In this post in the Alfred Blog, fifth paragraph down, where they mention the “Workflow Gallery”.
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Just got an update for Alfred and noted that Ver. 5 is out. I perused the ‘features’ page and realized that I am using a 747 to basically walk a few blocks. My use case is 75% app launcher, 20% file finder and 5% clipboard history. I have installed all of FIVE workflows, and I don’t use four of them at all. I average using Alfred 10.1 times per day.
Based on all that, I wondered if I could find something else to accomplish the same thing without spending money – not that the upgrade is particularly expensive, just on principle.
So I just downloaded Raycast. Guess we’ll see how that goes…
One other note. I was slightly surprised to discover that Alfred is the product of two people who are either a couple or siblings, unsure. Raycast, on the other hand, is now 17 people and growing. Obviously Raycast is shooting for the enterprise market and the big bucks. I feel like this will make their app a much more robust and active operation shortly. This will also probably make their Mac app a bit of an afterthought eventually, but as long as cross-platform functionality is maintained it probably won’t matter.
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Andrew and Vero (the Alfred developers) are husband and wife. They’re great. 
Raycast built native code into their core values–hopefully they’ll stick with it for a long time, or at least until there’s a truly performant and UX-respecting cross-platform tool…
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here’s a nice video on raycast
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It’s hard to argue against Alfred. They’re great developers and have served the community for such a long time.
Perhaps as dumb as this sounds, I prefer Raycast because it doesn’t use a visual editor. There’s something about writing automations (particularly web api automations) in my normal coding flow that makes Raycast seem much more like a dev tool. That’s not exactly a pitch for Raycast, but it is for me :). That being said, I hope Alfred continues to explode in popularity and I hope Raycast continues to develop at a rapid pace. It’s good for everyone if we have devoted devs and devoted users. Give us all the good stuff from everyone!
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I don’t think you can go wrong with either Raycast or Alfred.
I migrated from Alfred to Raycast, and it took quite a while - I don’t think it was necessarily worth it, but I don’t regret it either.
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Considering that the founders are AppKit developers, I doubt it. At the very least, it will happen to a lesser extent than many other cross-platform operations.
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I don’t think you have to use the visual editor for Alfred too. Alfred workflows can just be .plist files with the config in them defining what to do. However, having a visual editor also caters to the non-coders.
I tried Raycast a few months ago and felt it was slow relative to Alfred. I like their workflow management though. I’d actually wait for a few more months to even re-consider Raycast because of the blazing fast releases Alfred is making for Automation Tasks. Vitor (Alfred’s newest team member) has been very active pushing out new modules/extensions here GitHub - alfredapp/automation-tasks: Official Alfred Automation Tasks. These modules helped me deleted multiple workflows as the feature is available out of the box.
I would also add that I have a bit of a bias too, toward supporting a small dev team that is not being funded by VC rather than a product that is (not to say that’s bad).
Importantly, at least for me, the difference b/w Alfred and Raycast is too big right now to even consider Raycast. My bias would probably kick in if they equal in terms of quality and range of features and workflow community.
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That dev experience is a lot less smooth than Raycast’s Typescript/React API.
Same… but I feel like Raycast just has so much value, with a nice looking UI and for $0 to me, that Alfred isn’t worth it. Obviously YMMV, not saying Alfred’s a bad product, etc.
Curious to know what you’re missing in Raycast? Would love to know if there’s cool Alfred things I’ve missed out on.
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Depends on if you are a TS/JS dev. One can generate workflows with Python and other languages for Alfred if they don’t want to make plist.
You do know that Alfred has custom these which I don’t think Raycast offers (To how much I explored a few months ago). So you can make a Raycast theme, Twitter theme, Material theme or whatever you like. I just use the default dark one as that’s minimalistic for me, but you have the option.
I’m not sure if that will stick for long. I just believe in the phrase If you don't pay for the product you are the product
Actually, it’s the other way around. I have been an Alfred user for 3 years and bought the power pack within my first week. When I tried Raycast, I didn’t understand the hype and felt it has nothing to offer that I can’t do in Alfred. I’m not sure if I can say that about thing the other way around. For me,
- There are so many features like Universal Actions, File Triggers, Text Triggers etc. Probably can name 10 I guess which aren’t in Raycast.
- The huge community of workflows
- Blazing fast speed of Alfred (Raycast is slower for sure, in my experience). Even when doing things, it takes me more keyboard taps to get things done in Raycast than in Alfred.
- Supporting a great product made by a small business.
- Great forums, where I don’t have to open slack to talk to people. It’s difficult to find things there
I think Alfred folks don’t do a good job marketing the features it has. Raycast is pretty good with it which makes sense considering a larger team.
Also, nerds like us get pulled into the flashy new thing all the time and forget to explore the awesomeness we already available to us. I’ve seen so many users on reddit explaining how Raycast can do an awesome thing using cmd+k menu, lol, Alfred has had that for years with Tab or arrow keys, but people don’t know about it. Little things like that.
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I remember the craze Craft Notes had when it released and so many posts here and at other places. But I see that a lot of people have came back to Apple Notes .
It’s also a lot of time investment to try something new and re-build the muscle memory and then abandon it after sometime for something flashy. Even if the new things offer a few minor features here and there, that still isn’t worth the switching cost/time.
This particularly applies to me for Raycast and Alfred, there isn’t much to look up to for me in Raycast to abandon Alfred, an already great thing, for something which is just flashy (with no extra features worth for me)
Also doable with Raycast script commands.
… pretty much everything? Yep For me, the difference between Raycast and Alfred is less about functionality, and more about how that functionality is presented to me. It’s like the argument about command line apps that comes up every once in a while - sure, they might have more features than a GUI, but presentation matters. The fact that Raycast makes a lot of operations more obvious or easily accessible/usable does count for something IMO.
I would agree in general, but Raycast seems to be using a paid-by-teams approach, so they are getting funding without analytics, etc.
Very likely, but in general I see this a lot with “classic” mac apps (DEVONthink et al). So many features, but how do I get to them?
Once again, I think having both Raycast and Alfred is great because it opens up a lot more options for our community. For example, Raycast has plans to expand cross-platform, whereas Alfred doesn’t seem to, which is another reason I want to stick with Raycast for now. Things like this don’t matter to everyone, but having multiple products taking a different angle/approach on similar issues is great no matter which side you stand on.
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Out of curiosity, I just pulled out their network access pattern from little snitch. AWS ones are fine, but all those requests to segment, google and nomics (crypto) is weird.
Always good to block all requests from apps that can function without network access, which a launcher can
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Good find, do you mind if I repost this in the Raycast slack? I’d like to see what’s behind some of these network connections as well.
Sure go ahead.
Some of them might be app perf tracking and analytics (user based), but I don’t like anyone tracking that for me either. They might be useful for the company though and they might not be selling the info. One thing I am sure of is I never opened Raycast to check crypto stuff, as I don’t track or see crypto, so not sure why they connected to that domain (nomics). I’m especially wary of crypto websites and the crazy spams that go around it.
Let us know what you find from them!
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I tried to give Raycast an honest go for a couple of months and returned to Alfred.
There was a lot to like but two things soured the experience and I just couldn’t continue using it. First, it’s slower to launch. Has this been changed in a recent update? I don’t know if it’s an animation or a bug, but it’s remarkably slower than Alfred. When I pressed my hotkey, there was a slight delay in the launcher appearing … it was enough to be noticeable, especially compared to Alfred.
Second, I couldn’t get the file search to work for me. Alfred is simply better at getting the exact file I’m looking for. This might be just my use case - I keep lots of things in folders and search for the folder rather than the filename. I couldn’t configure this in Raycast - it would never show the folder.
It’s a beautiful UI but it’s not as fast as Alfred.
Ask John Siracusa about “going for enterprise.” He had a mini rant on ATP back when 1Password, I think, started getting funding. Either Marco or Casey suggested “maybe they’re going for the enterprise market”. John’s response is one of my favourite monologues from him ever. It started along the lines of “I hope not, because a move towards enterprise is a move away from caring about quality.”
And I draw your attention to 1Password. That was also a small team of dedicated, long serving developers who have now grown very large and… what do a lot of people think about this? Certainly it is at least divisive.
I will just say this… there is a continuum from a single person struggling to keep an app afloat through to a large team who struggle to remember what they’re there for. Both ends have their issues, but the happy middle ground is, in my view, a lot closer to the bottom end of the line, and more so the more talented the people are.
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I agree with this. I tried Raycast for a month, and the file search was nowhere near as smart as Alfred. For me, this is a dealbreaker as it slows down almost every workflow I have. Also, it felt much slower generally - especially when starting up.
That’s concerning. I don’t want a launcher connecting to a crypto site.
I had a quick look at their privacy policy… I suspect it’s standard, but it gives them a pretty wide pool to draw from:
from time to time, we may analyze the general behavior and characteristics of users of our Services and share aggregated information like general user statistics with prospective business partners.
In certain circumstances we may share your Personal Data with third parties without further notice to you, unless required by the law… Vendors and Service Providers: To assist us in meeting business operations needs and to perform certain services and functions, we may share Personal Data with vendors and service providers, including providers of hosting services, cloud services, and other information technology services providers, email communication software and email newsletter services, advertising and marketing services, payment processors, customer relationship management and customer support services, and web analytics services. Pursuant to our instructions, these parties will access, process, or store Personal Data in the course of performing their duties to us.
This is qualified by:
We also impose contractual obligations on service providers relating to ensure they can only use your personal data to provide services to us and to you.
(although what counts as a service to Raycast could be wide-ranging - presumably anything that supports their business interests).
It’s perhaps not surprising they’re collecting lots of information to develop their business. I’m not sure I need a launcher that much though - uninstalling.