Athens vs DEVONthink
When comparing Athens vs DEVONthink, the Slant community recommends DEVONthink for most people. In the question“What are the best alternatives to Roam Research?” DEVONthink is ranked 12th while Athens is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose DEVONthink is:
File types containing text are indexed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Athens is open-source, private, extensible, and community-driven
Pro You can use Athens as a local desktop app that saves data to your filesystem or with a self-hosted server
Pro You can modify Athens's source code. We are also building a plugin system for custom themes, keybindings, and integrations with other data sources
Pro Athens has [[bidirectional links]] and ((block references))
Take notes on anything from any page. Just [[link]] or ((reference)) another page or block - and voilà! - you can now go to this page and see all the places that linked back to it. The next time you press [[ or ((, you will be indexing through your previous notes, helping you connect the dots. You've started creating a graph of your knowledge!
Pro Written in Clojure
Ensures possibility of feature parity with Roam.
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.
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.