I use a PC and can find only one decent cloud outlining app. The Outliner of Giants: http://www.theoutlinerofgiants.com

I know there are a few iPad apps, and some are good, but I don't generally use my iPad as a productivity device. I have tried, and I know some do and love it, but it's not for me (though I love my iPad for many other things). I prefer doing the bulk of my work on a laptop. Are there any other online outliners besides the one I linked to above?

Yes, I have tons of outlining programs *installed* on my laptops (I'm an admitted CRIMPer) - just looking for online options.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Just found a few others. I'm sure a lot of these have probably been discussed, but not specifically in a thread about online apps.
(Or if there was, I missed it.)

- workflowy.com

- checkvlist.com

- fargo.io

- listography.com (not quite an outliner - but interesting concept)

Just a few you haven't mentioned.

http://sproutliner.com/ - multi-column, but not a writing tool.

http://www.tidylines.com OK, but no word count, and can't find a way to save on that site.

http://checkvist.com/ - jaslar/pattern
I like this one. Very spiffy. Easy to use, easy to watch things on screen, can be shared. Good export to HTML.

http://loosestitch.com/ - costs so didn't sign up. There is a free trial.

http://www.lucidgreen.net - Very undeveloped.

http://thinklinkr.com/
Pretty good. Free account is public. Otherwise, $5 a month.

Coggle (through Google) (more of a mind map)
http://www.coggle.it/

CarbonFin Outliner
https://cfoutliner.appspot.com/

Oak Outliner (local storage)
http://oakoutliner.com/

Mango markdown editor (oak outliner plus markdown)
http://mangomarkdown.com/

Don't forget the sensational Gingko:

www.gingkoapp.com

You could include MindMup here too: https://www.mindmup.com/

Donovan wrote:

I use a PC and can find only one decent cloud outlining app. The
Outliner of Giants: http://www.theoutlinerofgiants.com

I checked out the Outliner of Giants a few times over the years but always came away disappointed. If you're looking for something similar, I think WorkFlowy is hard to beat. It's a single-pane outliner with inline notes and hoisting. Exports formatted, plain text, and OPML, and has excellent automatic syncing with a variety of clients across several platforms (iOS, Android, Chrome OS). Moreover, you don't even need to use it in a browser, as it has its standalone Chrome app that is a cleaner interface, and more importantly, it works offline and syncs back automatically when you reconnect.

It is interesting how many outlining options there are in the cloud, and yet how sparse the outliners for Windows have been over the years. I wonder why that is. Any thoughts?

Steve Z.

http://thinklinkr.com/
Pretty good. Free account is public. Otherwise, $5 a month.

thinklinkr shut down in Dec 2012. I had only been testing it for a bit, so I didn't have anything important there. Still, I didn't receive any warning that they were disappearing. I just happened to go to their site one day and it didn't respond. The author sent me a link to a mobile read-only interface that was still available for a while longer to extract my data, but that's also gone now. Something to consider if you're moving your data to the clouds.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

It is interesting how many outlining options there are in the cloud, and
yet how sparse the outliners for Windows have been over the years. I
wonder why that is. Any thoughts?

My guess is that

1) the cloud (i.e. subscription) is the only way to make money out of an outliner these days, especially as

2) outliner software users seem to be a fairly small niche to make it worthwhile to serve;

3) there is an expectation today that new software is multi-platform and can be synced, so probably developers start with the cloud solution and mobile (iOS, Android etc.) clients, and develop Windows clients later (if ever). It probably doesn't help that Microsoft have decided to conflate the Windows desktop and mobile operating systems...

I don't know how common my experience is. But in the course of a day, I move from Windows to Mac to iPad to Android. Outliners (and to a lesser extent, mind maps) really capture the way I think. Inevitably, I want to work on files I may well have started on another platform.

Add multiple devices/OSs to the rise of cloud technology, and I think web-based outliners are the obvious and inevitable solution.