Alfred vs Raycast

Software
1

Those who switched from Alfred to Raycast or vice versa, what are your reasons?

Raycast is more functional, but Alfred feels snappier and lightning fast.

2

I went from Alfred (5+ years) > Raycast (4 months) > Alfred again last year.

Where Alfred shines:

  1. Fewer Keypresses: Every single action in Alfred takes atleast 1-2 fewer keypresses. Either extra options like universal actions, or searching for stuff, or keyword based triggers, or taking actions specific item. Raycast felt I had to be intentional - especially with contextual actions. Alfred felt that it went with the flow.

  2. Fast: Alfred was rapid fast. Open launch it and it shows up instantly. Plus the searching and results were super fast too. Raycast is good, but still felt like 100ms slower than Alfred.

  3. Versatile Ecosystem: Ability to write workflows in different languages. Alfred support multiple languages, bash, python, JS, Go, swift, apple script…whatever you want. Why is this important? Because some things are better/easily available in certain language. e.g., UI related things are best available in JS, while Python/Go allowed other types of operation better. I know from raycast you can trigger some things, but again it feels like a wrapper rather than having direct access to the language tools.

  4. Privacy Aspects: This is more of a Indie dev vs VC backed. Alfred has been the OG and private app for a decade. Their incentives are clear…make a superb product and earn money from software purchases. Raycast is VC backed…so i’m not sure how my data is used. It has access to my clipboard, browsing history, files, and everything else. I didn’t feel comfortable providing access to those things to a VC backed company. Sooner or later, they could potentially use that.

  5. Easier onboarding for non-tech users: Alfred Workflow maker makes it super easy to non-tech user to drag/drop object and glue together a workflow. No possible in Raycast.

Where Raycast is better:

  1. Raycast store: Raycast is definitely better with the Raycast store and provides easy way to browse and install. It definitely pushed Alfred team to release their workflow store https://alfred.app/. Although, every Alfred workflows are a google search away…i never went to their forum to search for workflows. Googled apple notes Alfred and I’d get 5 good results.

  2. Nicer out of the box UI: Raycast provides nicer out of the box Spotlight like UI. Alfred is more raw and coolish…but some people like “modern” UI elements. The thing is Alfred team doesn’t market it enough that you can customize the UI of Alfred as much as you want. There are 100s of themes in the Alfred forum or elsewhere. you can make it look like spotlight, raycast of whatever you want.

EDIT: added “5” for Alfred.

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3

Excellent summary. I too went from Alfred to Raycast to Alfred. I combined Alfred with Claude. I am not a power user. This sets up everything I need.

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4

Another vote for Alfred. Asked similar question years ago, most recommended Alfred so I went for it. Not technical, still managed to write some spaghetti code workflows.

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5

Alfred. Never tested Raycast (maybe installed it just for testing, a few minutes).
Alfred does what I need (mainly general Search function, Clipboard History and sometimes Calculator), I never used the Alfred Workflows. Alfred an me are good friends,

6

Say more?

One of the features I intend to use with Raycast is the AI integrations but I have never taken the time to figure it out.

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7

I guess we’re all different. I like Raycast because I use it all the time. I like the idea of Alfred, but I’ve had it for years, and barely used it. It felt like a lot of fiddling around, which I didn’t need or enjoy. We’re all different.

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8

Hi Ryan. I was using the default AI with Raycast. I was fine. I have a lifetime subscription to Alfred so I redid my hotkeys in Alfred. My renewal was spent on Claude. I also found as the previous poster that Raycast took more keystrokes for similar actions.

9

I also gave Raycast a whirl for a month a while back and went back to Alfred. There were three issues that put me off.

One was not being able to navigate up and down through folders. Often when you’re looking for a file, you know the rough location but not the filename, so being able to open a folder and then browse using the left and right keys to what I’m after is very helpful.

The other was file actions. When you find a file you can press Ctrl and get a list of actions to take. This includes other workflows. In Raycast there’s a tiny list of things it can do (basically copy, paste, rename) while in Alfred you can use any workflow that works with files. So I can navigate to a file, then add it to Dropover or grab a Hookmark for it.

The final limitation is that Raycast extensions couldn’t interoperate with each other. So even if someone created an extension that let you navigate through folders, you couldn’t do much with it other than dropping into Finder to work with. In Alfred you can search for a recently used Folder in the Trickster workflow, navigate into the folder to find a file you want, then import that into Devonthink, for example. Certainly back when I tried Raycast, this wasn’t possible.

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