Best personal information, knowledge and idea manager software?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 7, 2013 at 12:35 PM

Greetings and welcome to the forum.

I concur with everything Alexander said. “Best” is what works best for you and will probably change over time. The knowledge management tool I currently use the most is TheBrain, which is extremely versatile and useful, but a long way from perfect. Not to mention, it is pricey compared with some of the other options.

Here’s what I like about it:

- The interface just works for me. I like the visual set up of the main window (known as the Plex), which is kind of like a mindmap, but not really. Unlike a mindmap, when you click on an item (known as a thought), it becomes the center of your knowledge universe. You can see related thoughts, and how they may be related. You can stuff a thought full of information:
- text notes
- multiple attachments (almost any kind of file, from PDFs to Word documents)
- multiple links to URLs
- screen shot or icon
- visual links to other thoughts, and the links can have labels to define the relationship
- multiple tags
- provide it with a thought type

- While you can be buried deep into the structure of your data, other key pieces are quickly accessible in a number of ways:
- You can pin thoughts to the top of the Plex for quick access
- You can search for a thought quickly and easily
- If you have tagged a thought, you can quickly find all the thoughts with that tag
- TheBrain has a powerful reporting function to locate thoughts in any number ways

- Integration with data from the outside world is pretty good, could be better. You can drag and drop lots of different pieces of data right into the Plex, either to create a thought related to the active thought, or to make it attached to the active thought:
- Drag e-mail from Outlook
- Drag URLS from your browser
- Drag in files
- Files can be embedded in TheBrain or just linked to
- While you can capture text from the Internet (only be cut and paste), it does not capture the actual web page, but only links to it.

- TheBrain syncs to WebBrain, a proprietary cloud service, which also does a fine job of keeping your data synchronized across your computers. Unfortunately, the handy calendar system is not available online at this time.

Anyway, my point is not to convince you that TheBrain is for you, but just to let you know how it works for me.

Steve Z.