For more than a year now I have been using EagleFile exclusively to do my note taking and organization. I used to use DevonThink. After the break I will tell yo why I chose EagleFiler over DevonThink.
I started out using DevonThink. The reason was that I needed a OneNote replacement, and some people suggested Notebook and DevonThink. I was captivated by its search capabilities, as well as the scan into pdf functionality. At the time of my purchase DevonThink could store any kind f file, but it would not open the file in whatever program made it. That has since been remedied with the newest version of DevonThink, but there are other reasons which I will enumerate.
Price
The cheapest version of DevonThink is $49.95, and the feature rich version costs $149.95. That’s because DevonThink licensed ABBYY Fine reader for the OCR portion of scanning physical paper into the DevonThink. EagleFiler is just $40, but it has no native OCR. No problem you can add PDFPen which will do the OCR for you. The problem is that you need to scan your document, invoke PDFPen on it, and then put the resulting pdf into EagleFiler. EagleFiler support AppleScript, so you could write your own AppleScript, but the developer of EagleFiler offers applescript for you to use. The applescript for doing all of this scanning – OCR – and importing is here
The total cost is $89.95 for the solution with EagleFiler and PDFPen. The good thing about this is that the PDFPen is not limited to working with EagleFiler. It allows you do to minor editing of PDFs as well as other things.
My Use Case
As I started to work more intimately with the other Note taking software I began to realize that all I wanted was some kind of super finder. EagleFiler holds all the files in your libraries as a file system accessible outside of EagleFiler. That means I can find a file in the EagleFiler folders, and manipulate them without ever starting up EagleFiler. However if you want to add and delete files you need to do that with EagleFiler open.
DevonThink wants to put everything inside of a sparsebundle, and trying to find anything inside of that is kind of hard. So, the Use Case of being able to get t my files outside of the program is solved by EagleFiler.
Conclusion
Because EagleFiler works the way I want it to and is a much cheaper alternative to DevonThink, it has won its position as one of my Go To apps.
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DT doesn’t want to put everything in it’s sparsefile. You can also just reference the files from the finder. And when something has changed, just scan the finder’s folder. DP will come up with the actual content.
While I still have DevonThink, I like the more open feel of EagleFiler. I also like the interface, and other things. I also like the OCR product that I use with EagleFiler. EagleFiler and PDFPen gives me DevonThink’s functionality at half the price