Actually there was also DEVONnote, which has been retired, so it was a 4-tier product.
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Obviously true…some will buy a name but …
If you want the PDF annotations to sync with the file within DEVONthink you’ll have to use either or DEVONthink to go (which works great for this frankly) or utilize a PDF Viewer that fully supports “open in“. But if your concern is to just simply read the PDFs outside of DEVONthink and not concern yourself with sinking annotations, there are far too many with the exact same features. PDF expert, PDF pen, PDF viewer, the stock iOS files app, etc.
Are use DEVONthink three and Devon thing to go to sync a massive amount of research material (with embedded standard and custom meta-data). It has been a challenge to identify apps who is changes on Files re-sync with DEVONthink on my Mac. Are use DEVONthink three and Devon thing to go to sync a massive amount of research material (with embedded standard and custom meta-data). It has been a challenge to identify apps who is changes on Files re-sync with DEVONthink on my Mac.
Also there is (was) and educational discount. I bought DEVONthink 3 pro during the beta, with an educational discount and saved a significant amount of money.
Much of the search capabilities are available in the DEVONthink search bar - or am I misunderstanding your interest?
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Sorry, yes, you misunderstand. Another person on this thread asked how they might replace DEVONthink with alternative apps. I was pointing out that no other app seems to provide search capabilities at the same level as DEVONthink. People looking at alternatives will probably have to go without that kind of search power.
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. I see. Missed that connection. You’re right though. I have tried a number of apps for storing, sorting, organizing data/files and nothing really compares. It’s my Evernote, IA writer, RSS feed reader, OCR engine, meta-data manager, knowledge base wiki, etc. I could go on. It would be a different story if I didn’t get the educational discount, but it has allowed me to easily avoid the shiny apps that offer similar features. I debated Devon think 2 for nearly a year, but jumped on the version three beta and immediately bought a license.
Edit: accessible all without an Internet connection when looking to read and work with the documents and data. I live in an extremely rural area and have limited access.
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If you want search power FoxTrot (http://www.ctmdev.com/foxtrot/professional_search/index.html) is the way to go.
On the Mac, maybe, but it doesn’t look like you can use it to search your iOS devices. An iOS version exists but, if I’m understandings it correctly, it just provides the power to search your Mac’s search index.
Fact is that with a ‘good’ PR/Advertizing person DEVONthink could have been a lot more tricky with their pricing; in fact they clearly try to be fair and it is a shame the extent that that comes back to bite them.
There is nothing remotely comparable in power to DEVONthink for what it does.
I can’t and am not interested anymore in experimenting either though so I could miss something new: I don’t care really since I have no bottleneck now, not at IT. All bottlenecks are with me, or the stuff I read I might say 
That is a pretty big endorsement of the small app set I use now in my view. That is DEVONthink, Keyboard Maestro, Ulysses, LaTeX for mac, Launchbar, KeyCue,TE and one or two writing apps that I keep around just ‘in case’. I do not have any real media needs and so on: I appreciate I am lucky in that way.
I think DEVONthink could charge a lot more in fact and are being very reasonable. By trying to be transparent and avoiding tricky PR methods, that actually do work on all of us however sophisticated we think we are, they have maybe annoyed one or two of us though. Hardly any commodity or service has a stable price anymore… Often changing according to ones own click rates on it I have found.
I used EndNote for years for similar purposes to what I use DEVONthink for now. I had a shock when I needed to buy an individual licence at one period. I think it was well over $200, that was in early 2000s too. I could never find stuff either though it was citation led. Weird limits and blocks for all kinds of reasons too.
It was clunky too in my view. I had a good chatty personal relationship with some of the support staff in the end who were really good and let some stuff pass for me, bit like @Mark above. I was one of the few individual licences though that they dealt with and found it interesting in some ways.
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I know everyone’s circumstances and usage are different, so I’m not suggesting my situation applies beyond just me, but for me it is a no-brainer, even with the seats restriction. Even if I go back to a third Mac (I retired my home iMac) and need 3 licenses, the upgrade cost for me would be about the equivalent of 2 years of Evernote to upgrade from version 2 Pro Office to version 3 Pro. At two Macs, it is equal to about one year of Evernote. Given how I use it throughout the day, every day, that’s a simple choice.
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I bought DTPO 2 just after it was released, almost ten years ago. Each time I downloaded an upgrade, I asked myself how do they manage to continue to develop this without any more money from me. I am glad that they will finally get some money to pay their developers to keep working on it.
The way I see it, there are mass apps with super low prices, and there are professional apps, developed by and for professionals who understand what the user needs. DTPO 3 is definitely in that category. We who use it would be a bit less productive without it.
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Take for example:
OCR: DT3 has one of the best out there. There are others, but few integrative into my workflow. All others are expensive.
AI Features: Not found in other apps.
Flexible: The ability to work with so many document types natively, without switching, is wonderful. I don’t need another markdown editor, or PDF app, etc.
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FYI - for other folks who may have found this thread and be curious about alternatives…
I tried KeepIt but the pricing was just too much for what I actually ended up using (they have a separate subscription for iOS and Mac, and claim there’s nothing they can do to avoid that, despite other companies managing it just fine). It also had iCloud sync issues that I just didn’t trust.
I think I’ve settled on EagleFiler. For a one-time $40 purchase, I can use it on as many Macs as I want, and it can sync via Dropbox. It’s been around since 2006 and is made by the same developer who wrote SpamSieve.
EagleFiler: Collect notes, e-mails, and Web pages on your Mac, and search them instantly
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KeepIt solves the clipper problem, and is quite delightful to use, but the price was just a little too much for me (since I already have DT3) also.
EagleFiler looks great. Thanks for the recommendations.
If only DTTG could get some UI/UX love I would never consider leaving DT.
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I’ve been using EagleFiler on my Mac for three years now and I’m happy with it. But the more I use my iPhone, and the closer I come to repurchasing an iPad, the more important a cross-platform solution becomes. As I said a month ago, I’m slowly trying to decide between Notebooks or possibly Keep It if the occasional complaints about iCloud sync subside with Apple and/or Reinvented improvements.
FSNotes is particularly interesting as an open-source project (with a $2.99 iOS app, and a Mac app you get download for free from Github or get in the MAS for $3.99 to support them) that uses the TextBundle format (also used by Bear, iThoughts, MindNode, Ulysses, et al), has TouchBar support, versioning, backups, does Markdown, and can store encrypted AES-256 notes. For the price it’s quite the app, although it apparently only does image attachments (no pdfs, sadly). To that end it’s more like a supercharged nvALT, but offers much of the functionality of an app like Bear.
FSnotes have no subfolders and organizing notes only by folder and tags for many different projects could get messy.
https://nvultra.com/ from Brett Terpstra and Fletcher Penney looks interesting as well. It has subfolders, but it is in beta 
New on Devonthink’s blog:
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I think that linked article is hyperbole. Of course it makes sense to use caution when upgrading software especially if your livelihood depended on it. But “experts” saying ‘may’ and ‘could’ in this context seems like scare tactics.
The article states “Even though Apple officially released macOS Catalina last week, the upgrade has numerous very rough edges that can even stop you from getting any actual work done on your Mac.”. That’s a pretty bold statement. I have upgraded and have not run into anything that impedes my ability to get my real work done. Sure, I didn’t bother to install ScanSnap and am using ExactScan, but we all knew about the 32 bit deprecation. And, I would ‘t have attempted the upgrade without a bootable copy of my existing system if I needed to rollback for some reason.
Imagine the blowback Apple would take if their upgrade prevented a majority of their users from doing their jobs…
Most of the people that use their Macs for their livelihood—and certainly the people here—follow the tech and typically are prepared. They already know if they should wait or “take the risk.”
They need to cover their back. It is just a disclaimer.
I wound up buying the DT3 upgrade. The new user interface is better than the old DT2 version, but not as pretty as something like Things3. Still very usable.
I gave a look to EagleFiler which was mentioned by a few folks earlier in this thread. I would really like to be able to use EF, especially because the way it handles tags is really quite excellent. The fact that it keeps tags synced between the EF app itself and Finder tags coupled with the fact that all files in a library are rather simply arranged in a folder hierarchy in a library folder is really awesome, allowing one to use EF to find things, but also to use Spotlight, mdls at the command line, or a 3rd party app like HoudahSpot to search for things is exactly what I wish DT would do. Plus, my workflow is often file/folder centric with a system of tagging and Hazel rules that I don’t want to give up.
With DT, I wind up having two separate systems, one the databases in DT and the other my file/folder hierarchy that is kept sync’d between desktop and laptop with ResilioSync.
But, I ran into three issues with EF, one a serious (but not necessarily insurmountable) inconvenience, but two that turned out to be show-stoppers (for me).
- EF does not have an iOS app, and I find having DTTG sync’d to my DT databases is very handy at times. This is not an insurmountable issue, as I would just store my EF databases in my folder that is shared between desktop and laptop via ResilioSync, and use the RS app on iOS to retrieve a file. Perhaps not as convenient as DTTG, but not something I could not live with, especially as my use of DTTG is much more for viewing than creation of data anyway.
But:
-
EF isn’t designed, and cannot support, having a library open on two machines at once. My workflow involves having my DT databases stored on both desktop and laptop, and DT is always ruining on both. DT’s sync mechanism is very robust, and both computers access a DT sync store (on a WebDAV server) and stay perfectly in sync, with very quick response times. (Yes, you also should not store DT databases on a shared location like Dropbox and open the database on both computers at the same time, but you don’t have to because of this sync mechanism). Unfortunately, EF syncs between computers via a shared folder mechanism, and you have to close a library on one computer before opening it on the other. It just doesn’t work for me to have to remember to keep exiting EF or closing libraries when I stop working at one computer.
-
Email archiving: Both EF and DT can do this, but the big drawback to EF is that while the entire email file is stored in EF including attachments, if you want to open an attachment you do so by clicking on the email which then opens it in your mail application. This is just not a good workflow for me. I intend to move emails to DT from Mail.app, and in DT I can just search out an email, view it in DT, and click the attachment for it to open in the appropriate app (Preview, Numbers, etc).
So, unfortunately while I wanted to be able to use EF, it is lacking some key functionality (for me) that DT provides, and while DT also has some friction points (I really don’t like its totally separate tagging vs the Finder tags, which is not very convenient for my workflow), at least for now it is the way to go for me. I’ll have to keep an eye on EF, and if they decide to change the way at least #s 2 and 3 above are handled, it will be worth another look for me.
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I have been using HoudahSpot frequently with DT2 and DT3, as it is also supported, see: