When comparing DEVONthink vs Zoho Notebook, the Slant community recommends Zoho Notebook for most people. In the question“What are the best Evernote alternatives?” Zoho Notebook is ranked 27th while DEVONthink is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Zoho Notebook is:
Zoho (the company behind Notebook) has been providing free, advertisement-free, productivity applications for over a decade, and this one is no different.
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 Completely free, ad-free, with unlimited devices
Zoho (the company behind Notebook) has been providing free, advertisement-free, productivity applications for over a decade, and this one is no different.
Pro Cloud sync
As an Evernote alternative, Notebook securely stores notes to the cloud, allowing you to access notes on all of your mobile devices, while the sync is seamless. Also, web app support is coming soon.
Pro Easy to use
If you've ever used Evernote, then you know it has lot's of menus and that doing simple things requires lots of taps. Notebook is designed to be more functional, and lets you take and access notes quickly.
Pro Pre-built checklist and audio notes
Rather than create a checklist within a text note, Notebook has a pre-built checklist card, which makes creating them really easy. Plus the items you check off move to the bottom of the note. Audio notes work the same way. Rather than treat audio notes like attachments (as Evernote does), Notebook has a pre-built audio note which is really nice, very similar to Evernote in that fashion, which makes it a good alternative.
Pro Great UI
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.
Con Non free/libre (proprietary)
Con Migrate from Evernote non functional
The migrate from Evernote function resulted in blank notes. The headers are there but blank notes
Con Available on limited platforms
Currently there is no web app or Windows version available.
They are working on both, but there is no set release date.
