I am a newbie. How does OO6 compare to Logseq and or Obsidian? Can one app do it all for notes/journal/outlining? thank you
OmniOutliner is an outliner with the ability to add columns. I think of extra columns as a kind of metadata, or more properties that can be assigned to each row.
One review I read called OmniOutliner a spreadsheet for the humanities. Pretentious, but not inaccurate.
Journaling in OO is not disagreeable. It does everything I really need for that purpose, although I think I’ll stick with my Devonthink journal.
One of the included OO templates is specifically for journaling. There’s nothing I do in my DT journal that wouldn’t be right in line with OmniOutliner’s features.
It can also be used in Scrivener fashion, where each topic has its document in the topic’s notes. I’ve written YouTube scripts that way in OO. When I was finished, a docx export fed my teleprompter.
Or, a subheading can be used as if it were a document. That’s how the included Book Draft template works.
In other words, it’s a very flexible outliner. If I were in a medieval prison with nothing but moldy bread, scummy water, an entry-level Macbook, and OmniOutliner I could get by.
For knowledge management, Obsidian or Logseq is a better alternative, but I wouldn’t exclude OO entirely. I’d argue OO files in your knowledge databases wouldn’t be a bad practice.
For instance, I sometimes want a to-do list in a Devonthink group (folder). Taskpaper has been my choice for a while. Now that OO is apparently in resurgence I pretty sure I’ll use it for my ad-hoc to-do lists. For my two cents, OO is preferable to Taskpaper.
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Thank you for the detailed response, it greatly helps me. 
I loved, used, and paid for OO for years and years and years. I used it largely to construct a variety of structured documents. It was brilliant, but, at the same time, I watched them degrade the “notes” part of the outline—in the latest version you can no longer style them within the app, but, instead, you are supposed to style outside the app and paste in! That is truly crazy-making. Without the ability to use notes as body paragraphs, OO is far less useful (to me).
And, I know Mellel does this, but if there was ever an app to describe as embracing the twiddly, it would be Mellel. (It’s an app I would love to like, and use, but I have never been able to work my way through all its complexity.)
To my mind, if OO would allow multiple styles within the body paragraphs / notes, it would reduce my reliance on Word (because in my line of work everything inevitably has to pass through Word).
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Another opportunity missed. Notes supports multiple attributes in a note, but you can’t switch styles. I don’t think you can even switch an entire note to a different style.
My experience with Mellel was initially what you describe. Now, nothing else will do. In fact, I sometimes outline in Mellel. The navigation pane is my outline topic hierarchy and it’s pretty cool to use sidebar text boxes as notes to self.
The same could be done in Word.
Word’s purpose-built outline view never resonated, though, and the subdocument feature was for a long time a pretty dicey thing.
OmniOutliner could be so much more. I hope OO6 marks fresh interest at OmniGroup.
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FYI OmniOutliner 6 is out of beta and has been released: Introducing OmniOutliner 6 - The Omni Group
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That was an instant buy!
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Me too, but I noticed something a little disturbing. I installed it on my desktop, then booted up my laptop to install it there.
I opened it on the laptop to set up the toolbar and both instances stopped responding, OO6 on my Mac Mini and OO6 on my laptop.
Since it runs fine if I run one instance at a time, I suspect I’m seeing an anti-piracy safeguard.
All fine. I don’t condone theft. The correct response for any who think OO6 is too expensive is use something else.
But what if I forget to close OO on my desktop and need to use it on my laptop?
There is some kind of issue. Their “About Omni’s software licenses” page says:
We have applied Mac App Store-inspired limits to our Omni Store licenses to better accommodate single users who have more than one computer. Like the Mac App Store, a single-seat license purchased through our store can be used on multiple Macs by a single individual for personal use.
I installed it on my desktop and then did so on my iPad. I logged into my Omni account on my iPad, and the iPad app says “Trial: 14 days remaining.”
But the initial blog post says:
With OmniOutliner 6, we now have three apps available as a universal cross-platform purchase. When you purchase an OmniOutliner 6 license, you can use the app across all of Apple’s computing platforms: Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro.
So I think I’ll send them an email.
I got a reply from Ken at OmniGroup, which I suspect is Ken Case.
He said my report is definitely unexpected behavior, and “We expect customers to be able to use a single license on all of their devices at once—even if they have multiple Macs, multiple iPads, etc. (We do this ourselves here at Omni!)”
I bet an answer is forthcoming.
That’s a good thing. OmniOutliner plus a couple of automation scripts is proving to be a very nice tool, well worth the price. To me, anyway. I respect alternate views.
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Interesting to see. At one time I used OO all the time, but eventually the weird way it handled styles just annoyed me, and made it a less than ideal pick when you just wanted to quickly open the app and get started. I mainly use Bike for outlines these days.
£37(ish) upgrade price is very fair for a one time purchase. But its only good value if I’ll actually use it. There’s a trial I see, so I’ll give it a whirl.
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My issue disappeared, and Ken (Case?) said it wasn’t from overly aggressive license restrictions.
The only difference I can see is that each time I opened OO6 on my laptop with a second instance already running on my Mini, it hung.
After I got Ken’s email, opening it on the laptop produced a warning - thumbnails had changed, did I want to run the app?
I got that same warning the first time I ran OO6 on my Mini, but that was the first time I saw it on the laptop.
After that, no more hangs.
My best guesses are a connectivity burp between my LAN and OmniGroup’s servers, or maybe iCloud Private Relay caused an issue.
I"ve come to the conclusion that OO’s wacky styles actually serve a purpose. There’s a style per indentation level so you can have major topics larger or in a different color from subtopics. As you promote/demote topics, OO has to re-style the line. That’s not quite the same mission as styles in a word processor.
You can simplify things by putting your style setup in the Whole Document style and clearing all attributes from the row styles.
I think the precedence of styles could be better, though. For instance, overrides in a row style apply to the whole row. I’d like to be able to have a column for a second notes field in fine print. Unfortunately, the columns tend to follow the overall row style.
Another weird thing about row styles is they get created by the act of indenting a line. If you’ve got styles for row 1 and row 2, if you indent a line to the third level a row 3 style will appear.
You can’t delete it, but it will disappear if you save the file without any 3rd level topics - unless you applied style changes. OO won’t throw away your style preferences even if there aren’t any rows left using the style.
Regarding Bike, it’s a fine tool. I see that if I type virtually the same stream of keystrokes into OO as I would into Bike, I get the same outline I would have in Bike. OO6 has an appearance of complexity because it will do more, and because the details of style behavior is best learned through trial and error, not the documentation.
I’m very happy with OO6.
Now, we need to turn up the heat. It’s already past time for OmniGroup to be working on OO7. My favorite wish-list item is a mind map view. But, whatever, no more withering on the vine!
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You can import an OO file directly into Omnigraffle for a mind map view, if that helps
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- How often would you be generating documents like this?
- Also, why are you putting section headings in list format?
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Right now, I’m generating several large documents, a new multi-year strategic plan, a white paper on AI, accreditation reports, and a few others. I was trying to find a way to use OO to create an outline that I could then export (or paste) into a markdown editor, Pages, or Scrivener that would retain the hierarchy. Even when the overall hierarchy is preserved, indents are added or other elements such as bullet points. I want to use a good outliner while minimizing the amount of reformatting I have to do. 
Why is there not an export or Save As Option for Markdown format. Thats the only thing I’m missing in OO6.
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There’s a lot that OO can do that wouldn’t translate cleanly to Markdown. Like, I have a document open right now that has multiple columns, multiple rows, an image, and drop down menus.
I don’t know, maybe you could do it with tables, but I imagine it wouldn’t be great.
Fortunately, I’ve not run into that problem. I’m able to run OO6 on my MBP and iPad simultaneously. I have them both opened now and on the same outline.
There’s a glitch of some kind in my installation. When I hit reply on your post I was going to say all’s well. Then I decided to look at a detail in OO6’s styles.
When I tried to open the app, it went into the hung syndrome. I got the icon in the dock but it won’t open an OO window.
Force quit and relaunch does the same thing.
As far as I know, this is exceedingly rare. It may be unique to my system and OO6 installation.
I got an application sample and have already sent it to OmniGroup. Based on past experience with them, I’ll hear back pretty soon. Customer support at OmniGroup is great.
Edited to add: OmniOutliner is back to normal. When this syndrome strikes, it is temporary.
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Hopefully someone here can answer my OO6 Pro question:
I have purchased OmniOutliner Pro 5 in the past and want to upgrade to Outliner Pro 6. That part is easy. However, I also want to be able to install on my iPhone plus iPad. In this situation do I need to purchase Outliner Pro 6 on the Mac from the App Store? Or if I purchase the Mac version directly will the relevant App stores “know” that my license is good for iPhone and iPad?