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What It Is

Kumu is a complex relationship mapping platform developed by Kumu Inc. Its core goal is to turn the relationships between people, systems, concepts, and resources in a “messy world” into interactive, presentable maps. It is closer to a network analysis, systems thinking, and visual collaboration tool than a general-purpose flowchart app, making it suitable for stakeholder analysis, social network mapping, community asset mapping, causal loop diagrams, and similar use cases.

Core Features and Collaboration

The product supports stakeholder mapping, systems mapping, social network mapping, community asset mapping, concept mapping, and Lombardi diagrams. Feature-wise, it offers decoration, filtering, clustering, spreadsheet import, a presentation builder, a publishing platform, and the ability to embed interactive maps in blogs or websites. For collaboration, each project can have unlimited collaborators, maps, and views; public projects can control who can edit, while private projects are accessible only to authorized users. Pro workspaces further support view-only, edit, and admin permissions, a project activity feed, real-time comments, custom branding, and private project archiving.

Pricing and Deployment

Kumu’s pricing is relatively transparent: registration and unlimited public projects are free, and private projects come with a two-week trial. The Basic workspace is free, with private projects priced at $9/month/project; the Pro workspace costs $10/month/workspace, with private projects at $20/month/project. Students can apply for 3 free private projects, and nonprofits and community groups may use postcard pricing. Enterprise supports private instances, either self-hosted on-premises or hosted by Kumu in the cloud, with pricing quoted based on requirements.

Security, Compliance, and Support

Kumu.io is hosted on AWS and supports 2FA. Enterprise offers a 99.95% SLA, SAML single sign-on, air gap compatibility, priority support, invoice payments, plus training and consulting services. The terms note that EU data users can review the GDPR Policy and request a DPA. However, in the shared cloud instance, customer data resides in the same database and servers, so teams handling sensitive data should prioritize evaluating Enterprise.

Pros, Cons, and Best Fit

Its strengths include generous free public projects, deep vertical capabilities for relationship mapping, no installation required, unlimited collaborators, and deployment options ranging from cloud to private instances. Downsides include per-project pricing for private projects, which can become expensive as the number of projects grows; no public Enterprise pricing; no visible open API information; and no disclosed Chinese localization. It is well suited to social impact organizations, research teams, consultants, strategy departments, and enterprise teams that need to explain complex networks.

Access from China

The available information does not mention mainland China access, ICP filing, local nodes, RMB payments, or local service support, so China accessibility is unknown. If you have higher requirements for network access, payment, or data compliance, you may also want to evaluate Miro, Lucidchart, Gephi, or domestic whiteboard/graph-mapping tools as alternatives.