Simplenote vs MindMeister

Notes are encrypted in transit, but remain unencrypted on Simplenote's servers.

You are able to sort your notes alphabetically, date modified, or by last created. There is no way to drag and drop the notes to create a custom order.

You cannot set reminders to revisit a specific note or complete a task.

Simplenote doesn't provide support for embedded attachments. This can limit the use for some as many other note-taking apps do support this type of feature.

There seems to be no way to find notes that have both tag X and tag Y. This isn't a big deal until you have a large library of notes, and want to cross-search for two things at the same time to vastly narrow down your search.

They recently removed support for older browsers, and it's not working on the latest version of Waterfox. You need an updated version of a well-known browser.

If you search for 'foo' you won't find notes with tag foo. In that regard, tags are completely isolated from the search.

This is a typical workflow action in other apps: Do a search, multi-select notes among the matches, then apply or de-apply one or more tags to all these notes at once.
There's no way to do this in Simplenote. The only bulk operations are Delete and Pin-to-top.

Currently, there is no way to be alerted when a change is made by another contributor on a shared note.

The only way to download your data off Simplenote is via a "download zip" feature that unfortunately loses all the semantic structure of your data (tags, for instance).

The only way you can share notes with others is with a link you're given when you publish your note. There is no integrated social media sharing if you directly want to post your note to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There are two themes available, the default theme and a dark theme.
Both use only the single solid color (either white or black) for the background, so there is a lack of visual cues to separate what you're looking at.

You can only work completely offline when using an iOS or Android device. For your browser there's only a clumsy 'offline mode' available. If you didn't hit the switch before you have the need for working offline (for instance: in a meeting, at a customer's location, in a plane, etc.) than your out of luck... no tool for note taking. Especially with all those HTML5-capable browsers and the Chrome App store (including Desktop apps), this limits the usage of this commercial product.

A basic monthly subscription ($92 USD) gives you no more than XMind FREE except PDF exporting. XMind paid with PDF export is $79. $20 less for lifetime use of an app with more features as of writing.

A free XMind app/online account or MindMup account both provide unlimited mind maps.

Evernote is the number one 'store-everything-archive' when it comes to unstructured data or information. MindMeister markets there Evernote integration as a very cool feature. But this integration is very basic and buggy: only the last 50 (?) notes from Evernote's default notebook are shown in the list, and it takes about 30 seconds to one full minute to generate that list. After that it takes about the same amount of time to add a copy of the selected note as an attachment to a topic. MindMeister support is well aware of this poor implementation, but doesn't put any effort in fixing it.

For example, it lacks the possibility to define a long text under the node title showing it in a permanent way. The software is 1000 less powerful than Microsoft Visio. Meanwhile it should just be more specific.