I own both Agenda and NotePlan, across macOS and iOS.

I recently wrote a short blog post attempting to outline the challenge faced choosing between these apps - https://canion.me/agenda-and-noteplan

I thought it might be of interest to CRIMPers here on the forum.

FYI a new version of NotePlan just came out with live Markdown rendering. Looks good.

https://i.redd.it/iufs6gu4ol941.gif

https://www.noteplan.co/blog/markdown-live-rendering-making-noteplan-easier-to-use/

I like your review of the two apps, Drewster, but agree above all with your conclusions about Agenda: it’s slow. Nice, good-looking, but confused and slow.

Whereas NotePlan (speaking from my own experience, which is primarily text-based, so I’m not so interested in the ability to display images/attach files) is fast. In several senses of the word: it is fast to update, fast to sync - and also continues to make rapid progress, driven by the enthusiastic Eduard.

The recent advances, including nested tagging, savable filters/smart searches and rendered markdown, have made it a very attractive, very usable environment. The simple, user-friendly interaction of the Notes and Calendar components is outstanding. There are other multi-component task managers that interact in similar ways, but in my experience none are as immediately and practically easy to use as NotePlan (not even the exceptional but relatively complex Pagico). What I’m particularly impressed by is the way NotePlan has made steady, sensible progress from a very simple initial premise (which I looked at a couple of years ago but wasn’t especially impressed by) to a powerful, flexible information management machine. The recent expansion of Apple Calendar/Reminders integration is a great step forward.

I have no doubt that at some time in the near future, Eduard will add the ability to attach files and display images. NotePlan’s simple folder/file-based architecture make that step an obvious one.

Agenda, by contrast, started off with some impressive goals, and achieved a number of them at an early stage. But in doing so, managed to restrict its architecture in ways that are, I suspect, now hampering the developers as they struggle to implement things like multi-window viewing. I’m moving remnants of personal data away from Agenda and will be unsubscribing as soon as I have done so. Stuff that involves graphics is going straight into Notebooks. Stuff that involves calendaring will go straight into NotePlan.

Cheers!
Bill

Thanks for your enthusiastic reply, Bill!

You've inspired me to take another serious go with NotePlan. I agree with you about its pace of development being rapid; the latest Markdown rendering update is another example.

I do find myself futzing too much with Agenda - I'm going to try to use tags and saved searches with NotePlan to try to bring the Agenda timeline feature to it. The wiki linking feature is also intriguing. It's not something I've used in NotePlan, but I find myself using it quite often in The Archive, so I'm getting in the habit now.

I would like to use Notebooks (in fact, I've pre-ordered the new iOS version) but since I've removed myself from the clutches of Dropbox I've not found a sync solution that works well. I tried using WebDAV to my Fastmail account. While it works, it was too clunky.

And as predicted, good ole’ Eduard has upgraded NotePlan again to support attached images.

You can also adjust line lengths.

Isn’t he lovely!?

Cheers,
Bill

Worth noting, incidentally, that you can also drag and drop non-image files onto NotePlan, whereupon it will insert an absolute link to the file in question. Here’s a typical example:

[completed-form-en.pdf](file:///Users/Bill/Downloads/completed-form-en.pdf)

Useful if one has a very well-organised hard drive (or is anticipating Eduard by placing attached files in a separate folder/folders in the NotePlan directory). Not so useful if you’re using NotePlan across multiple devices (unless one is an inveterate Eduard-anticipator, as above, in which case one is probably doctoring links in any case).

Cheers!
Bill

I posted separately about the image thing, too. Very nice. Thanks @Eduard

I turned off my Agenda subscription and stopped using it. The interface was way too fiddly. I think they made some decisions early in the design that have locked the app into the mode of being dependent on endless mousing and clicking. It's a pretty app but not practical. On iOS/iPadOS there are so many panes and windows to deal with that it's a mess and useless in split screen mode.

I think NotePlan is winning the calendar-linked-note taking app race.

I didn’t see this post when I replied to Paul’s other one. But I heartily agree. Agenda looks great, but NotePlan just feels right.

There is one thing that I find so terribly annoying about Noteplan that despite liking it overall I stopped using it altogether. The calendar and notes are so disconnected that it sometimes feels as though two programs (calendar, notes) have simply been put together in one room but they aren't talking.

My quick jobs just live in lists associated to days in the calendar, whereas tasks that are associated to projects reside in the projects. When it comes to planning my day, the two dates do appear in the day view in the calendar, but once you schedule them to happen some other day, it only ever applies to the tasks on that day, not the project tasks that are also supposed to be happening that same day, although both appear in the same view nonetheless. To reschedule those project taks, you have to move over to that project, reschedule the tasks for that project, too. Repeat for every task that was sent to day X from any other project.

Am I doing something wrong here? I hear you say I should perhaps just get more done and reschedule less but that is hardly a valid argument in these circles, right?

That is the big flaw for me too, unless I am also missing something. In fact, the saved searches do not work correctly on tasks stored in notes.

I have emailed Eduard about this a few times and he recognizes the problem and has promised to correct it. If I hadn't seen so many updates and fixes from him I may not be using NotePlan now either.

I have recently started putting most of my tasks in the calendars, whereas I used to store them in separate files by project. But it became too difficult reschedule tasks inside of notes.I plan on moving everything back to the notes once a fix is made. But it is a small short term price for me for the amount of features I have been receiving.

It just seems that the emphasis is on people who store tasks in calendar files, not notes. I expect that to change in the near future.

The other challenge I have is finding my scheduled tasks easily in the notes. Some updates have made that easier, but I always thought having the ability to sort tasks in notes by scheduled date would be helpful.


Prion wrote:

Am I doing something wrong here? I hear you say I should perhaps just
get more done and reschedule less but that is hardly a valid argument in
these circles, right?

I agree that this is a flaw, but after running comparisons with other task/project managers, a relatively minor one - the same problem is fairly ubiquitous.

And as you say, Eduard is so responsive!

Just replying in a little more detail:
- I run projects in separate Notes, and reschedule task dates as necessary. This is relatively easy to do. I follow a specific format in the notes, however, placing all tasks at the top of each project note and using the “Archive Processed Tasks” function to place completed tasks at the bottom of the note. Immediately after the list of tasks, I include the general project info (apart from a couple of customer-related bits of info, e.g. contact, order number etc., right at the top of the Note).

The one weakness of the “Archive Processed Tasks” function is that it only moves the actual tasks - it doesn’t move associated subtasks, indented comments etc. I’ve asked Eduard to look into this and he’s promised to do so. This will make the whole task management aspect much easier. Ironically, the rescheduling function *does* move all related subtasks, comments etc.

When rescheduling daily tasks (i.e. tasks stored in Calendar days, rather than in Notes), I tend to simply cut and paste whole swathes of tasks rather than reschedule them - unless I specifically want/need an audit trail. The “Overdue” list view is a great way to keep an eye on tasks that have drifted by and need to be moved to today/tomorrow/later.

Although there’s still a bit of a disconnect between Calendar and Notes, I’ve found that in general, they are much more coordinated than they used to be, and at least the equal of any other multi-functional task manager I’ve seen (Informant, I’m looking at you here). With the possible exception of Pagico - but the latter is much more sophisticated, and consequently can be just as irritating as NotePlan, albeit for slightly different reasons.

Cheers!
Bill