Outline Reviews

I have never written a negative review before, but Outline has pushed me to do so. Initially, I absolutely loved Outline; however, after using it for a graduate course its limitations are readily apparent. One day I suddenly began recieving messages stating that I needed to quit programs because I exceeded my application memory, which shocked me since I have a 2017 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM. After researching the problem, I figured out that not only was this program hogging more than 5GB of RAM by itself, but it was so taxing on the computer that it was causing my computer to overheat (i.e. the fan kicks into overdrive after this program is open for a matter of minutes). The company’s response was that I have a broken link and it can be fixed through the context menu (which isn’t the case). Future efforts to contact them have yielded no results. Any company that charges a $40 premium for their software better make sure that they are deliveringa quality product that doesn’t make a brand new computer using the latest microchips, RAM, and SSD’s overheat. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with this program.

Programmer applies indent, bullet, formatting to every character so when copying anything say a number in the middle of a senntance in some notes to paste into another application it also copies the Bullets and tabs. Stupid Bug because of taking shortcuts in programming.

Also Encountering a bug where I delete informatoin from a sheet and save the sheet and when I come back to the sheet the information is restored and basiaclly cannot be deleted.

It is basically unusabale for anyone who needs an efficient work flow for storing project notes and be able to copy and past them to & from this applicaiton as you spend crazy amounts of time fixing formatting... even the copy as plain text still copies the Tab indents and bullets. when you only copying a small portion of the line that doesn't include them.

Installed Outline , launched, it crashed. no worries, these things can happen. launched again and all went well until I imported from evernote, then another crash and it locked me out of the notebook (that is spent 2 hours setting up with a hierarchy). so i deleted the notebook, started clean again, imported from ever note (again) and crash. Ok, fine. Started Outline again, deleted everything and started clean, did a drag and drop of a screen shot to start a note, crash.. I want a refund, but of course Outline is not eligable for a refund so im screwed out of $40. Very disappointed - i think Outline would be useful but I do research and cannot afford instability in my notes app, so back to evernote…

Outline is the basics of the basics:
You can’t change the font color and you can’t format your tables and you can’t insert symbols. You can’t move the tables at leisure
The search function, will point you to the section where the word is . .. but it will not take you exactly there with the highlighted word .. . you ahve to scroll down the page looking for it . .. not a big deal if you don’t write much . .. it is a problem if you have written a lot.
One of the things I absolutely do not like is its problem with tables! They never released a patch or a fix for that in a long long time!
So you go in there .. . you write up your table on whatever right? and then you decide, ok you need to use lists within the table. .. . and the table comes out all fine . .. then you close Outline , open it another day/time . .. and the tables come out really really long . .. it takes up multiple pages! all the formatting of everything is completely whack! It happens everytime you use this app, close it and then come back to it.
I’ve put in a request to fix at least this table issue, but they ignored it? or they keep saying they’re working on it . . . it doesn’t work for college students.

I would have given this 5 stars until about mid-January, when Outline began duplicating my sections in my notebook, and renaming them with the date and time. I think they were supposed to be syncing, but it just made separate ones. I had to stop using it alltogether because it wasn't just two or three copies of a section (which all held different--some updated--information I had added). Now there are literally dozens of copies of each section, and not worth me using because I don't know which is the most current, because it doesn't keep them in order. I wish I could share a photo. It looks ridiculous!

Sadly, OneNote for Mac does not allow local storage and CircusPonies Notebook is shut down, so this unprofessional morass is the best option available.

One major issue is the autocorrect feature. It seems incapable of distinguishing between dictionaries, and will often autocorrect from a valid English word to a random French or Spanish word. Of course, if I turn it off, I can't use any of my text shortcuts (having ARR correct to → for example).

This is very frustrating. I wish I had another option.

I've used this app for years now, and am a fan of the tool. However, at least on my MacBook it is getting worse over time. Performance really goes down if you have large files, such as extended "outlines" (no pun intended), or notebooks with multiple sections that contain multiple pages. The most recent update has made this worse, as the software now randomly closes. Also, it has become more dificul to export to OneNote, or import in reverse, making sharing notes more difficult.

this app has many good and useful features although not as robust as it should be. Getting sync between tablet and Mac was not a good experience where I even had to contact support to discover I had to import them into the tablet version before they would sync.

I used this app extensively at the start, reduced usage as I saw no real improvement in areas they really needed to step up in.

Just recieved an email and I will be removing this app from my devices. The email was regarding "subscription" cost starting June 1, 2023. No real progress and now subscription is not a good model as I already paid the additional to get all features and now they want to collect more?

Firstly, the program just drains battery on my Air. Unlike any other program, obviously this is less than ideal for a notes program that sits open in the background while you're reading, in class, or in a meeting.

Additionally, it seems like development has stopped but Outline is far from perfect. There's not format paintbrush and while the notebook allows hierarchies in a more compelling way than onenote, some organizational features aren't there. Plus, it's hard to toggle between heading styles and there's very few key codes. It looks beautify and if it were being updated, I'd be very tempted to move all my notes into the program.

I have used Outline on and off over many years, typically going back to OneNote however. The one thing that I have never liked about these types of apps is printing them to a PDF or to printer. There are no “margins” to know if what you have put onto the screen page will flow over a “right margin”.
I loaded up this app again to see what improvements have been made and discovered that pretty much what you see on the screen page is what prints to paper or PDF as one page without having right margin overflow issues. That is a huge deal for me when keeping genealogy research logs. OneNote still does not do this, so I have multiple extra print pages where the information flowed too far off the right invisible screen margin.
The other issue that I like about this app is that my files are local and sync’d on iCloud, rather that just dealing with a shortcut to OneDrive that OneNote uses.
Other than these two things, Outline does much of what OneNote does like linking to other pages and such.

The ONLY thing that is stopping me from giving Outline 5 stars is that there isn't an option to wrap text around pictures - you have to manually adjust the text and boxes rather than the text wrapping around the image as you type.

Other than that, perfect app for my needs!

Of all the notebook-taking apps I've seen, this one has the best layout and is pretty solid; however, if you're looking for styling options you'll need to look elsewhere. Font options are non-existent, you can't style ordered lists, there isn't a dark theme for the pages themselves, and in general the editor is bare bones. I've checked online for options and I keep seeing the developer promising new features that never seem to come.

Given the other merits of the software I'm willing to stick with it, but the developers really need to get the ball rolling. This has the potential of being the best on the market and, with a little more effort, could easily achieve it. If the menu looked feature rich like Word, or something similar, we'd be cooking with gas. I hope the developers will be more quickly responsive to user demands.

Thanks for fixing the issue with subscription getting forgotten. Otherwise, great tool to make notes, and it is pretty stable for me for last 1.5 years. Using it daily for my notes, and love it does not require me to sync to some cloud.

Outline is awesome in the sense that it can read and edit your onenote notebooks in the .one file extension. Outline is well worth the cost and is worth purchasing Outline to have something on the mac that will do the same thing the onenote on windows app will do, but for mac users. Nice app. I give it 5 stars.

For me, OneNote has been so problematic over the years -- lost notes, missing pictures, can;t find stuff, crashing -- so I have been looking for a great alternative for a while. Evernote is just so different functionally, so I could never get excited. This product, this app, is a dream. I hope to eventually leave MSFT all together. There are a few features missing, but it does not have all the crashes, etc that OneNote has. And, I can make easy backups. Thank you this app!

Nice app I was looking for alternative app for circus ponies app (notebook) And here I found it, I am happy that there is lot of sync option such as drop box , onedrive and so on :) , Also it sync well with icloud drive - App itself has nice clean UI look , Hopefully from Ios app please add the option that i can make the " text size " bigger ~ ( Would be much better reading it ) , Other than that I am waiting for more good fature to come on next Update :)

Outline works great for me in my MacBook Pro, I was able to import my MS OneNotes to it. My org doesn't allow access to the MS Cloud which MS OneNote forces their users to use. The one feature I would really like for this app to have is integration with MS Outlook (desktop version) is to be able to click on a "Send to this app" button and create a new page based on the email or meeting invite. Other than that I think it is great. I use it every day.

Oh my goodness! I'm in love. this app is a great idea! It's like a sketchbook of content creation, it has a lot of quirks that aren't too crazy to deal with, but the idea and implementation is fantastic in my opinion despite the quirkyness of how it works.

I used this app a loooonnnng time ago. And I do not remember why I removed it from my Mac, perhaps I wasn't using it as much. but I'm back.

Enjoyable to work in! I've been needing / wanting something tidy and comprehensive to create some of my own process and proceedures in and more, but with a more flexible layout more like a sketchpad for content creation.

It has a lot of power with books, sub groups and sections and then pages. If you can get your mind to wrap around the organizational concepts, you're golden! Great job guys! I'm excited to be back using this!

Just wanted to say thank you on behalf of Mac OneNote users everywhere. Microsoft's own implementation of OneNote has been a hobbled, cut-down, cloud-shilling disaster for people like myself who run our own sync servers or prefer to keep all our important notes to ourselves. I switched to Mac the summer of 2005 (PowerPC days) and the one app I missed from Windows was OneNote 2003. I waited ten long years for a viable alternative, trying all others, until this app finally came to the rescue. It's not a perfect 1-to-1 copy of OneNote, but that's ok. In fact, it's better than ok; it's great. this app excels where OneNote phones it in.

In summary: thanks for working on Outline and bringing it to all of us grateful Mac users. If I could, I'd buy it thrice.

Been using this for years since M$ disabled the ability for OneNote to save local on the Mac. At the time, this was a somewhat painful but necessary substitute. Since, it's evolved to a solid 4.5 star app. Appreciate the dedicated development and would love to see some enhanced freeform markup features. Overall it's a viable standalone OneNote alternative, which is no small feat.