When comparing DEVONthink vs TagSpaces, the Slant community recommends TagSpaces for most people. In the question“What are the best Evernote alternatives?” TagSpaces is ranked 31st while DEVONthink is ranked 38th. The most important reason people chose TagSpaces is:
TagSpaces is free and open source making it easily extendable with the help of extensions.
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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 Open source
TagSpaces is free and open source making it easily extendable with the help of extensions.
Pro Your can choose your cloud file storage
Using only files and no databases let's you make the decision with which cloud file sync service to use, making sure your notes are made available on other devices and platforms. It works great with Owncloud, Nextcloud, Dropbox or Google Drive.
Pro No web service or database lock in
The backend is simply the directory and file structure on your harddrive.
Pro No cloud
TagSpaces is running completely offline, sending no data to any cloud based service, unlike many Evernote alternatives.
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 It renames your files in order to tag them
The positive side of this drawback is that this way the tags are easily transferred to other platforms by simply syncing them.