Dofferent strokes for different folks I guess. To me DT is effortless and easy to expand as my uses change. It seems to support many more ways of dealing with my info compared to every other similar app so I’ve never felt I was locked in or unable to accommodate a newer better workflow.
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I think that’s likely part of my problem with it. It’s hugely expandable, and really all I need is a folder of files by date or subject. I was barely tapping the surface of what DEVONthink is capable of, so I wasn’t gaining any benefit over a simple folder structure and spotlight searching.
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Well, I’m following you back now, too. After reading the discussion above I decided that no-one had persuaded me not to switch back (thanks again everyone for honest opinions).
I think the thing with DT is it’s like using Photoshop instead of Pixelmator or Logic instead of GarageBand. I’d been learning doing graphics work with Photoshop for years and eventually moved over to Affinity Photo as it aims directly at Photoshop. I can’t get much done in Pixelmator because I find it too different and too simple. But I know far more Pixelmator (or Acorn) users than Affinity Photo users because the latter does require some institutional knowledge to “get”.
When it comes to document storage solutions, I’m with the masses and sticking with KeepIt because I find DT a little overwhelming all the time, and that’s to be expected because it does do so much more.
So as much as I understand why people use Pixelmator while I use Affinity Photo, I also understand why people use DT when I use KeepIt.
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Glad you found he one that works for you, that’s all it matters. Hope don’t follow you and switch to Keep It. Will take too long to move my stuff from DEVONthink 
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Only taken me the weekend to move 10k+ documents across!
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tempting, really love DEVONthink but dislike DTTG. Be nice to have DEVONthink sync with Keep It Mobile.
After a long love affair with DT going back some 15 years and with ten slowly accreted databases, I do, from time to time, long for a “simpler” data life. My professional life is deeply embedded in this astounding application but its sporadic dummy-spitting with Dropbox sync and DTTG, make my eyes wander off track once or twice a year.
Notebooks app and Keep It are the only two I have experimented with - apart from using the Finder + Dropbox + Files.app.
I simply export data from one of my DT databases, import into Keep It and watch thing go south quickly. Try moving a file and be presented with a pop-up consisting of the hierarchy of the Keep It folders - several hundred deep. That one alone makes me shake my head, back out of the dream and go back to DT.
Keep It or Notebooks are nice apps but should be considered for small databases with minimal content. If your needs are deeper and definitely for the medium to long-term, definitely go with DT. Sure there’s some learning to do and it isn’t pretty but Joe Kissel’s Take Control of DT book is great. Devontechnologies download page has a great manual.
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Full disclaimer ahead: I’ve never used KeepIt or other “DT competitors”, only DT.
I agree Kissel’s book is great. I bought DT 2 in nov 2018 planning to manage my 1500+ PDFs but was daunted by its complexity. DT 3 launched later and I paid for the upgrade, but still couldn’t get into it.
I downloaded Kissel’s book several months ago and it finally clicked with me. DT feels incredibly intuitive to use once I grasped its philosophy with the help of his book.
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I’m a DT3 fanboy that used Keep It now and then so here’s my opinion 
This is gonna be a longer post
First DT2 for a while, then went to Keep It because it looks nicer, then became a beta tester for 3, and now I use DT3 exclusively. I sometimes nibble into Keep It but IMO they don’t compare.
Whenever I added my few-years-old databases into Keep It, the app became unusable, crashed often, scrolling lagged, opening documents froze the app for a couple seconds. It really wasn’t fun.
The sync was flaky too, it felt it just shoveled things into iCloud and hoped for the best (but that’s just how I felt and might not actually be the case).
I can’t imagine my digital life without DT3 because it’s just so well built. It never sweats, sync is rock-solid and more important - all the sync locations (NAS, Dropbox, iCloud, etc) are all separately encrypted. If one location gets compromised or loses data, I couldn’t care less because my DT database is still untouchable. Also no headache with cloud services analyzing my documents or feeding it as training data into a neural network.
On the other hand I had iCloud dataloss quite often, either due to sync issues or because I installed a Mac/iOS beta and some glitch nuked some of my files.
Also what if I lose access to my iCloud account? Sure it likely won’t happen, but if it ever does, I don’t want to be in complete misery.
DEVONthink is heavily keyboard optimized and has since added everything I wanted. There are shortcuts for quickly moving files or fuzzy-jump to different folders that I really really need.
I also use smart-rules heavily to auto-apply OCR, and shortcuts to quickly select some text from a document and turn it into the documents title (CMD-CTRL-I)
Then obviously the AI assistance is something that Keep It can’t do. Right now all I do is scan a document, put it into DT3 and apply OCR through Abbyy (either standalone or with the built-in plugin), give it a title and DEVOnthink can almost perfectly predict where that document should get moved and what files are related.
In reality this comes into action when I for example download an e-ticket for a flight, and DEVONthink immediately tells me to move that into the folder 2020/10 - TripName because other stuff like hotel reservation is in there too
The search is also really good because DT3 indexes all files pretty well. I can shovel whatever I want in it, then later hit-up the search and perfectly find my files on the go by just typing a few words that are in the document, title or tags.
What I don’t like is DTTGO. It’s lacking way too many features, notably OCR and mentioned AI categorization. It’s not a very nice app to use, but delegating it to “viewing stuff” works pretty well. Just not the powertool that I was hoping for.
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So at first it was more about the looks and Keep It does feel really nice. But now DEVONthink is in my opinion worlds ahead of Keep it. One is a productivity-centric professional information database, one is a more casual file organizer.
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Oh man, this is exactly my experience as well, haha.
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Looks like all of us who love Mac DEVONthink also view DTTG as piece of cr@p 
. DTTG has too many bugs, way too basic (not that I expect iPad/iOS version to be same as Mac’s) to justify the price charged plus additional in app $ for Pro Package. To further add to insult, it takes a very long time for DTTG to come out with an update.
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To be fair, DTTGO isn’t very expensive. I’m just glad there is an iOS version at all that at least syncs reliably. I’m sure they’re aware that the app isn’t that useful yet and are working on making it better.
Know they’re working on DTTG v3 but it’s taking so long. Paid for DTTG + in app Pro Package. It’s not the $ but subpar features + bugs that bothering me.
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Another nail in the coffin of DT for me… double the price if you want OCR.
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DTTG is being rapidly developed and I can’t say much but there’s a ton of new features. Join the beta if you’re interested. It’s getting quite a bit of features weekly.
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You mean the OCR addon? You don’t have to use it and could interface with other software you already own through smart rules and applescript, but yes it costs extra mainly because it’s using Abbyy under the hood, and that stuff costs money for the developer. It’s still far better than most open-source/free OCR software.
I own standalone Abbyy and have that running on my server to OCR whenever I tag something with abbyy_pending for when I need it. Could do something similar with Prizmo, Google Tesseract, etc.
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OCR is not the only additional feature included in the Pro version. Email archiving with the the plug-in for Mail.app is possibly more important than OCR for many users, and the Imprinter function is nicely implemented, although that’s not something I use often.
Yes, I realise you get what you pay for, but as I do not own any other OCR software (other than PDFPen Pro but that’s not much good here).
Yes, but for those of us who don’t use Mail nor need the Imprinter it’s a big jump in price.
I’ve already made my decision and moved back to KeepIt which does include OCR, although it’s only using what is built into the OS it runs on (ala Notes).
[That’s not to say people continuing to discuss this won’t be useful, even if not for me. 
]
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It looks like DTTG is going mandatory subscription with 3.0 at $25/year. Purchasers of old versions will have access until July 2021. Not sure if this will come out as a new app or not as the surprise update might make old users lose access. This is just info from beta. Might not be final.
Hope subscription won’t happen. DTTG is so inferior to Mac DT and they want to yearly subscription? Ridiculous.