Southbeach Modeller vs TheBrain

Posted by moritz
Mar 29, 2016 at 05:16 AM

I was a long time (ten years) user of TheBrain. Ultimately, with the new subscription model, I didn’t renew my professional subscription after years without significant updates.
TheBrain is still a unique tool, and there is nothing quite like it.

Thanks to this thread, I discovered Southbeach Modeller. What a silly name. Just search the web for Southbeach and Modeller - I was looking for YouTube videos. Don’t go there. Not safe for work.

Having said that, besides the poor product marketing and promotion, Southbeach is a fantastic piece of software. I immediately fell in love with it. Can you spell CRIMP?

Differences between TheBrain and Southbeach: They are opposites, in that TheBrain doesn’t require any order or specificity in relationships between nodes. This lack of specificity to a modelling notation that supports the task of “world building” very well - capturing concepts and associations (relationships).
Southbeach Modeller, in turn, is based on argument mapping: The fundamental abstraction is that of “good” and “bad” elements. Relationships follow systems thinking principles (and beyond) in that polarity and impact between nodes play a central role.

Possible applications (with a grain of salt, this is just my personal history):

The Brain serves as an excellent container to capture thoughts, references, etc. when venturing into a new (research) domain. I’m still tempted to pick it up again for that purpose (my perpetual v8 Pro license), despite my annoyance with the author and the ever fluctuating roadmap, stability issues.

Southbeach Modeller - any strategy or ideation process will greatly benefit from it. Its expressiveness is unmatched by tools that are as (relatively) user-friendly. The report generator is ingenious (often, graphical models are not acceptable for executive reviews and group collaboration - this is a life saver). It doesn’t really work as well as TheBrain as a tool to collect facts and serve as a large-scale reference database. DevonThink might be a better candidate for that (striking a balance with its associative inferences between TheBrain and Evernote).