Ulysses III vs Workflowy

A few themes are baked in and a big selection of user-contributed styles to choose from are available on the Ulysses Style Exchange.

Ulysses has a clean, unobtrusive, easy to overview interface that allows focusing on writing. By default it's split up in 3 panes with sidebar, sheet pane and content pane from left to right. Unnecessary panes can be hidden.

Markdown formatting can be applied from the right-click menu, with keyboard shortcuts or from an optional markup bar. Necessary elemants to links, images, and footnotes are added by filling in a popover.

Pasted rich text and imported Word documents keep their formatting when converted to Markdown.

Attachments such as images, text notes, keywords and writing goals can be added to content. And to organize them keywords can be added.

Ulysses saves everything in the app so there's no file management outside of the editor involved. It organizes content in groups (folders) and sheets (files), has a powerful, easy to use search and allows adding keywords to attachments to help them be organized and found quickly.

Groups can have an unlimited amount of subgroups and the title of subgroup shows up in the pane view. Sheets can be split up, merged, glued together and easily moved around in the sheet pane by dragging and dropping. Great for splitting up larger documents into manageable chunks while still keeping an overview of the whole project and having the ability to move sections around quickly.

Contents of a group can be filtered by text, keywords or change date within headings, code blocks, images or any other marked up text. Filters can contain a combination of conditions and be saved to make a new group. Saved filters can be moved around to different groups and will return filtered results for that group. Selecting multiple groups will show the combined sheets of those groups.

You can operate Ulysses via keyboard only. No need for mouse.

The editor can export to Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML, ePub and PDF with customizable styles for each option. It can also preview HTML directly in the browser.

There's no live-preview pane or an external previewer necessary. Ulysses displays styling inline.

Ulysses has options for highlighting current line, showing line numbers and enabling typewriter mode. Typewriter mode defines a place on the screen where the cursor should be so eyes are kept focusing in one place on the screen.

Content can be synchronised across devices via Apple's iCloud.

Ulysses comes with an excellently written documentation that covers everything there is to know about the software, including an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts as well as short and sweet introduction to Markdown and its benefits.

Ulysses is available for both macOS and iOS. This, combined with the cloud syncing allows users to work on their projects using any Apple device they have at the time.

The editor tracks statistics that shows how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages a document contains and estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers. The statistics display in a popover that can be torn-off so it's constantly visible.

Goals such as how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages should be written can be set to help get motivated.

Groups, tagging, and notes for each document.

Staff is helpful in answering questions on how to use the app.

A time (10hrs) and usage limited demo for Ulysses III is available.

Any sublist can be viewed as a top-level list. This sounds simple but makes WorkFlowy extremely powerful. For example, the same line item, "write my book," can simultaneously be a to-do in a task list and the container for an entire working document.

Interface has no clutter. It allows focusing on thoughts to note down. This keeps things simple and easy to understand, which can help keep everything organized in an intuitive manner.

All notes are part of a list, which makes it easy to organize everything. Nested lists allow for organizing notes into hierarchical categories of infinite depth. All lists can be folded. WorkFlowy also has tags and instant full-text search.

While adding a list of to-do on web, it syncs with iPhone and iPad apps very quickly. This way you can jump between devices with no delay of up to date content.

Enables users to focus on specific topic area, which is referred to as "hoisting" within Workflowy.

Enables users to search by tags.

WorkFlowy can be accessed from either a browser or their apps, which include a Chrome app for desktops as well as an iOS and Android app. This makes it easy to access ones notes no matter the platform or device being used.

Workflowy's 'everything is in a tree' interface makes it easy to keep expanding on topics, no matter where, or how deep in the hierarchy they are.

WorkFlowy allows entering many tasks very quickly – especially useful for meeting minutes or a "brain dump" when you have to type fast. After typing in all your thoughts, it's very easy to organize and sort multiple groups at once.

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is a commonly used standard for text exchange. With two-way support for OPML you are never locked into Workflowy. Importing/exporting via copy/paste of entire outlines is a snap.

You can have bold, italic, and underlined text.

There are number of talented coders who help customize WorkFlowy with extensions and styles. It has an active blog and welcomes collaboration.

WorkFlowy can send you an email with that day's activity. It's a great way to track progress.