Websites for making concept maps

A comprehensive overview

Let's briefly see the main features of these websites, both free and paid, with their advantages and limitations.

The ultimate web app for creating, customizing, and sharing maps online!

Algor Education is a web application for creating, customizing, and sharing concept maps online in a simple and intuitive way. It is accessible from any device through a browser (e.g. Google Chrome) and does not need to be downloaded.

This site offers a very modern multimedia editor that allows you to modify your maps in real-time with other users. Among the main features of Algor Education are:

• Creating concept maps from scratch or starting from a ready-made map;
• Creating concept maps automatically from a keyword, from photos of pages from a book or from a long digital text with AI functions;
• Customizing maps with different layouts and inserting images, videos, audio, and web resources;
• Sharing maps with other users and making real-time changes;
• Uploading PDF documents and making them communicate with the map environment in just a few clicks;
• Listening to the text of maps or documents with text-to-speech with karaoke highlighting;
• Printing and exporting maps as an image or PDF.

Maps and documents in Algor Education are organized in convenient folders, distinguished by colors and icons. All material is accessible from different devices with the same account.

The advantages of Algor Education are certainly the ease of use and automatic text functions, which make creating concept maps online much simpler and more interactive. Among all the sites for making concept maps, Algor is the only one that allows you to create maps automatically.

Extremely useful is the ability to create maps from documents, such as digital books or note files: in just a few clicks it is easy to move from the document to the map.

To make the most of all the features, it is recommended to use Algor on a PC with the Chrome browser. Algor offers a Free Plan, which is always free, that allows you to create a limited number of maps without multimedia elements. There are then various paid plans to take advantage of multimedia maps, automatic functions, and text-to-speech.

It is possible to try it for free by registering on app.algoreducation.com

The free software for creating customized concept maps

Cmap Tools is a free software developed by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition of the State University System of Florida that allows you to create, share, and print concept maps. The software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Cmap Tools offers a wide range of features, including the ability to create customized concept maps, add images, and share maps online. It allows users to create graphic nodes that represent concepts. They can then be connected using lines and linking words to form a network of related propositions that represent knowledge of a topic.

The software is available in both downloadable and web versions. To use the downloadable version of Cmap Tools, you need to first download the program from the official website. Once installed, you can start creating maps using the user interface.

The main advantage of Cmap Tools is that it is a free software, also available in the online version. Its weaknesses are the unattractive and outdated interface, as well as the lack of many features compared to paid web apps: loading PDF documents, real-time collaboration, and speech synthesis.

A comprehensive guide to its features and benefits

FreeMind is a free software for creating concept maps. The software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. FreeMind offers a wide range of features, including the ability to insert links and images into the map, modify the layout of the map, and export the map in PDF or HTML format.

These are the main features of FreeMind:

• Folding branches of the map;
• Inserting icons on nodes;
• Hypertext links to web and file from nodes;
• Export to HTML;
• Exporting images in PNG, JPEG, and SVG.

The advantages of FreeMind are that it is free, open source, and can be run on any PC. The disadvantages are that it does not have a web application, so it must be downloaded. Also, it is not as user-friendly as other more modern programs and can be a bit complicated to configure, especially for less experienced users.

Create stunning maps and visuals with this open-source software

Vue is a downloadable open-source software that allows you to build maps, changing shapes, colors, creating links, inserting images, audio, video, text, and links.

The obtained map can be saved in different formats, so that it can also be used on devices where the software with which it was created is not installed, and the possibility of building maps also starting from Excel.

Vue, which stands for Visual Understanding Environment, is a free software, therefore accessible to everyone. However, the fact that it must be downloaded makes it technologically obsolete. The interface is not very attractive and the features are limited compared to more modern software or web applications.

The ultimate browser-based concept map and mind map creator

MindMup is an English language application for creating concept maps and mind maps designed to be run in browsers. In fact, the maps created are saved to your online account. With MindMup, the user can:

• Create maps with different layouts in a convenient interface;
• Convert maps to PDF for printing;
• Publish and share maps online;
• Save your maps to Google Drive.

MindMup is available with a free plan lasting 6 months with various storage and functionality limits, such as uploading attached documents to your maps. There are also various paid plans to have fewer limits on the storage of your material and collaborate with other Gold users.

The application interface is easy to use for creating maps from scratch, although the commands are only available in English. MindMup does not integrate speech synthesis on maps and documents and does not allow you to create concept maps from digital documents and books.