Has anyone had any experience positive or negative with upgrading to DT4? It sounds great but DT3 is working so well, I am hesitant to upgrade.
Itās been positive. I would say thereās no reason to rush into an update unless you really want the LLM integrations or file versioning.
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I thought DT 4 was still in Beta. Is it available now? Iāve not received an email about the new version.
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Itās still in public beta.
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You can purchase/upgrade to Devonthink 4 on their website, although it is still a beta.
Thanks, but Iāll wait. I avoid Betas. 
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There was a major bug soon after the beta was released that made it unusable. It kept asking for your license, but it never worked. They did put out a new version that fixed the bug, but Iād returned to DT 3.
So even though I bought the upgrade to DT 4, my experience with the bug has made me hesitant to use the beta again. I think Iāll just wait.
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I have to say the more I play with the AI features the more underwhelmed I feel about them. It should have a big advantage in using AI with documents, but the chat function is so bare bones that any time I save using AI in situ is outweighed by the lack of options. It needs some work to be compelling.
Itās very stable for a beta though and its new non-AI features are all decent. But if youāre wary of betas you can safely stick with 3 for the time being.
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Iāve been using the beta (and have paid for the upgrade) since it became available. Apart from the āneeding to relicenseā bug ā which was quickly fixed ā Iāve not come across any problems.
I donāt use the external Chat stuff myself, but DT has always had its own AI and thatās been enhanced.
There are some nice improvements to the core functionality as well, making it worthwhile to me. For example, the editor has now aquired typewriter scrolling and margin control, so becomes more usable for longer notes; thereās a new graph view to visualise links; and a lot more that I havenāt really got round to reviewing yet.
I havenāt thought about reverting to DT3 at all, but my data isnāt essential to the business I donāt have. If yours is, then DT suggest you install the beta on a test user account to test it thoroughly first.
HTH
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I decided to āleaveā DT because of the new licence model (which the developer calls āmore modern and flexibleā). They moved to an expensive subscription (I am not against the subscription licence model, but the yearly price if too high for me).
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This one seems to be safe, the core functionality remains the same. New stuff is mostly related to integrating LLMs.
Thanks. I thought Iād read somewhere there were significant improvements to the editor, including for DDT4. Did I imagine that?
Yes, the Markdown editor is better but I didnāt notice any change in functionality, itās only that the default look and feel is better. But perhaps I missed something.
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This is the (unsorted) list of new features and improvements from the Help files for Beta 1 and 2. These are just the ones with āMarkdownā in the title ā of course there will be other related improvements, but this gives a general flavour:
- Improved styling of tables and working with ordered lists in Markdown.
- Optimized MultiMarkdown code speeds up viewing and converting Markdown documents.
- Better support for dropping .webp and .avif files from Safari, e.g., into Markdown documents.
- Better detection for Markdown content on the clipboard.
- Added a Capture with Source Link command to the contextual menu of documents, clipping selected text and a source link to the document in the Sorterās Take Note tab. Supports plain and rich text, Markdown, HTML-based formats, and PDFs.
- Added a DEVONthink: Append Markdown Note service.
- There are many improvements to Markdown editing. Edits to Markdown documents now support live scrolling and updates in the side-by-side view so your changes are shown in real-time. There is now a default Markdown font used as the source and preview font if no styling is applied. Markdown WYSIWYG editing now displays images or links instead of showing the raw source code. Attached images, PDFs, or media files can be Control-clicked in the source or preview of Markdown documents with options to be copied, edited, or revealed. In the case of images, you can set the documentās thumbnail.
- Improved file conversions, e.g., multiple web-based formats, including EPUB files, to Markdown or paginated PDFs, and converting Markdown to PDF. There are also many other improvements that try to preserve data during the conversion.
- Item links in documents, called ācrosslinksā, can be quickly created by typing >>, followed by the initial letters of an itemās name. Matching items in the current database are shown as suggestions. Only supported in plain text, rich text, and Markdown.
- The Table of Contents inspector now supports multiple selections, hiding page numbers, and copying paragraph links for rich text documents. For PDFs the entries can be organized, renamed, or removed. For rich text and Markdown documents, reorganizing the table of contents reorganizes the contents of the document as you move the sections. And drag-and-drop to external applications creates a page link to each dropped page.
- Removing linked text in Markdown documents via the Document > Links inspector preserves the text and only removes the link.
- The Data > New > With Clipboard command more intelligently creates a format appropriate to the type of data on the clipboard, e.g., Markdown files when Markdown content is detected.
Iāve highlighted features I think are more than merely cosmetic. For some reason the list doesnāt mention the improvement I most welcome ā typewriter scrolling ā which as Iāve been asking for it since about 2012, is a nice surpriseā¦ Personally, the Markdown editor is now more than good enough for me to use most of the time. I now only use an external editor (BBEdit) when I need to do some serious text manipulation.
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Thanks for the list! 
Given the recent improvements and the already robust feature set, I may consider using DT 4 as a replacement for Apple Notes for work-related notes. The determining factor will be the extent to which the DTTG 4 editor has been improved.
I look forward to purchasing the upgrade.
Thanks again of the list, much appreciated.
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No problem!
You could try out the beta now, but donāt do it on your normal user account (as DT4 inherits some of the DT3 settings so itās hard to roll back). Instead, create a test user account and install the Beta there and give it a good kickingā¦
HTH.
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Because I donāt have the technical expertise of many on this forum, I steer away from Betas. Hopefully, I wonāt have to wait long for the official release.
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Yes, better text editing is major! I benefit from these daily and shouldāve mentioned them.
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I just had a thought. If the editor is really as good as it sounds, and if DTTG 4 has an improved editor, I could possibly use DT to write my blog articles. I could have a databased with three groups: Ideas, Drafts, Published. 