I tried EagleFiler and like it for these features:
archive emails
F1 and ⌥F1 shortcuts for capture
OCR
can add notes to folders and files
the ability to search by file names, tags, content, notes etc.
Also tried Keep It, but I can’t find the equivalent of EagleFiler’s quick capture shortcuts esp. if I want to add tags and/or notes when importing.
Before I spend $57.74 on EagleFiler, any thoughts on if the above features are available in DEVONthink? DT costs $99 (upgrade pricing). Is there anything significantly better in DT besides being able to chat with AI?
Devonthink has much greater automation capabilities, such as smart rules and batch processing.
Eagle Filer cannot index external files without importing unless you use Symlinks as a workaround.
Eagle Filer does not have an iOS version as Devonthink has (Devonthink to Go).
Devonthink’s ability to sync between more than one Mac is much more robust than Eaglefiler.
Devonthink supports custom metadata fields and data access via web server (albeit at higher price points -not in the basic version).
That said - are you sure you would not utilize Devonthink’s new AI capabilities? Its usefulness is immense for just about any use case of Devonthink I can imagine. Hard for me to imagine how that would not be a killer distinguishing feature.
I will chip in and say I’ve used DEVONthink for years now and it really does sit centrally to a lot I do. That’s not to take anything away from EagleFiler - it’s a great app and if anyone feels overwhelmed by DEVONthink, it’s a very viable alternative. If you want to get nerdy however and really dive into the weeds of an app, DEVONthink is hard to beat.
I use both, Eagle Filer for my personal stuff, DT for work.
Eagle Filer is simpler. It has less friction if all you want to do is capture your emails, receipts etc and just get them into the right folders asap. It works by just having a layer over a normal folder setup, so you can dip into Finder (or indeed Forklist/Pathfinder) if you want to reorganise lots o stuff at once.
It has no iOS app, but since your stuff is in a normal folder, you can just use the Files app to open and edit files.
Devonthink is much more powerful. Not so much the AI stuff, which is new and still leaves a little to be desired, but all the traditional rules, automations, scripting etc that you can do with it.
It has good tools for working with PDFs and other documents. Its very active in development and its well connected to the general automation ecosystem on Mac. The forum is usually full of answers.
On the downside, the iOS app is, frankly, rubbish. I’ve tried again and again over years, its never worked for me. The search has always been a real chore, it doesn’t have that clever feeling you get from other apps where the stuff just turns up for you. The reason I moved my personal stuff out of DT is to make the search work better. Its still not great.
Plus of course its far more expensive. Devonthink is essentially $99 per year, while EF is $59 one off. Consider that over 3 or 4 years (an appropriate timeframe to consider for archiving software) and the difference is pretty radical.