Cosmos.so is a inspiration capture system marketing itself as an alternative to Pinterest. There is quite some overlap with the features offeret by MyMind, so this will come up often as a comparison.

  • Yesterday, I received an invitation to Cosmos' early access and tried it on iOS and the web.
  • Cosmos is a really great looking app, and their pricing sounds reasonable to me (6$ a month, when paid annually), at least when compared MyMind, which is about twice that amount.

However, great UI and a good price tag isn't enough. There are a couple of things that immediately put me off and make it unlikely that Cosmos will keep a place in my digital world:

  • I need to create at least one cluster, which essentially is something like a board or folder.
  • I have to decide, into which cluster something should be captured. That's one crucial step I don't have to worry about in MyMind, which lets me do one click without having to decide anything. Though, if I want to, I can add custom tags and create smart spaces that act like such boards, but are much more versatile.
  • There is currently no way to test the full feature set without paying. I wouldn't mind paying, but I want to test it first.
  • I can only create public clusters on the free tier.
  • I cannot test AI tagging and decide if it's of value to me. Automatic categorization is a huge selling point, which should be up for some tyre-kicking before deciding to pay.
  • There is a very tight integration of a public, social-network-kinda-thing with my captures. I don't like the very idea of social andd public features. I get that this is the point for a product that places itself in a market with Pinterest, but that is definitely not what I'm looking for. MyMind makes me feel much more at ease with it's clear statements against such social features.
  • Cosmos is backed by venture capital. Not being bad per se, I very much prefer MyMind's bootstrapped approach, where I can be sure the company is only accountable to their customers and do what is in their very best interest.

I'm not affiliated with either MyMind or Cosmos in any way.