7 Brainstorming Tools To Consider + Features To Look For

Brainstorming sessions—simple as they may seem—are at the root of many of the world’s best products.

Without creative problem-solving at the earliest stages of product or brand development, it’s difficult for a business to progress to its full potential. Companies must anticipate needs and meet them before they arise. Brainstorming uncovers ideas and examines solutions, providing an efficient way for teams and individuals to gain fresh perspectives about how to cater to their customers.

Let’s take a deeper look at some popular brainstorming tools to help make the ideation process even more impactful.

What is a brainstorming tool?

Brainstorming tools are software programs designed to help you generate and organize new ideas, regardless of your specific business needs or industry. By sorting your ideas in one place, brainstorming tools make it easier to assess your objective (whether it’s new product ideas or brand positioning), zero in on suggestions, and determine your next best steps.

Main types of brainstorming tools

Mind-mapping programs and whiteboard programs are the two most common types of brainstorming tools. Here’s how they differ:

• Mind maps. Mind-mapping programs diagram thoughts and ideas by connecting them to a central prompt. For example, you might use a mind map to brainstorm ways to promote a sales event, with the sales event in the center and branches leading to promotional channels like social media, email, and direct mail.
• Whiteboard. Whiteboard programs tend to incorporate brainstorming techniques beyond mind-mapping, such as project management tools. A whiteboard program could help you take your mind map for your sales event, for example, and organize each branch into action items for team members in a shareable kanban board.

Features to look for in brainstorming tools

Brainstorming tools come with various features, many of which overlap among competitors. Your specific business preferences will determine which of these features to prioritize. An entirely remote, large-scale engineering team may have different needs than a UX designer duo starting up their own firm. Here are some criteria to consider:

• Collaboration functions. Some formats work well for brainstorming solo, while others are designed to bring people together across varied functions and time zones. Does your tool need to support a large team all collaborating in real time? Or do you essentially want a more productive place to organize your thoughts? This will dictate whether you need video conferencing, voice recordings, and/or the ability to integrate other apps.
• Compatible integrations. Ensure your brainstorming tool of choice offers desired integrations with products you may already use every day (e.g., Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, and other project management software). This factor can maximize efficiency if you’re using your brainstorming tool to collaborate and assign tasks to individual contributors.
• Visual customization. Most brainstorming platforms are user friendly and have drag-and-drop, intuitive tools. Deciding what works best for you depends largely on preference, but also whether or not it meets your needs to work with premade templates or a custom-built interface.
• AI features. Some software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate intricate mind maps from a single prompt, while other software uses AI to summarize ideas presented in a brainstorming session. Think about how much or little you want AI integrated into your process—and what would be most helpful to your team.

Overview of brainstorming tools

Here’s a birds-eye view of each brainstorming tool’s type, G2 rating (aggregated reviews from G2.com), and base monthly price. Note that all tools offer a free version with more limited capabilities, and some plans may overlap with both mind-mapping and whiteboarding for paid options:

Mind-mapping tools for brainstorming

• Ayoa
• Bubbl.us
• Xmind

Mind-mapping tools enable users to digitally branch out various ideas inspired by an initial prompt in the center of the map. If mind-mapping is your preferred brainstorming technique, the free versions of these plans offer mind-mapping capabilities with options to level up to more robust paid plans:

Ayoa

Ayoa’s free mind-mapping tool lets you easily add branches to your mind maps with a single click, differentiate branches by color, and add images for visual emphasis throughout. Ayoa paid subscribers can use AI to create entire mind maps based on a single prompt, then develop Gantt boards from those mind maps to expedite task management. Ayoa allows for collaboration with up to five users who are also subscribers. Integrations include Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

Ayoa Free limits you to 10 mind maps. To create more, you can delete older maps or upgrade to the paid version, which also includes AI, task management, collaboration, Gantt charts, integrations, and more.

Paid version: Starts at $17 per month per user.

Bubbl.us

The Bubbl.us free plan offers a more stripped-down mind-mapping tool. The free version allows you to create up to three mind maps that you can share for viewing, but they cannot be edited by anyone else.

Premium members get AI-generated ideas and real-time collaboration with up to 50 subscribers, so solopreneurs can easily develop work with remote teams that also have access. The product’s no-frills design keeps things simple, and its price makes it one of the most affordable mind-mapping tools available.

Paid version: Starts at $6 per month per user.

Xmind

As a mind mapping tool, Xmind provides comparable functionality to its competitors, but its standout feature, Zen Mode, uniquely promotes focus and time management. Zen Mode is a proprietary view that takes up your whole screen with just the brainstorming board and a timer to help you stay on track—leaving every potentially distracting button, icon, or app out of sight.

Integrations include Slack, Zoom, Notion, Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. The free version offers unlimited brainstorming boards but limited AI and a three-day version history, while the paid versions include more AI functionality, a 30-day version history, and unlimited storage space.

Paid version: Starts at $10 per month per user.

Whiteboarding tools for brainstorming

• Canva
• Mural
• Miro
• Lucidspark

If you want the flexibility to explore different brainstorming techniques within a single tool, consider these tools that offer whiteboarding options within their free plans:

Canva

You might know Canva as a popular graphic design software. But it also has a whiteboard feature that transforms the app into a brainstorming tool. Canva’s whiteboard focuses on real-time collaboration. People can add sticky notes to the board, comment on it, and add emoji reactions to teammates’ sticky notes. You can also lock sticky notes if you want to prevent others from editing them. At the bottom of your whiteboard you’ll find a timer you can use to stay on track during quick brainstorming sessions.

If you want to create mind maps or visual flowcharts, you'll need to choose from Canva's graphic design templates, which are separate from its whiteboard feature.

The free version of Canva includes whiteboarding and real-time collaboration, but limits how often you can use its AI features. Canva Pro and Teams subscribers get more credits to use toward Canva’s AI features, access to premium themes, and integrations with tools like Slack, Asana, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce.

Paid version: Starts at $15/month per user.

Mural

Mural allows you to invite collaborators without Mural memberships to work on projects alongside you in real time, making online brainstorming as a group more accessible. Its focus is on whiteboarding, but it also provides mapping and diagramming features and a variety of templates for different use cases like marketing strategy, kanban board, stakeholder interviews, and process flowchart.

The free version of Mural allows you to create up to three whiteboards (called murals), which you can share with unlimited viewers. To create unlimited murals—and grant editing rights to unlimited visitors—you’ll need a paid subscription.

Paid users also have access to Mural’s AI features, which you can use to generate a mural based on a prompt, cluster sticky notes by topic or sentiment, or create a content summary from a mural. Within the mind-mapping feature, AI can automatically build out further branches of thought to any brainstorming bubbles—allowing you to go deeper in examining ideas from nuanced angles you may not have otherwise considered.

Paid version: Starts at $12 per month per user.

Miro

Among the mentioned whiteboard tools, Miro offers the most integrations as well as user-built integration capabilities.

Boasting over 160 available apps, Miro is easy to incorporate with everyday platforms you may already use for development and communication. For asynchronous collaboration, Miro’s Talktrack feature enables you to record walkthroughs of your boards so that users can follow your train of thought, letting colleagues more deeply connect in understanding and building upon your ideas.

Additionally, Miro features an expansive library of community-inspired brainstorming templates, called the Miroverse. Its AI integration uses a credit system in which certain AI functions cost users set amounts of credits. The free version gets access to all of the templates and AI functionality, limited to 10 credits, for a maximum of three boards. The Starter plan unlocks 25 AI credits, the Business plan provides 50 AI credits, and both unlock unlimited boards.

Paid version: Starts at $8 per month per user.

Lucidspark

Another popular whiteboard tool for brainstorming product development is Lucidspark. It enables collaborative brainstorming sessions with AI assistance, as well as a private mode so team members can brainstorm independently in the same session and reveal their ideas without seeing each other’s work.

Its standout feature is the integration with the flowchart tool Lucidchart, which allows you to easily turn whiteboard documents into action plans. You can create up to three boards on the Free plan, while the Individual plan gets you unlimited boards and one gigabyte of storage. The paid plan adds features like allowing guest collaborators.

Paid pricing: Starts at $10 per month per user.