"Free" means four different things
Before comparing features, work out which kind of free you are being offered, because it decides what happens in month six — which is when switching costs are highest and you have the most to lose.
Free tier of a paid product. Fine, provided you check the limit that will bite. It is rarely the number of maps. It is usually export, sharing, or history.
Free trial dressed as free. Everything works until it does not. The tell is a card required at signup.
Free because you are the product. Less common in mind mapping than elsewhere, but check what the privacy policy says about your content specifically.
Free while it is being built. Early product, real limits, honest about the stage. The risk is longevity, not a bait-and-switch.
None of these is disqualifying. Mistaking one for another is what hurts.
The question that matters more than features
Can you get your work out?
A mind map is thinking you did once and will want later. If the only way out is screenshots, you have not chosen a tool, you have chosen a place to leave things.
Look for structured export — data you could import elsewhere, not just an image. Image export is for showing people; data export is for not being trapped. Check it before you invest, because the moment you need it is the moment you have already decided to leave.
Does it survive contact with an actual week
Most tools demo well. The failure appears around week three, and it always looks the same: the map became a picture. Nice to make, no reason to open again.
What prevents that is somewhere for the work to live inside the structure. Ask whether a branch can hold a next action, a note, a date, and evidence that something happened — or whether the branch is only a label and the work lives in a different app. If it is the second, you now maintain two systems that disagree, and the map is the one you will stop updating.
This is the real dividing line among free mind map tools, and it is not on any feature comparison table.
Try before you register
You cannot answer "does this suit how I think?" from a feature list. Dragging a branch and seeing whether the resulting shape matches how the problem sits in your head takes about four minutes and settles it.
Some tools let you do this before signing up. It is worth preferring them — not because signup is onerous, but because a tool confident enough to let you test it first usually has a reason to be.
Minty Path does: open the workspace and build a real Growth Path with no account, no email, no install. It saves in that browser, and if you sign up later you can bring it with you as your first owned map.
A checklist worth running
- Export. Structured data, or only images?
- Action. Can a branch hold a todo, a note, a date, evidence?
- Mobile. Does it work on a phone, or is it desktop with a phone apology?
- Limits. What exactly is capped, and when would you hit it?
- AI. Optional, or on by default with your content going somewhere?
- Longevity. Is the free tier a business model or a launch promotion?
- Depth. What happens at 200 branches — does it stay navigable?
That last one catches people out. Small maps are easy for every tool. Useful maps get big, and the difference between tools shows up entirely at scale — collapsing, zooming, focusing, and finding things again.
What Minty Path does and does not do, plainly
Free while it is being developed with early users, and any future paid option would be introduced clearly rather than by removing access you already have.
You get Growth Paths with two views over the same map — Plan View for structure, Work View for the branch you are actually working on. Branches hold status, Focus, notes, todos, dates, and proof. Export is structured data plus SVG, PNG, JPEG, and PDF. Account holders get backups, sharing, attachments, reminders, and email capture into an Inbox.
What it deliberately is not: a real-time collaborative workspace, a calendar, a cloud drive, or a general project-management suite. If you need several people editing one map simultaneously, this is the wrong tool and it is better to know now.
AI is optional and off unless you turn it on. The provider-neutral flow builds a prompt for whatever assistant you already use rather than sending your map anywhere.
The honest summary
Most free mind map tools are good enough for drawing a diagram. The ones worth staying with are the ones where the diagram is also where the work goes — and where you can leave with your data if it turns out you were wrong.
Test that in five minutes rather than reading about it: open the workspace.