Best Idea Management Software

The best ideas are often never executed. Because they are not captured. We spent hours poring over the top idea management software options. Ideanote is our best for most. They allow you to save your ideas centrally and collaborate with others on them. You can share ideas across departments and even measure the impact of your thoughts and ideas visually.  

The Best Idea Management Software for Most

Ideanote is a powerful idea management tool you can personalize to bring your best ideas to life. This makes employee engagement even more potent because employees are able to see the life cycle of the new idea they created being used and the impact it has on an area of the business.

With its many templates, Ideanote helps teams move faster through the idea and iteration process for better results in shorter periods of time. This is a fresh approach to open innovation, employee engagement and continuous improvement of business workflows. Ideanote software is cutting edge and can guide your business towards growth and innovation by reshaping how you manage ideas for the new generation of business.

The Best Idea Management Software Options to Consider:

1. Ideanote – Best for most
2. Miro – Best for remote teams
3. Powernoodle – Best for decision making
4. MindMeister – Best for mind mapping
5. Brightidea – Best for innovation

When it Makes Sense to Invest Into Idea Management Software

When you need a better way to capture the best ideas within your business idea management software makes sense. Continually innovating and fostering growth is easier than ever.

You’ll benefit from integrating the right idea management software into your workflow. 

Here are a few key questions to consider if you’re wondering when it makes sense to invest in an idea management system:

• Do you need a centralized place to brainstorm ideas, focus on the best ones, and receive feedback?
• Are you trying to nurture innovation within your organization but have no tools or system to manage it all?
• Do you need a repeatable way to capture, evolve, and apply all your team’s best ideas? 
• Is speed important to your company culture as far as ideating, iterating, and executing ideas effectively?

If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, chances are you’d benefit from an idea management system that can help you reach your business goals and innovation milestones faster.

To stay ahead in any industry, fostering innovation and fresh ideas is a highly effective way to add value. And let’s face it, with the type of technology at your disposal these days, a “suggestion” box is a pretty outdated method of feedback and will likely stunt any possibility for true growth at scale. For some more useful options, read ahead to learn about our top picks for idea management software. 

#1 – Ideanote — The Best for Most

With Ideanote, you can capture, collaborate, and measure the best ideas your team thinks up. All in one central place.

The likes of Google, Capterra, and Facebook use it to ensure their ideas are constantly taking them to the next level.

With Ideanote, co-creating with a network of engaged members becomes second nature. Hundreds of idea collection templates help you distill a pile of ideas to find the ones worth elaborating on. 

It all starts with a question to define the direction you need your ideas to take you. For example, consider important questions like:

• How might we package our products better?
• How can our company become a market leader in three years?
• How can we make our work more stress-free?

You can use one of Ideanote’s templates to start collecting a wealth of ideas, feedback, and valuable information on any of those questions, and then organize all of that info once you have it. 

Ideanote doesn’t just stop at templates. You can comment, assign, and rate ideas, save time with automated actions, and define evaluation criteria with an easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard. This is exactly why it’s my number one recommendation for most people. It’s highly valuable as an all-in-one tool you can personalize to your needs at scale. 

Here is an overview of each tier, along with their top five features. As always, I recommend you take a look at their prices page for a full rundown of what exactly comes with each tier to make the best decision possible. 

Starter

• $249 a month
• Unlimited members
• 1 admin
• 100 ideas
• 1 team
• 5 criteria
• Your own workspace for innovation

Business

• $649 a month
• Unlimited members
• 5 admins
• 500 ideas
• 5 teams
• Unlimited criteria
• Your own workspace for innovation

Enterprise

• $2899 per month
• Unlimited members
• 10 admin
• Unlimited ideas
• 10 teams
• Unlimited criteria
• Your own workspace for innovation

As you can see, each tier is pretty well-defined, with clear limits. So you need to be sure of what your current and future idea management needs will be before committing. With Ideanote, defining the size of your team, the number of admin, as well as the amount of ideas you want to collect is key. 

Once you look through each tier and make a decision, get started innovating faster with Ideanote here. 

#2 – Miro — The Best For Remote Teams

With Miro, you can easily manage and harness the best ideas of your remote team with a whiteboard-like platform that centralizes your team communication. 

Widgets, pre-built templates, and journey maps help you not only discover your best ideas but move you along the decision making process as a remote team. 

Tools like screen sharing presentations, video sharing, and chat features make sure your remote team is on the same page as they cross-pollinate and build upon their best ideas through an organized framework.

If you want to take on Miro, the easiest way to decide which plan is best for you is to approach it from the number of people you’ll want to onboard now and in the future.

Their free plan is a stellar way to get familiar with the platform and try it out without any real commitment. Once your remote team takes up the platform with ease and starts seeing traction with it, you can easily upgrade your membership to paid tiers with additional features.

You can find a full breakdown of what each tier offers, along with a helpful full feature matrix on their page. Below is a quick walkthrough of what each tier will cost you and what it’s generally best for. 

Free

• For a team of 1 or more
• Best as a simple jumpstart for small teams new to the platform

Team

• $8 per member per month billed annually
• For a team of 2 or more
• Best for small teams that want to increase their collaboration and create better workflow

Business

• $16 per member per month billed annually
• For a team of 20 or more
• For bigger teams that want all the functionality of Miro and SSO

Enterprise

• Custom pricing
• For a team of 50 or more
• For large teams looking for robust workflows, integrations, and support

Consultant Plan

• $12 per member per month billed annually
• Best for agencies, freelancers, and consultants what work with clients

Get started organizing your best ideas remotely with Miro here. 

#3 – Powernoodle — The Best For Decision Making

Quality decision-making as a team can be possible with powerful idea management software like Powernoodle. It’s not surprising to hear the likes of Intel and Deloitte use it to ensure better decision-making within their organization. 

The cloud software is designed to lessen decision-making biases and bottlenecks so your team can innovate and grow effectively. Stakeholders can use easy templates to submit feedback without having to go through extensive training. 

The software is designed to create focused group discussions that lead to answers with an organized approach to information.

One of Powernoodle’s best features is its collection of pre-built templates designed by professionals in the field with extensive experience in the idea decision-making process. 

Powernoodle equips you with tons of templates for:

• Risk management
• Strategy
• Change and transformation
• Process and quality
• Project and portfolio
• Innovation and R&D

The robust nature of software like Powernoodle is reflected in its prices. While a small startup might not have an immediate need for a tool like Powernoodle, enterprise-level businesses can leverage the tool to see major growth in collaborative innovation. In other words, it isn’t cheap and most definitely an investment. 

Below is a general breakdown of each tier.

• Facilitator – $325 per month billed annually
• Facilitator Pro – $575 per month billed annually
• Enterprise – Contact them for pricing

Get started gathering ideas and making better decisions with Powernoodle here. 

#4 – Mindmeister — The Best For Mind Mapping

MindMeister is a powerful idea management tool for mind mapping the best ideas within your team. 

Capturing innovative ideas can take real-time collaboration, ideation, and a feedback and voting system. MindMeister meets all three needs and then some. 

You can share mind maps with a select group of people, chat within your maps, create team sign-up pages, and define team administrators. The higher the MindMeister plan you choose, the more access to personalization you have.

MindMeister equips you to discover great ideas by crossing both collaboration and a structured mind mapping dashboard where real ideas can come to the forefront. Once you start using MindMeister, you can use their idea history feature to ensure you’re keeping track of everything your team comes up with. 

MindMeister is definitely one of the more affordable idea management software on our list. It starts with a free basic plan, all the way through to a Business plan at only $12.49 a month. 

Below is a quick overview of each tier and how they stack up to each other. You can find a full rundown of features along with an exhaustive comparison chart to make sure you’re picking the best plan. 

Basic

• Free
• Up to three mindmaps
• You can share, collaborate, and import files

Personal

• $4.99 per month
• Best for individuals with personal projects
• Unlimited mind maps

Pro

• $8.25 per month
• For mind mapping alone or in teams
• Custom styles, boundaries, and themes for maps

Business

• $12.49 per month
• For enterprise users and mapping enthusiasts
• Create groups within teams along with a custom team domain

Start mind mapping your best ideas with MindMeister here. 

#5 – Brightidea — The Best For Innovation

Brightidea, used by greats in their own industries like John Deere, Nike, Amazon, Merck, and Adobe, is a turn-key idea and innovation management tool that’s ready to go out of the box. 

It makes collaboration easy with its mobile app and user-friendly interface that’s designed to create your very own ‘innovation pipeline’ by collecting, tracking, and managing all your successful—and not so successful— ideas.

You can think of Brightidea as a digital suggestion box that empowers your team to submit ideas, suggestions, or feedback in real-time. An accessible and easy-to-use drag and drop setup makes for a hassle-free user experience.

Dynamic analytics help you track the impact and ROI of each idea to accelerate the innovation process and iterate quicker. 

Brightidea doesn’t publicly list their prices, but it does let you schedule a free demo once you’ve filled in a few questions about your team.

Ready to try it out? Get started with Brightidea here.  

Methodology For Choosing The Best Idea Management Software

As with any software that promises to improve your business, choosing the right one from a large group of options can be tricky. 

Making the right choice starts with knowing what tools and features you need to fulfill your goals and achieve all your KPIs.

Any idea management software worth integrating into your business should have the basic tools starting with a clear and easy-to-use workflow process, as well as feedback and crowdsourcing tools, automated notifications, and a centralized dashboard that’s accessible to all the stakeholders involved in the process.

Beyond that, here are a few additional factors to consider when making a final decision on an idea management tool that fits your unique needs. 

Frameworks and Templates

Usable frameworks and templates that fit with your goals are an important part of the puzzle if you’re trying to manage ideas productively. Some idea management tools allow kanban, Gantt, and timeline templates that make it easy to visualize workflows and decision-making checkpoints while others might not. 

Decide what frameworks are most important for the whole of your team to be an engaged part of the process. This way you ensure you’re gathering the best ideas possible with less friction and your idea management process creates real results. 

Reporting and Analytics

The degree to which you’ll need in-depth reporting and analytics depends on a lot of factors like the size of your team and your overall end goal. A smaller team with less complex workflows can probably get away with basic to no analytics. 

Once you start getting into midsize to enterprise-level territory, in-depth reporting and analytics can add astronomical value to your idea management process. 

Security

As a midsize to enterprise-level business security might be a concern when thinking about using an idea management system to house your best intel. 

Often, enterprise-level plans give you access to additional security features like secure single sign-on, advanced permissions, and group permissions that can get granular in terms of what you allow as the administrator. 

While security might not be as much of a concern for smaller startups, it can become more important with a large team that needs to deal with possible compliance and legal issues. 

Summary

This concludes our list of the top idea management software. Here’s a quick overview of each pick so you can take a closer look at each according to your own needs:

• Ideanote – Best for most
• Miro – Best for remote teams
• Powernoodle – Best for decision making
• MindMeister – Best for mind mapping
• Brightidea – Best for innovation

Like I mentioned in the beginning, Ideanote is one of the best tools on the market for capturing and building on the best ideas in a collaborative setting. But don’t be afraid to try one of the other options if they feel like a better fit–one of the great things about idea management software is how specific and personalized each option can be. 

Use this guide to choose the best idea management system for your business goals. Once you’ve onboarded your team, there’s no telling where the best ideas you uncover will take your business.