create, edit, and delete tasks right from your view.
Allows you to create powerful free-form diagrams.
It helps you to invent mind maps independent from any task structure.
It enables you to share your mind maps with anyone.

Milanote

Milanote is an extremely easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects and project them on to visual boards. It is perfect for professionals like designers, creative directors, marketers, writers, and agencies alike.