Earlier i have used Xmind and similar mind mapping softwares and wanted to get more into concept mapping area. Issue with concept mapping is that you can't use mind mapping software for the same. As it involves more pointers and stuff that makes a map. So you have to look for the concept mapping softwares. There are many concept mapping softwares in the market. For example, microsoft visio and few others. But most of the functional mind mapping and concept drawing softwares are commercial and requires payment. For those who are on low budget should consider softwares like diag, vue and other softwares into the concept drawing field.

Diag is one free software written in GTK that runs on multiple platforms. But it has few limitations of use and is extremely hard to use. For example, diag has trouble with editing some properties of your concept. I have found that there are restrictive ways to using the diag. You can not use it the way you use visio and some other online mapping softwares like the brain, creately etc.

Here comes vue, which is one good concept drawing software that has most of the features of the mindmap software and the concept drawing software. it is free software and is released by the tufts. You'll find that it yet another application that runs on java and hence it is cross platform for the same reason. Panels are similar to adobe software and has property editing and other settings. Compared to diag it has much cleaner and easy to visualize layout. You'll also find that there are some decent export and import options in this software. So far i have not done much to take full benefit of this software. But surely i'm going to use it for some of my work. It is also good for typical mindmap if you want to use it that way.

You can download the VUE from their official site. It requires opt in or say email registration which they collect to check number of the downloads done by people. Versions are not regular but you'll get new version when most of the operating systems update. That aside do take a look at community maps and examples too.

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