As a tech journalist, I spend a significant amount of time brainstorming new ideas and story angles, and I use a variety of different tools in the process. For mind mapping, there's nothing better than Milanote. This free application has an easy-to-use interface and makes it so I can simply drag and drop ideas as they come to me, building links between different sections to discover connections I hadn't realized before.

While there are a lot of similar tools on the market, it sets itself apart from Miro, Notion, and others in a variety of ways.

4 Milanote is catered to creativity

Less structured, more free flowing

Milanote shares many similarities with Miro, but while the latter is more broadly applicable across a range of different industries, Milanote is designed with creativity in mind. It can serve as a sort of mental hub where a person can dump ideas, keep lists of research, and create an unlimited number of boards.

It's an excellent choice for anyone who tends to think more visually. The drag-and-drop nature means you can drop images directly onto the board, and the web-clipper extension makes it easy to save anything that catches your eye. Milanote also has an excellent mobile app for adding ideas on the go, and that means no more jotting things down in a note app or on a napkin and hoping you remember to move it over.

3 There are dozens of pre-built templates to choose from

Visualization for the non-visual creatives

Not all creative people are visually focused. I can write, but I have absolutely no eye for design, and that's another reason Milanote is a fantastic choice. When you create a new board, you can choose to leave it completely blank or fill it in with a Project Plan, Moodboard, Creative Brief, Weekly Plan, or Team Planner — but if you select More Templates, a list of 31 different categories appears, each with a different number of options within the category.

For example, under the Writing category, you can select the Brainstorming template. It shows you an example of what it might look like, but that disappears when you select Use this template unless you click Keep example content. You'll be left with the same layout, except blank and waiting for you to fill it in. Milanote also works with Pexels to provide more than three million free images for you to choose from.

2 Collaboration is easy as pie

Teamwork makes the dream work

Creative projects often go beyond a single person, and Milanote makes it easy to collaborate with multiple people. Leaving a comment is as easy as dragging and dropping the box, while a full suite of reaction emojis can be applied to nearly every element just by clicking it and choosing Add reaction. You can easily invite teammates and collaborators to work on the project either through email or by providing a link, and you can share the project board as a read-only link, too. You can even password lock it.

You can work together with others either simultaneously or asynchronously. You can mention teammates by tagging them with @, while a smart notification system will let someone know if the board has been changed. Milanote also has a version history feature that allows users to review past variations of the board to check what has changed over time, and offers an easy way to restore to an earlier version if something goes horribly wrong.

1 It's affordable, too

We love low costs

Milanote has a free tier that provides users with an unlimited number of shared boards, but it does limit usage of those boards to a total of 100 notes, images, or links, and only 10 file uploads. However, you can delete these at any time to reduce that count. Thanks to the ability to export board layouts as a PDF or PNG, or to convert them to a more linear format for use in Microsoft Word or a related program, the free version is more than enough if your uses aren't too large.

After that, unlimited notes, images, links, and file uploads start at just $10 per month when billed annually. If you're working with a larger team, the cost is $49 per month for up to ten people. The cost doubles to $99 per month for a team of up to 50 people. In that sense, Milanote offers incredible value for creatives that need a way to easily collaborate with one another.

Eye-catching layouts tickle the brain in just the right way

In a way similar to journaling or scrap booking, seeing ideas laid out in an attractive, visual way makes it easier to draw connections between seemingly disparate topics and discover associations that might otherwise be overlooked. Milanote's intuitive interface is easy to use, even for someone who lacks any and all artistic talent, and its vast set of features make it an obvious choice whether I'm plotting out a novel or trying to come up with ideas for the weekly pitch meeting.