WorkFlowy: Note, List, Outline Reviews

I have been using Worflowy on an almost daily basis for years. It is a clean, easy to use product that uses a simple outline format that I find useful for all of my note-taking needs. I am a prodigious e-book reader and I capture ideas and quotes from everything I read by just cutting and pasting text directly into Worflowy. The tab button indents automatically so organizing information is quick, and once entered, the "touch and move"feature, along with the editing, highlighting and search options allow you to format and easily locate your text depending on your own specific search criteria.

I also use this for my todo lists, for brainstorming and capturing ideas, storing my favorite internet sites and links, long term planning, keeping track of my accomplishments and bucket list items... everything! After several years, I have pages and pages of well organized information in one place that I can retrieve with just a few search terms. I would call this a grown-up app for people who want to keep track of any kind of data in any form. This is my most used app and I would be lost without it.

In my work and personal life, I rely on this app to keep me organized— it’s an essential service for me. More of a utility, really, like electricity or broadband Internet. While the website is very good, maybe 4.5 stars, WorkFlowy has never reached the same level of excellence, unfortunately. It locks up frequently (several times a day for me) and I find it quite difficult to re-order lists because when I’m dragging an item to its new destination this app often locks up, then inserts the item in an unpredictable location. Rather frustrating. Also, while I’n entering information through WorkFlowy this app will suddenly revert to its loading screen without warning. Also quite vexing.

I give the main service two big thumbs up and enthusiastically recommend it, though my enthusiasm for WorkFlowy is more muted at best. I recommend using WorkFlowy only to read and review your notes. Any major editing tasks should be done on a regular laptop or computer through the main website as attempts to do this through WorkFlowy will be an exercise in futility and frustration. With luck, the skilled and innovative developers on this app will work out these kinks with WorkFlowy in the future. Until then, I unhesitatingly recommend the main website but not WorkFlowy .

Summary: WorkFlowy serves as my all-purpose notepad for temporary as well as long-term text storage.

What I love:
- replaces iPhone Notepad app (there is no benefit to using notepad anymore)

- flawless, almost real-time syncing across phone and laptop (and wife’s phone)

- super flexible sharing (I can just send anyone a link to view/edit any part of my notes)

- non-tree structure (wiki style) allows the same note to appear in multiple places (so I don’t have to pick the one exact perfect place to store things)

- automatic backups to Dropbox so I have no fear of losing work (I’ve never once needed this feature, but it’s comforting)

What I don’t use it for:

- tasks that I want to “disappear” and never see again (I use Todoist)

- anything that has a date on which I need to be alerted (iPhone calendar + Todoist)

- anything that needs a bunch of formatting (Word)

- anything that needs automatic totaling / formulas (Excel)

But...

(Developers please read this part!)

I don’t need this app to do everything. The greatest thing about WorkFlowy is that it knows its own niche. Please don’t add too many features that lead it away from what it’s so great at doing:

Plain text editing with super fast interface.

I need it to take the place of PAPER, not all those other apps. And it’s doing a great job. Thanks very much to the this app team for a great app!

In all my years with Apple this is my first review. I'm a productivity and GTD guy and I've tried a lot of tools. I usually end up back at Evernote trying to force "the Secret Weapon", because tasks become projects and you usually need more than a task manager, which Evernote is not. Don't get me wrong, couldn't live without EN. I almost dismissed WF out of the gate due to the old school look and feel, but the simplicity is really what you need. You can draft agenda's, story's, keep team notes, personnel notes, account notes, task or projects lists, any list. You can infinity expand and and use tags. The clincher for me was that you can share or just copy/paste to word and the bullet points transfer perfectly. So your not trapped in WorkFlowy . I use it from the web on my work laptop and on my iPad and iPhone via WorkFlowy . Michael Hyatt has it right, everything seems to start on WF now for me.

this app is a program I have left and returned to a couple of times. Now, again, I am using WorkFlowy daily. That says I can’t replace WorkFlowy though I have been enticed with more complex or structured to do apps as enough for my work. this app’s ease of use, availability across devices, flexible tags, and speed captures ideas and details in a way that fills a creative and thought gap that the other more structured organizational apps do not. When I return to this app after trying other apps says that I can’t replace it with fancier or more expensive options. It is working well. Now I have leaned into this app strengths and doing that has helped me to settle on the other pieces I need for structure more easily and to stop hopping around. The recent update has been excellent. I like the program and the developers’ responsiveness. Great job. Easy to recommend.

WorkFlowy has been dormant for many years. People, including me, stuck with WorkFlowy so that someday it will be up to the expectations. The blog posts, zen desk page has many requests unanswered and ignored. I will only talk about the mobile app below.

This is NOT a native iOS app so the user experience is not good. It’s hard to navigate, go in edit mode etc. You might as well just open this in Safari and you should be good, except if you care offline support

If you are a pro member then you are not getting money’s worth. For the same price or less you will get some great notetaking and todo apps. Themes on desktop are not available on mobile. Unfortunately this app like outlining is not available anywhere except a few clones that don’t do a good job.

It took them few years just to add the ability to change Fonts, and then few months to introduce swipe completion/deletion.

The website on Safari may load faster than WorkFlowy itself.

As you would find in most native apps, there are widgets and 3-D touch support. WorkFlowy don’t.

The whole theme of this app is using the tags. There is not auto suggestion on tags as you would find it on desktop. It makes really hard to add a tag and be consistent.

There is no share feature but I don’t use it. They are planning to add it.

Overall WorkFlowy is good for quickly looking up something on the go.

I am a subscriber and active user of the full version for Windows. So far I have found the iOS version to be a good balance between usability and familiarity.

I can, in a comfortable and natural way, access the common features I need to use. While a lot of users feel that it is missing some of the power user features of the desktop version, I prefer that over the somewhat awkward Rube Goldberg approach taken by HandyFlowy, the iOS clone that has the power-features, but in a package with a ton of hieroglyphic buttons.

With iOS, you don't have all the same controls that you have in the Windows environment. I'm certainly open to a full feared version in iOS, but perfect one that preserves the elegant simplicity where the functionality isn't in your face, but rather hidden in the keyboard commands.

Full disclosure: I use this for personal task management but I realize others use it for far more.

One of the great myths in time/task/project management land is that one task is a function of exactly one hierarchy... the world simply isn’t that way.

A given task might live among a dozen hierarchies. Including (but far from limited to):
•Who For/Constituency
•Due When
•What Project/Context
•Is it merely an idea you need to write down before forgetting.
•Urgency
•Best time or place to do it
•Delegated to whom? When do I need to check on them?

The tag system is dirt simple and it just works.

I’ve done bullet journals, I’ve done spreadsheets, I’ve done Franklin Planner. I’ve counted on my brain alone. I’ve done scraps of paper strewn across my desk. I am back to this app.

The incessant re-writing of tasks required by Franklin or Bullet doesn’t work for me. It’s tedious and that time is not value added. My penmanship is atrocious. The spreadsheet thing gets complicated with work and home life.

Instead of adapting my brain to an external system, I’m using a system to adapt to my brain.

Welcome back to my life, this app. It’s been a couple of years. I missed you.

I’m an organizational development consultant who teaches time management to managers and executives at Fortune 500 and large private companies. I regularly test personal productivity tools so I can make recommendations to clients; if you are an individual contributor, or a specialist who does not delegate tasks frequently, I heartily recommend you try WorkFlowy. In fact, after many years as a power user of OmniFocus, I have switched to this app as my task management app.

I’m doing so because this app is built around a simple outliner and #tags. You can get up and running in 5 minutes, be a power user within 24 hours — and (if that’s your thing), be running your fully configured, personalized GTD “implementation” a day or two later.

Did not expect this to become my absolute favorite app, but after a week of usage-I was hooked. It’s very easy to use, and they are always improving it without cluttering it up. The interface is smooth and simple.

Update: I’ve been using WorkFlowy for almost 4 years now and I still absolutely adore it. I’ve found new ways to use it and it’s just become a very helpful constant in my life for tracking lists, dates, ideas, and more. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses a bullet journal or just wants a more organized tracking option in their life.

I use this app as my only tool to organize my entire life. After years of trying a lot of things, I was using a simple synced note pad, and this app is an obvious improvement over that and very flexible for personal organizational preferences and styles.

That said, why is WorkFlowy so bad? Why is it so un-thoughtfully translated from keyboard to multi-touch? How about adding some context menus and checkboxes or something? Why is it just flat out buggy, with things not showing up, things getting stuck, etc.? I emailed about a bug, got a reply, and a fix didn’t show up for months - and it’s still only partially fixed. I would gladly pay more for this per month if WorkFlowy was designed better and worked as expected. Very frustrating.

I'm not sure what others see in this. It's a bookmark to their site - and it looks like it offers offline support. Ok cool ... offline support … pretty much the only reason to use this.
I don't see a reason to rate it higher than this because you can't initiate sharing from WorkFlowy for a list - if you can their support hasn't gotten back to me on it when I asked them last week.
The bar that is on the top of the screen also interrupts your view when you scroll. It resets itself once you are done scrolling, but it's an annoyance I'd rather not see.
Room for improvement on WorkFlowy , regardless of how nice the actual service is.
Ideas for your improvements?
1> No shake to undo - maybe add a confirmation, in addition to that particular capability...
2> Sharing options via WorkFlowy - not having it is limiting since you have to use the web app to perform those operations..
3> Fix the top banner
Odd as it sounds, it seems like everyone writing these 5 star reviews are impeding on the progress of making the iOS app any better than its current state. I don't understand how people are giving 5-star ratings to an app that's essentially an offline-capable bookmark and nothing more.
You devs got creative with making a nice web app; please get creative with making a better iOS app.

this app is one of the most surprisingly powerful “Tools for Thought” I’ve ever encountered. If you believe, like me, that the universe is a fractal, and that the organization of human ideas is best conceived of similarly, you MUST spend some quality time with this software.

It is incredibly low-friction, logically designed, highly iterable, encourages creativity, and is a joy to use. There are plenty of resources available to discover hidden gems and clever, emergent functionality.

Additionally, as of this writing, the product is being actively developed with a great deal of thoughtfulness; just check out their blog. I’m so looking forward to growing with this app!

Rarely have I been as disappointed with an app as I am with this counter productive and ill-designed waste of one's productive efforts.

This stems less from the overall quality of other free apps and more from the confusingly absent ability to simply cut and paste ones work (let alone export into another word document or app) after completing it on the this app iPad app.

This is my first experience with an app actually hindering my ability to use it productively. In brief: one cannot export nor select and copy text after working on an outline or project. It's worth noting that although WorkFlowy was free, I downloaded three other similar apps at the same time that while rated lower, still possessed the very basic feature of allowing the user to transport his/her work to another app, document, or outline.

Love the update! Though I have not thoroughly gobbled up the changes yet- but happy to see such pleasing interface pop. Where there were once bare bones are slightly larger fonts of bare bony bones.
It gets a little tricky when I made new entries today: This iphone 7 9 11 or whatever triple X has trouble zooming. It could be the this app app refuses to zoom out since the update. Either way, the lack of pinching zoom is rough. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Everything else is yay for this artist who mostly needs quick, immediate outline writing while the thought is hot hot hot. Bombastic this app! Ok, huge fan despite my nonsense. Thank you!

I’ve only used this app for about a year, but I use it now for just about everything and I’ve gotten many of my coworkers to switch to it. I love it’s simplicity and I would hate to see that go away. This iOS version is not perfect, but they have made some big improvements on it recently, including the drop down arrow on the right side—a really nice touch. The syncing seems slow though, moving this around is awkward, and I hate the slide to the right and left feature to complete. It looks awful.
All in all, it’s ok and I don’t need much more. I like using this app on browser and rarely want anything on my phone.
I wish there was an easy way to add to my Inbox in WorkFlowy though.

I love just about everything WorkFlowy can do. I’ve been using it for over a month (for a book) and the only complaint I have is how difficult it is to move one bullet into another with the drag and drop feature. It’s very finicky and is more likely to make the bullet I select move above/below or as a sub-bullet for the bullet I want to move into. Doing once every and again it wouldn’t bother me but when I make a long list of things and want it to be in a category I already created its quite a hassle to move each bullet one by one. Overall fantastic app but hopefully the developers see this and consider improving this feature.

this app is fun to use because it works and flexible. It has significantly increased my productivity by becoming my go to app for easily breaking down an project into next actions small enough for me to keep going instead of doing a paralysis analysis in my head. Because this app lets me keep my lists and action maps, looking back on how I accomplished continuous progress I find ideas and good memories that boost energy and success. Using WorkFlowy many times daily has made it a thinking partner in ways no other planner, list maker, or journal has worked for me.

It helps you keep track of anything and everything. It doesn’t have way too many features, just enough for what you might want. And what you can do with it is amazing!

But it’s kind of obvious it’s made more for the web. Linking something is either really hard or just impossible, compared to on the computer. On the computer, moving or deleting a bullet can be done more easily than on the phone. It would be nice if some of these features were also included on mobile.

All in all, great app! I seriously love it. But it’s tailored more for computer use than mobile use.

I’d recommend WorkFlowy to everyone. I’ve been using this for years and it’s a very reliable app and even better on desktop. Literally ever single person should use WorkFlowy to organize their minds, lives and work. The beauty is in the simplicity!
this app, if you’re reading: lately I’ve been having a hard time opening WorkFlowy : I just get a white screen or sometimes I get the floating bullets but it doesn’t load all the way. Can you fix that? I’m using an iPhone 7s IOS 13.5.1, and just updated this app today.