Personally (by my admittedly idiosyncratic standards) there are only four outliner apps for iOS/macOS that I think are worth mentioning: Workflowy, Dynalist, Outlinely, and Mubu. As the state of these outliners seems to constantly be in flux, I think it is useful to have an occasional update on their development:

Workflowy hasn't shown much improvement on the iOS front, but they have hired new staff, started updating the web app more regularly, and introduced a desktop app, so I think we can expect to see some improvements soon on the iOS front as well.

Dynalist keeps improving their web app and desktop apps very regularly. In my mind their web app is currently the best all around outliner. They are also aware of the problems on their iOS app and claim to be working on them.

Mubu have also shown regular improvement. Because of the Chinese interface and Chinese servers it is not recommended for everybody, but in my mind it is currently the best compromise between a native iOS app and a Workflowy-like desktop app. I still hope, however, that Dynalist or Workflowy eventually release an iOS app that is at least as good, if not better than Mubu's. But because they don't plan on writing native apps (as far as I know) I feel that this might not happen any time soon.

Outlinely, an early favorite of mine, seems to be dead in the water. There have been no improvements or even updates to their blog or twitter feed since June, over four months ago. I wouldn't mind so much, except they charge a heck of a lot for the app and the subscription fee, so one would like to see some regular updates and much needed improvements (especially on the desktop) ...

So far I have not seen any new players enter this increasingly crowded field. My personal fantasy would be for Dynalist to buy Outlinely and incorporate the app into their own product...

I'm fond of Outlinely, and use it a lot, but I've sent them a list of things that really do need to be improved.

Glam Development have a history of going very quiet for months at a time. It's very irritating when a subscription app is involved, however. And it doesn't increase one's confidence in what they're doing. I haven't had any replies to my e-mail, either; when I sent them some suggestions last year, they responded quite quickly.

I haven't heard of Mubu - thanks for the tip.

OmniOutliner remains very irritating. For a relatively high-priced app, it has some extraordinary failings. I only use the "Lite" version (Essentials), but after trying to set it up to be as neat as Outlinely, I was frustrated by a very simple thing: if you switch off checkboxes for certain items, but not for others (for a list of tasks under headings, for example), when you sync to and fro from iOS, you find that checkboxes have automatically been restored for all items, even though you explicitly switched them off for some of them (headers). This is remarkably stupid for such a (potentially) powerful app. I shall write to them.

I agree that Dynalist is making impressive progress. I shall have to decide about Outlinely. I've been urging Bear and the team behind Ulysses to include folding for a long time, but they're both being slow/coy about doing so, despite expressing (mild) enthusiasm. If Bear had folding, it would be the obvious shoo-in for Outlinely. Despite Ulysses's many admirable qualities, I find it remarkably slow to load, which makes it a less-than-ideal notes manager (although it is, of course, a great writing tool).

Neo (on the Mac App Store, successor to Tao) remains a very full-featured, if relatively uncelebrated option (uncelebrated perhaps because its UI takes a degree of learning).

And of course there's always Tinderbox, which is a lot more than an outliner, but can function very successfully as one.

Both of course, however, only macOS.

Yes, I think the true value of outliners only really becomes apparent when you can use them across multiple platforms.

Actually, having just run another experiment with OmniOutliner, I have to say it looks laughably outdated against Outlinely, even though the latter has been languishing for a few months. The whole thing is just so much more sophisticated with its library (irritatingly, you can't reposition items in the library easily, one of the things I've whinged about to the developers), its fast keystrokes, its broad range of formatting options, checkboxes, done status, support for Markdown AND rich text, etc. No, it's not got the same support for styles as OmniOutliner, but I find the rather rigid style-based approach of the latter somewhat off-putting. And it doesn't work well in Essentials, either (the style hierarchies aren't applied correctly).

Let's just hope the Glam Development team redeem themselves with another slew of updates! Their last burst of activity resulted in a number of impressive improvements to Outlinely. And I won't mind if they don't include support for styles...

I have to say I consider Outlinely superior to both DynaList and Workflowy. But obviously that's just my own opinion ;-)

OmniOutliner seems to me to be geared toward presenting nice-looking outlines, rather than to creating working documents.

Do TaskPaper documents still open okay in Taskmator or Task on Paper in iOS? If so, there's another option.

Steve Z.

Outlinely, an early favorite of mine, seems to be dead in the water.
There have been no improvements or even updates to their blog or twitter
feed since June, over four months ago.

As a programmer and running a very small software company (2 persons) for a while, i can tell you that 4 month is no time at all. You should start worrying if development stopped for a year, and even then it can be a huge refactoring behind the scenes to implement new features.

One other option is Cloud Outliner Pro. I hadn't used this in awhile, but just reinstalled on my MacBook and iPad. I set it up to sync via iCloud (there's also a proprietary server sync and an Evernote sync), and it worked okay. Development isn't rapid, but there was a recent update to the iPad version.

More info here: https://xwavesoft.com/cloud-outliner-for-iphone-ipad-mac-os-x.html

Steve Z.

One more note. I love Dynalist, but I've found a bug in the iOS version that makes it unusable on my iPad. I used it once with a blue tooth keyboard and now it behaves as if my keyboard is always linked to my iPad. So it doesn't pop up the onscreen keyboard when I try to edit something. Fortunately I can access Dynalist through Safari on the IPad, and that works just fine.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

OmniOutliner seems to me to be geared toward presenting nice-looking
outlines, rather than to creating working documents.


Steve Z.

My overall view too, although, in an effort to curb my Crimping, I continue to use it frequently.

And in my view, the absence of clones remains OO's biggest flaw.

I agree, especially in an outliner that costs that much. On the other hand, do any of the MacOS/iOS outliners have cloning?

Hugh wrote:

And in my view, the absence of clones remains OO's biggest flaw.

OmniOutliner might appear "old fashioned" -- but it has features that many / most "outliners" do not have:

- By using columns we can have a nearly unlimited number of customer "attributes" / "fields", or whatever you want to call them -- without resorting to fragile things like hashtags, tags, or TaskPaper's @something construct

- OO syncs flawlessly across platforms -- always has -- on iCloud or on OmniGroup's still-free OmniPresence -- I don't have to subscribe to something just to use my own hardware

- It has a large, active development staff behind it

- I supports multiple export formats

I really like (and frequently use) the other apps mentioned in this thread, but when it comes to doing work for clients, I always return to OO.

I second everything Paul says about OmniOutliner. It's conservative about adding new features, but the amount of attention that's gone into making its existing features work smoothly and flawlessly sets it apart--in my opinion--as the highest quality hard-core outliner out there.

The one thing I'm disappointed about is Omni's decision way-back-when to move all personal task-management features into a separate product (OmniFocus). I find personal task management to be something that's far more effective when integrated with the outliner I use for my working and reference notes. Grandview and Circus Ponies Notebook both could do this, but alas neither is around today. I know there are web options, but I manage far too much confidential information to trust a web-based solution.

I'm also a fan of TaskPaper mainly because of its brilliant use of formatting conventions built on top of a text file format.

Another way of defining my personal "idiosyncratic standards" for an outliner might be to say that I want a Workflowy-inspired outliner that works across platforms.It still seems to me that only the four outliners in my original post meet such a requirement. Other people may not like the workflowy-model of how an outliner should work, but for me it is close to perfect, and Dynalist has come the closest to perfecting it on desktop, while Mubu and Outlinely have done the best on iOS.

I've been an OO fan since the early days, but rarely use the app now. Mainly because styling is such a mess in my opinion. Completely unintuitive.

I mostly use Workflowy, in the hope that their iOS apps will finally (after 4years) see some development.

One of my all time favourites, that lacks a companion macOS app but does allow access over wifi is Trunk Notes. It's a mobile wiki with really cool features allowing some nifty setups.

Voodoopad was another great app killed by those folks at plausible labs who kept promising, but never delivering. I was so sad that Gus sold it.

Yes, I love TrunkNotes, and remain baffled as to why there isn't a desktop version. But it's a wonderful iOS app. If I spent all day working on an iPad, I'd use it much more than I do.

Having said that, Bear and Outlinely have much better search functions, and allow you to connect to individual notes as well, so they're perfectly capable of acting as a personal wiki.

Ulysses still doesn't allow you to link to individual notes; there are a number of areas where Ulysses needs to take some big steps forward, IMHO. It's very good at what it does, but to be the all-round writing app it claims to be, it needs to be capable of a little more.

I generally don't like outliners because they tend to be bucket systems (write a lot of information in a single file). They are less friendly to Devonthink's AI.

- I tried OO many times; gave up with it

But, I am wondering which of the apps should be considered as outliner and which do not.

is Keep It outliner? The difference between Bear and Keep It is quite minimal. I, however, find Keep It more useful than Bear.

What is and what isn't an outliner is open for interpretation. For some it seems that anything that allows you to generate a hierarchy is an outliner, but my own definition is that a genuine outliner is a single-pane app that allows you to add notes inline in the single pane. The intent of this thread appears to restrict the discussion to the latter definition.

Dellu wrote:

I generally don't like outliners because they tend to be bucket systems
(write a lot of information in a single file). They are less friendly to
Devonthink's AI.

- I tried OO many times; gave up with it

But, I am wondering which of the apps should be considered as outliner
and which do not.

is Keep It outliner? The difference between Bear and Keep It is quite
minimal. I, however, find Keep It more useful than Bear.

That's a good working definition -- and given that definition I'd suggest the universe of software discussed in this thread could expand to included "mind mapping". For me, that means iThoughtsX and iThoughts on iOS/macOS. It's a great notetaker / outliner and syncs seamlessly -- better than an of its peers, IMO.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

What is and what isn't an outliner is open for interpretation. For some
it seems that anything that allows you to generate a hierarchy is an
outliner, but my own definition is that a genuine outliner is a
single-pane app that allows you to add notes inline in the single pane.
The intent of this thread appears to restrict the discussion to the
latter definition.

Thanks for the reminder about iThoughts, Paul - yes, it is quite impressive, and remarkably flexible, too. I've been playing (again), and although I prefer Outlinely for sheer speed and convenience (its syncing is also very quick), iThoughts at its best is extremely elegant - and has the added advantage of being able to act like a genuine task manager (complete with reminders etc.), which Outlinely doesn't (yet) do.

Luhmann wrote:

Workflowy hasn't shown much improvement on the iOS front, but they have
hired new staff, started updating the web app more regularly, and
introduced a desktop app, so I think we can expect to see some
improvements soon on the iOS front as well.

Maybe your optimism is not unjustified, considering their call for alpha testers:

https://blog.workflowy.com/2017/11/07/help-us-design-workflowy-join-workflowy-alpha/

It has been about a year since I wrote this last post, and nothing much has changed. Outlinely shows some signs of life, and has a new lifetime subscription, but many of the things that bother me about the app's UX still haven't been fixed and my emails to the developer (since paying for a subscription!) have all gone un-answered. Dynalist continues to ignore major problems that cause freezing on iOS. So I remain stuck between these two imperfect options. Workflowy has done nothing other than update their fonts (as far as I can tell). Hopefully the next year will bring some more substantial improvements to one of these platforms, or something new...

Luhmann wrote:

Another way of defining my personal "idiosyncratic standards" for an
outliner might be to say that I want a Workflowy-inspired outliner that
works across platforms.It still seems to me that only the four outliners
in my original post meet such a requirement. Other people may not like
the workflowy-model of how an outliner should work, but for me it is
close to perfect, and Dynalist has come the closest to perfecting it on
desktop, while Mubu and Outlinely have done the best on iOS.

Luhmann wrote:

It has been about a year since I wrote this last post, and nothing much
has changed.

I prefer my files to reside locally or on the cloud of my choice and I'd consider jumping onto Outlinely if I had any confidence in its continuing development, but so far it seems more like a side project that got some attention over the summer.

OmniOutliner has the most refined outlining on Mac and iOS but development has stagnated as Omni puts virtually all its efforts into OmniFocus and its upcoming web version. It's what I'm still using, not all that happily, with occasional sojourns into TaskPaper.

I miss Tree.

I wish Ulysses or IA Writer built up outlining/folding into their products.

Gingko seems somewhat lost in the weeds - two different codebases, the web client being deprecated (then not, and now ...?) with the Mac app still being too rudimentary for me to use or trust.

Dynalist's devs appear to have solid plans and (slow) follow-through, but their pricing is off the mark. If Checkvist were not so ugly - and were less clunky - I might consider using it for a year.

Worth pointing out that a pro plan with Dynalist (as expensive as it is - I signed up when it was cheaper than it is now) gives you daily backups on Dropbox in a standard format, so you always have local copies of all your outlines.

I just don't understand how they can justify charging so much when their iOS app has been broken for over a year... I guess most users don't use the app enough to have problems. (It is only broken if you have large outlines or many outlines, or something like that which causes the app to freeze up for several minutes on launch.)