What Is the Freeplane Documentation Website?

docs.freeplane.org is the documentation home for Freeplane, a free and open source mind mapping application. It is the place to read about the software, not to download it: the site itself states that you download and install the latest version over at Sourceforge, and that the change log is available separately. Use this site when you want to understand what Freeplane does or find reference material; use Sourceforge when you actually want the installer.

What Freeplane is

According to the site, Freeplane is a free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information, and getting things done at work, in school, and at home. It provides a set of tools for mind mapping (also described as concept mapping or information mapping) and for navigating the mapped information.

Two points from the documentation are worth noting if you are evaluating it:

• Positioning. The site says Freeplane's capabilities will appeal to power users, but that for the typical user it is also a more robust alternative to Xmind, Mindmeister, and similar mind mapping software.
• Technical basis. Freeplane is written in Java using OSGi and Java Swing. It runs on any operating system that has a current version of Java installed, and it can be run locally or portably from removable storage like a USB drive.

The Java requirement is the practical gate: if the machine you want to use has a current Java version, the operating system itself is not the constraint.

What the site gives you

The documentation is organized around explaining and using the application rather than distributing it. From the site's own framing, expect:

• A features rundown of what the application can do
• Guidance material for using and navigating mapped information
• Pointers outward to the places where the project actually lives

If your question is "should I try this, and will it run on my machine?", the documentation answers it. If your question is "where do I get the file?", it redirects you.

Where the rest of the project lives

The documentation page explicitly routes you to other destinations, which is useful to know before you go looking in the wrong place:

So bug reports do not belong in the documentation, and neither do general questions — those have dedicated Issues and Discussions spaces.

Who maintains it

The page credits the tools the Freeplane team uses: YourKit Java Profiler, developed and donated by YourKit, for analysis of memory consumption and performance issues, and Weblate, a free and open source web based translation management system developed and hosted by Michal Čihař. The page also carries an "Edit this page on GitHub" link for reporting mistakes, which tells you the documentation is edited in the open and that corrections are routed through GitHub rather than a contact form.

When this site is the right stop

• You want to know whether Freeplane fits your use case before installing anything.
• You need to check the Java and portability requirements.
• You are comparing it against Xmind or Mindmeister and want the project's own description of where it sits.
• You want to file a bug or ask a question and need to find the correct channel.

Skip it if you are only after the installer — go straight to Sourceforge.