January 2, 2020 at 8:43pm
Agenda and NotePlan: two apps that ostensibly do the same thing. They provide a method by which to take notes with regard to meetings, projects and daily happenings.
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Noteplan 3 Setapp
Design decisions
Both apps have been carefully designed but have ended up operating quite differently to one another. Agenda feels practically overwrought. It feels slow in operation, fiddly with a range of sliding panes, non-standard drop-down menus and a hybrid rich-text/markdown environment. Everything that is put into the app is tied up into its proprietary datastore.
In use, I often feel as thought I’m fighting against Agenda’s design. Yet it has the killer feature of being able to link together meetings in a continuous timeline.
Additionally, it allows me to attach files, take photos and create a rich tapestry of notes in relation to a project. The only problem is that because the note-taking itself is so obtuse, many of my notes say something like“refer to notes taken in OmniOutliner”. Not great.
NotePlan feels lightweight. It feels like I’m writing in a straight-forward text field that supports markdown. In essence, behind the scenes this is what is happening. NotePlan creates a .md text file for each day that a note is created and stores it in the file system. It supports tagging which is how project notes can be tied together with the support of a search filter.
Noteplan Vs Roam
My usage
I used NotePlan consistently for about 6 months, but realised that I wasn’t getting any benefit from the history of notes I had taken. Things were getting lost, rendering the whole use of the app almost pointless.
So I purchased Agenda and moved in. This does a better job of enabling the review of notes, but the friction associated with getting data in is the roadblock.
Both apps offer feature parity across macOS, iOS and iPadOS.
How to buy
NotePlan is available via Setapp or as a standalone purchase. Agenda has a fair freemium/pseudo-subscription model whereby you keep forever the features the app has at that moment, plus anything added in the coming 12 months. If you want features beyond that, you pay once again.
The upshot
It’s hard to say which is better. They are both great, and both infuriating. I’m currently in the Agenda camp, but only just. I continue to look over the parapets to see how the other is performing. I own both, so the barrier to entry is low. Switching costs associated with data migration is the major factor, and that is not much.
I cannot provide a recommendation to others, but I am interested in alternative views.
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Posted by Drewster
Jan 7, 2020 at 12:55 PM
I own both Agenda and NotePlan, across macOS and iOS.
I recently wrote a short blog post attempting to outline the challenge faced choosing between these apps - https://canion.me/agenda-and-noteplan
I thought it might be of interest to CRIMPers here on the forum.
Posted by satis
Jan 8, 2020 at 10:47 PM
FYI a new version of NotePlan just came out with live Markdown rendering. Looks good.
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.
Netflix app free download for mac. Cheers!
Bill
Posted by Drewster
Jan 9, 2020 at 10:55 AM
Thanks for your enthusiastic reply, Bill!
You’ve inspired me to take another serious go with NotePlan. I agree with you about its pace of development being rapid; the latest Markdown rendering update is another example.
Noteplan Review
I do find myself futzing too much with Agenda - I’m going to try to use tags and saved searches with NotePlan to try to bring the Agenda timeline feature to it. The wiki linking feature is also intriguing. It’s not something I’ve used in NotePlan, but I find myself using it quite often in The Archive, so I’m getting in the habit now.
I would like to use Notebooks (in fact, I’ve pre-ordered the new iOS version) but since I’ve removed myself from the clutches of Dropbox I’ve not found a sync solution that works well. I tried using WebDAV to my Fastmail account. While it works, it was too clunky.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 10, 2020 at 01:27 PM
And as predicted, good ole’ Eduard has upgraded NotePlan again to support attached images.
You can also adjust line lengths.
Isn’t he lovely!?
Cheers,
Bill
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