Agenda versus NotePlan

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 9, 2020 at 10:20 AM

I like your review of the two apps, Drewster, but agree above all with your conclusions about Agenda: it’s slow. Nice, good-looking, but confused and slow.

Whereas NotePlan (speaking from my own experience, which is primarily text-based, so I’m not so interested in the ability to display images/attach files) is fast. In several senses of the word: it is fast to update, fast to sync - and also continues to make rapid progress, driven by the enthusiastic Eduard.

The recent advances, including nested tagging, savable filters/smart searches and rendered markdown, have made it a very attractive, very usable environment. The simple, user-friendly interaction of the Notes and Calendar components is outstanding. There are other multi-component task managers that interact in similar ways, but in my experience none are as immediately and practically easy to use as NotePlan (not even the exceptional but relatively complex Pagico). What I’m particularly impressed by is the way NotePlan has made steady, sensible progress from a very simple initial premise (which I looked at a couple of years ago but wasn’t especially impressed by) to a powerful, flexible information management machine. The recent expansion of Apple Calendar/Reminders integration is a great step forward.

I have no doubt that at some time in the near future, Eduard will add the ability to attach files and display images. NotePlan’s simple folder/file-based architecture make that step an obvious one.

Agenda, by contrast, started off with some impressive goals, and achieved a number of them at an early stage. But in doing so, managed to restrict its architecture in ways that are, I suspect, now hampering the developers as they struggle to implement things like multi-window viewing. I’m moving remnants of personal data away from Agenda and will be unsubscribing as soon as I have done so. Stuff that involves graphics is going straight into Notebooks. Stuff that involves calendaring will go straight into NotePlan.

Cheers!
Bill