watch your thoughts connect
start with one word. let the rest tumble out — the map takes care of the tidying
the human problem
Ideas don't arrive in order. They arrive all at once — the presentation, mum's birthday, the trip, the thing you almost forgot — each one tangled up with the next. Holding them all in your head is the tiring part. A mindmap is the fastest way to get them out: no order needed, no blank-page pressure, every thought landing next to the thoughts it belongs with. Ten minutes later the week isn't a blur in your head — it's a picture in front of you, and your head is quiet again.
why it feels different
empty your head fast
Type, press Enter, type again. Tab starts a deeper thought, Enter the next one, arrow keys move between branches — your hands never leave the keyboard and the map lays itself out around you as you pour. When it's time to rearrange, grab any branch with a mouse or a fingertip and drop it under a new parent or into a new order; the layout follows you.
it ends up organized — without organizing
Thoughts that belong together end up together, because that's how you put them down. Every branch gets its own color, so one glance tells them apart — and you can recolor any thought that matters. When a part of the picture is done shouting, fold it away with one click — a small count remembers what's inside.
a thought can become real
Right-click any node and make it a Task or a Habit. Linked, not copied — finish the task anywhere and the map knows. On Pro, a node can also become an Event or a whole Project that stays linked to the map it came from. The map is where thoughts start, not where they get stuck.
make it yours
Bold the thought that matters, strike through the one that's done, put a link on a node, pick its color. Two hand-tuned map themes, each with a true dark mode that follows your screen — the calm holds at midnight too.
your map is never trapped
Export any map as OPML or a PNG image — or copy any branch, or the whole map, as plain text that pastes anywhere. Your thinking is yours.
✨ a coach for the blank pagePRO
A blank canvas can be its own kind of stuck. Tell the Guided Coach what you're untangling and it drafts a starting map — six to eight branches, each with a question or two to answer. Keep it, ask for another take, or start blank. Prefer a familiar shape? Starting shapes like a life-areas check-in, a trip or event plan, or what's weighing on you are one tap away.
how people actually use it
everyday life
the life brain dump
every worry and thread across work, home, health, and money — poured out and watching them cluster into your real life areas
the action plan
a high-stakes undertaking broken down by who's involved, what depends on what, and what it's all for
the deep-research map
a dense topic, taken apart into branches you can fold away and return to
the business plan
offerings, pricing tiers, margins, and who you depend on, all in one picture
the family horizon
the next six months — school terms, holidays, home projects, checkups
the health map
how sleep, food, screens, and stress actually connect to how you feel
the creative concept tree
one idea, branching into chapters, arcs, references, and the things that inspired it
the big-decision map
two paths, weighed side by side — the pros, the cons, the cost, the timeline
AI-assisted work
the feature landscape
dozens of ideas, sorted into families, feasibility, and what ships when
the agent architecture
personas, permissions, and how the pieces talk to each other
the user-journey map
onboarding, the edge cases, the error states, laid out before you build them
the dependency map
what a piece of code actually touches, mapped out before you refactor it
how it compares
infinite whiteboards
Miro, Mural, FigJam
- where they're good
- freehand drawing, sticky-note workshops, loose team brainstorming
- where it stalls
- every box needs positioning, every connector needs dragging — exhausting to keep tidy alone
- the Xale difference
- keyboard-first auto-layout. Tab and Enter while the canvas arranges itself — no dragging
heavy desktop mind mappers
XMind, MindManager, MindNode
- where they're good
- deep formatting menus, Gantt overlays, presentation modes
- where it stalls
- maps live as isolated files, cut off from your calendar and your day
- the Xale difference
- a node becomes a task or habit that lands on your Day plan, synced across your browser, phone, and tablet
graph-based PKM tools
Obsidian Graph View, Roam, Logseq
- where they're good
- automatic backlink discovery, a global view of every connected note
- where it stalls
- the graph looks impressive and is nearly unusable for actually planning something
- the Xale difference
- a clean tree, built for thinking something through and turning it into action — not a node cloud
linear outliners
Workflowy, Dynalist, Notion toggles
- where they're good
- minimal vertical lists, keyboard navigation, infinite nesting
- where it stalls
- a tall vertical outline makes it hard to see how parallel things relate to each other
- the Xale difference
- a 2D picture — color by Area, so you can see the whole shape of a busy week at a glance
free
10 mindmaps, the full canvas: keyboard-speed capture, mouse and touch rearranging, folding, branch colors, node formatting and links, dark mode, node→Task and node→Habit, OPML / PNG / plain-text export.
sign up — freeproPRO
Room for 1,000 maps, node→Event and node→Project (the project stays linked to its map), starting shapes, and the Guided Coach to scaffold a map with you when you'd rather not start alone.
what's in Pro →questions, answered
put your thoughts down
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