Non hierarchical mind map software

Question

I have been searching for a mind map tool that uses a non hierarchical approach and I found nothing useful.

For example XMind is even trying to sabotage my non hierarchical attempts. Every time I move two free floating nodes too close together it makes one child of the other. Very frustrating!

The most useful thing I found until now is Bubbl.us, but it doesn't look nice and doesn't really help with layout or anything. I might as well draw one by hand.

Must have:

• non sabotaging environment to non hierarchical mind maps

Preferably:

• free (but if it's really good looking and does what I want I would pay for it)
• auto arrangement (imagine I just want to write down 20 keywords, tell each one of them what other nodes it shares a connection with and BAM everything arranges itself in a nice cloud)

Answer 1

I am having a little trouble grokking a non-hierarchical mind map, but I think you mean that not all nodes connect to others, and that their is not one central "mother node" (?)

Sounds like you could just use any diagramming app. My favourite is yEd. Check out the gallery to see if you like what it produces.

Here's something I found on Google image search:

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As an alternative to the drag & drop likes of Yed, Dia, etc, since you say

auto arrangement (imagine I just want to write down 20 keywords, tell each one of them what other nodes it shares a connection with and BAM everything arranges itself in a nice cloud)

I am a great fan of diagramming apps which take a plain text input and produce a diagram. And the undisputed king, for a few decades now, is GraphViz. Again, take a look at the gallery, to see if you can find one that you like.

Here's a simple example, but you can get very complex if you want to.

This input:

graph G {
  e
  subgraph clusterA {
    a -- b;
    subgraph clusterC {
      C -- D;
    }
  }
  subgraph clusterB {
    d -- f
  }
  d -- D
  e -- clusterB
  clusterC -- clusterB
}

generates this diagram:

Answer 2

The only one I know is Scapple, but it is not free (though not expensive) and there's no IOS or android version. I'm also looking for an alternative.