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Add to SafariWhen comparing DEVONthink vs Apple Notes, the Slant community recommends Apple Notes for most people. In the question“What are the best Evernote alternatives?” Apple Notes is ranked 19th while DEVONthink is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose Apple Notes is:
It syncs with iCloud, and surprisingly, also with Gmail and possibly other services too.
Question 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 Sync with other Apple devices via iCloud, other cloud/email services
It syncs with iCloud, and surprisingly, also with Gmail and possibly other services too.
Pro Built-in
It's a default system app, making it easy to find and use since it is already installed.
Pro Rich-text editing
Allows for simple text formatting and making TODO lists with checkboxes.
Pro Attachments
You can add files to notes and then filter notes by attachment types.
Pro Supports sharing
Pro It's fast, and syncing is very dependable
The app launches quickly on both Mac and iOS, it also syncs quickly (in seconds) and very dependably across different Apple devices.
Pro It remains simple to use with a gentle learning curve
Despite the significant new updates in iOS 9 and iOS 10, you can start using Notes immediately, then try/master new features with ease — definitely a gentle learning curve.
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 Cannot export to a format that can be imported again
This makes it obscure and cumbersome to back up your notes as files that could be managed by your backup system. You can export to PDF, but not in bulk; and this isn't the native format that you can easily recover with.
Apple compounds the problem by using some undocumented format for notes. You can, however, back them all up by backing up the files found in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes
