When comparing DEVONthink vs Dynalist, the Slant community recommends Dynalist for most people. In the question“What are the best knowledge base systems for personal use?” Dynalist is ranked 8th while DEVONthink is ranked 25th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can store any file type
File types containing text are indexed.
Pro Very flexible
An extensive feature set makes it easy to adapt to your work flow.
Pro Completely offline
Pro Sync
Sync between different macs and/or ios devices is fast, safe and easy. You can sync via iCloud, Dropbox, WebDAV or WiFi.
Pro Full text search
Pro Webpage Clipper
A flexible web clipper can add contents of any web page to DevonThink.
Pro One-time purchase vs monthly subscription.
Pro Paperless office functions available in PRO Office version
Includes processing of scanned documents, OCR etc.
The OCR function is based on FineReader and is probably the best one on the market.
Pro Ability to create documents and organize by folder, and search by title
Pro Unlimited notes
Which is perfect for personal knowledgebase.
Pro Search and link to other notes
Pro Bullet hierarchy with zoom
Able to zoom in in bullet points, collapse bullets, move bulleted information, etc.
Pro Create custom user styles
Anyone can create a custom style and share them with the community, which can be found here.
Pro Inline images
Pro Printable shared lists
Cons
Con Only runs on Macs, iPoneOS, iPadOS & Web
It does not run on Windows, Android, and Linux.
Con Stores in a proprietary format
It stores the whole database in a proprietary file package, that you cannot easily access from another app or from the Finder. Considering you might be classifying a huge quantity of files there, it is quite problematic if you want to interact with this data from other applications.
Con Very limited automation
While the marketing claims are about an intelligent document manager, it actually does not offer many automation features, such as automatic classification, tagging and renaming of the files. It's much more like an extended file explorer.
Con Costs US$79.95 for just the Personal version
One-time purchase instead of monthly subscription.