Free online mind maps

Come up with the best concepts and bring them to life. Brainstorm with your team easily and organize ideas through mind mapping. Customize mind map examples for free with Canva Whiteboards.
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Playa Bowls
Painting with a Twist
Realty Austin
Engie
City of Los Angeles

Create a mind map online

You and your team can visually comb through your brilliant ideas using intuitive features that make mind mapping fun and collaborative. Choose a mind map template from Canva’s mind map maker, customize the labels, and work with your team in adding branches of information to build new concepts. Create a mind map with our online whiteboard tools and elements for free.

Infinite space made for unlimited ideas

Professionally designed templates to fast-track your workflow

Share and ideate with anyone, anytime, on any device

Run a workshop with whiteboard elements, sticker notes, and a timer

Embed your mind map in Docs, presentations, and more easily

Easy online whiteboard tools and data visualization


How to make a mind map

  1. Launch Canva - Open Canva on your desktop or mobile and search for “Mind Map” to start a new whiteboard design.
  2. Choose a mind map template - Get professionally designed mind map templates to work on with your team. Whether you're giving a presentation to business colleagues, helping students brainstorm, or organizing your ideas for a project, you'll find a beautiful mind map example ready to customize.
  3. Brainstorm with whiteboard tools - To start mind mapping, pick up a concept or central topic. The goal is to expound on this singular thought with branches of ideas to discover subtopics and new insights. Do it for your study time or invite your team to collaborate on your online whiteboard. Add shapes, lines, arrows, virtual sticky notes, icons, and other graphics to map out your ideas. You can also run a timer for every mind mapping session.
  4. Organize your mind map - Highlight the best insights in your mind map. Group similar thoughts and use color to sort them to your liking. You can also use stickers to vote on a thought and add supporting images or videos from our library to interpret ideas visually. Your mind map is a fun place to be creative. If you get a unique idea to bring to life, try Text to Image to turn your prompts to exciting images as visual cues.
  5. Share and ideate - Share your mind map to bring more clarity to a topic and encourage your audience to pitch in more ideas. Send a design link via email for more collaborators on your future workshops. You can also present it in class or your online meetings easily. Or even download and embed on Canva Docs and your other designs.
Create a mind map

What is a mind map?

A mind map shows the different ideas associated with a particular concept. It is a useful tool for brainstorming. The concept is usually shown in the middle as a central idea that branches off in different directions. So, what is mind mapping? It’s simply the process of creating mind maps. Mind mapping involves brainstorming to document the relationships of information based on a single concept, then placing those ideas onto the mind map itself.

Why use mind maps?

Ever feel like you have too many thoughts floating around in your head? Then mapping them out could be just what you need. Mind maps help you to brainstorm, take notes, or work through complex problems. Bring your ideas to life by creating a visual organization of your thoughts so you can remember information, identify correlations, and see the bigger picture.

Mind mapping is perfect for any field. In school, it proves to be a helpful learning technique to retain an influx of information. It enables students and teachers to sort notes and summaries and design courses. At work, mind maps are essential for note-taking, project planning, or ideation of new products, services, and processes. Simply put, mind maps help individuals and teams who want to sort their thoughts and bring more clarity into their day-to-day activities.

Map your ideas well

Mind maps can leap from topic to topic, so keep your thoughts and ideas organized. Canva’s free online mind map maker lets you quickly edit and customize professional mind map examples. Just choose the perfect template for you and start mind mapping for free to your next “Aha!” moment. Enjoy online whiteboard tools like custom sticky notes, shapes, and arrows to establish and connect interrelated ideas and highlight standout insights.

Find elements on top of your mind

Bring more clarity on a concept with a dash of creativity. Adding visual cues like images, icons, illustrations, or videos can provide a visual context on a topic and inspire you and your team to generate fresher insights. Explore our amazing media library of design elements to include on your mind map. When it comes to mind, search it and find photos or graphics to support an idea. Then, assign a color to its sticky note and related branches. Text to Image even helps you transform your ideas into images, no matter how unique the prompt or reference is.

Collaborate with your team

Canva Whiteboards bring more features to maximize how you work with more brilliant minds. Brainstorm with your team smoothly anywhere in the world by inviting them to collaborate on your mind map. It’s as easy as sharing a link to their email or socials. Your team can access your mind map design, apply changes, leave comments, and pitch in more ideas and subtopics. Run a workshop any time from your desktop or mobile device and manage each session with our built-in timer. So whether you're organizing your team minutes or curating ideas for a group presentation, real-time collaboration is at work!

Do and share more with mind maps

Don’t limit your thinking to the size of the canvas. Our free mind map software sits on our online whiteboard so you and your team can expand it to explore more exciting concepts and arrive at a million-dollar idea. It doesn’t stop with your mind map design. When you’re all done, you can download your mind map as a JPG, PNG, or PDF file, share it on social media, or email it directly to someone. Embed it on websites, reports, or Canva Docs. You can also present your ideas in a deck. The options are endless and always one click away.

Start inspired with mind map templates

Canva’s mind mapping templates are the quickest and easiest way to create a mind map. Customize a mind map template with your team and make branches of ideas out of a concept using our whiteboard tools and features. Choose from our mind map examples to get started with your whiteboard design.
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“When it came to design reports, Canva had a wide variety of simple easy to use templates that allowed me to easily plug in my graphs and information, and helped me to focus on the actual content instead of spending hours and hours on design.”

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Bring out your best ideas with mind maps