TheBrain for Mac User Reviews
Excellent
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"So much potential! Such bad pricing. Does anyone use?"
Version: TheBrain 7.0.4.1
Pros
Gorgeous Interface
Really helps you keep organised - but only as an individual - team tools are still weak and expensive.
This product still has so much potential - but it needs attention.Cons
Terrible pricing model
Unreasonable lock-in
Nearly useless free product - should just be called a "taster"
No iOS version
Manual Sync model - really in 2012? If you're built on Windows backend, how about using Mesh? Or even DropBox?
No live team modification (Groove and MindManager did that in 2005) so having team modify a brain in a meeting is out.
Suggestions to TheBrain: Add more to the free client, price the pro at $49, and build a better sync. People will happily pay monthly to use the online services if they get a reasonable amount of development attention. Adoption will go through the roof once you put something into the back-end. You could sell professionally build "brains" for all sorts of organizations - for example, if a help desk had50 people using Pro and could buy a brain with a starter pack of a question tree to traverse with linked articles, they would value something like this. If you could see public "brain of the week" picks that customers sold, you could get a cut.Summary
I loved the interface back when TheBrain launched about 10 years ago but it looks as though it's not been updated since then. Their sync model is weak (shared brains don't atomically stay up to date when everyone has an internet connection and I can't see how there aren't hundreds of update conflicts if they rely on manual syncs). They also still don't have an iOS version so I can't take it with me where I go. But the big drawback for me is the pricing and rather unorthodox lock-in they force on the product. Information in it is so hard to get out that it will mean you will always struggle to get a whole team to use it. The pricing doesn't work well either: The free version is so limited that it really should just be called a taster because no one could use it productively for much. The price of the client is so high that an organization would really have to think long and hard about making such a commitment. I so wish this product could be mainstreamed. I love the presentation.
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