Are you happy with Dynalist?

Yup, I have to agree with this one. Itā€™s why Iā€™m still using Dynalist. Plus, itā€™s SO EASY to create stuff in Dynalist. Because itā€™s so minimal I donā€™t have to spend any extra time setting up a new document or page like I would in Notion. I would love some basic tables, but I use tags to get around some of my databases. Itā€™s not perfect, but Dynalist feels more ā€˜naturalā€™ than Notion.

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im still very happy with dynalist. the only thing the has been making me look around for other alternatives is the lack of offline support. im starting to get concerned about the about of personal information i have i dynalist (nothing incriminating but lots of personal notes and thoughts) and with the way things are going these days with security breaches happening every second week i would feel a lot better if i could store some documents on my NAS drive and sync between devices on my home network only.

notion looks pretty good alright. it would be neat being able to have in-line images again. i used them a lot in evernote, but i love using dynalist so much that i am managing just fine without that feature.

did they just recently add windows or android support? i remember looking at notion at some point and wrote it off for some reason or other. anyway, its no good now because i switched from windows to linux a few weeks ago so i would need a linux version first to even consider notion

im actually starting to think of this as a downside! its so easy i end up writing down every random idea i have. if i was using evernote i wouldnt bother writing down half of the things because i know things would get way too messy

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Except for the Pro pricing, which is simply unaffordable for me due to currency exchange rates [I stay in India], I love Dynalist and itā€™s the only note app I use. Iā€™ve found ways to live without some of the pro features, so the free app is enough for me now. Iā€™m also not too concerned about privacy as Iā€™m not really storing the countryā€™s secrets in it. :sweat_smile:

So, overall Iā€™d say Iā€™m pretty satisfied with it.

Soā€¦

Where are you storing the countryā€™s secrets?

Just asking.

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How expensive is Dynalist in India compared with other countrys?

Iā€™ve entrusted that responsibility to my cat. Jokes aside, I understand the concerns over privacy, so I donā€™t store any information I consider to be sensitive. Iā€™m still very much a pen and paper person, and I tend to write a lot traditionally. I usually scan the important pages and keep them on my hard drive.

@Philipp Well I canā€™t speak for other countries, but $9.99 would be between Rs. 700 - Rs. 750 (with processing fees and such), and Iā€™m not comfortable having that expense every month. I also do not wish to pay for an entire year as I donā€™t want to be tied to the app. If it was $4.99 - $5.99 a month, Iā€™d have gladly paid.

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Dynalist has become an integral part of my workflow. I canā€™t function without it anymore.

In India not everyone has a credit card either, nor does all debit cards work for international payments.

I wouldnā€™t mind one time paid app that unlocked Pro features on phones only. Maybe a new unlock every year or two for major features, something like what Action Launcher does.

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@subhinay @anon77612580

Youā€™re probably aware of it, but donā€™t forget the referral programme as a way of offsetting the cost

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I switched to Dynalist this year after using Workflowy for years and years. I really wanted the calendar sync, and it has made a huge difference.

I would love embedding. I would love to be able to work on different files in Dynalist rather than simply have links to them.

Other than that, though, Iā€™m happy.

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Embedding and working on different files is possible with the Powerpack 3 . Maybe something you should try, itā€™s a game changer :slight_smile:

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I discovered Dynalist last summer, following the (impending) demise of Toodledo, and it has likely become my no. 1 most important app. I know @Erica said Dynalist is not meant to serve as a to-do list (?!), but I definitely use it that way (among many other things), and itā€™s superb in this respect. (Toodledoā€™s note-storing capabilities are atrocious.)

I plan to purchase the annual Dynalist subscription next week, switching from monthly payments. (Hoping for no ā€œ50% off special discounts!ā€ to be announced a few days after I make my purchase.) :joy:

As to payments, I regret PayPal isnā€™t an option. And, out of 5 (!) of my credit cards, Dynalist refused to accept 4 (!). It was a relief to discover that at least one of my cards got accepted here. Iā€™ve been buying stuff online for decades, and Iā€™ve never encountered such payment difficulties as here with Dynalist. Must be a Canadian thing, I guess? :wink:

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I think I meant Dynalist is not meant to compete with task managers like Things or Todoist, not that you shouldnā€™t use a todo list at all, sorry for the misunderstanding.

Not sure itā€™s a Canadian thingā€¦ Our payment processor is Stripe which is US based, and we use a US bank account. I looked up the transactions and didnā€™t see any paid payments, so maybe your other 4 cards were rejected before Stripe attempts to charge them. Do you remember what the error was?

Speaking of PayPal, we donā€™t have an automated system for accepting PayPal, but if you prefer we can arrange that. Just drop support@dynalist.io a line.

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Thanks a lot, Erica, good to know thereā€™s an alternative should my ā€œfifthā€ card fail one day. :wink: For now, itā€™s been working fine for monthly payments since the summer, so Iā€™m sure it will work fine for the annual payment next week, too. The working card is Visa, while the rejected ones were all Mastercards, I think, but itā€™s weird because Iā€™ve been using them for years for purchases from US Amazon, for instance. I no longer remember the error messages (from early September or so?), but they were terse one-liners simply announcing the payment had failed, with no specific reason given.

Yes, I was so blown away by Dynalist after discovering it I became a paying Pro user right away. And now Iā€™m confident I can stay here for the full year. Toodledo is still sputtering along, but even if it goes away completely one day, I think I could replace its functionality satisfactorily with Dynalist.

Prior to discovering Dynalist, I was considering Remember The Milk or Amazing Marvin as Toodledo replacements (Todoist and TickTick didnā€™t impress me in my testing), but the ability, in Dynalist, to bookmark time-based search results, is a life-saver.

So, I have set up Dynalist bookmarks such as Overdue, Overdue & Today, Today & Tomorrow, Next 3 Days, Next 7 Days, Next 14 Days, Next Month, and Next Quarter, and the speed with which you can click through all these in Dynalist is quite wonderful, and in a way even more impressive than in Toodledo, the native to-do app. The heading sizes and color highlights in Dynalist are, I find, nice (and even richer, in fact) replacements for Toodledoā€™s priority levels. Of course, Toodledo offers more task-specific features, but I could survive without them if need be.

In particular, as mentioned, the note-taking functionality in Toodledo is very poor, so I have transferred all of my task notes from Toodledo to Dynalist, putting links to Dynalist docs in Toodledo tasksā€™ note fields instead.

But Dynalist can do so much more than just to serve as a to-do list. Thatā€™s the great thing about it. Iā€™ve been using Dynalist to prepare outlines for articles I write, for instance. And Iā€™ve been using Dynalist to share professional feedback with my team members, and theyā€™ve been impressed by the clear structure of those feedback notes as offered by Dynalist. They couldnā€™t quite believe they could even insert their own reactions to the feedback notes without having to log in or set up their own Dynalist accounts, so thatā€™s some amazing functionality for the professional user.

In short, to reply to Alemā€™s question, Dynalist has been a revelation. :sunglasses:

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Thanks for sharing your use case in-depth! Thatā€™s super helpful to us :slight_smile:

Being a victim of psychiatry - Dynalist is a 4//10 for me.

  1. Once you get abducted inside a psych ward - There is no way you can cancel or pay for the monthly Pro subscription. I was surprised Dynalist was offering a pro service when I created a new account just to de-clutter everything and as a back up in case I had failed to log out of my phone but this is where Scrivener gets it right. 30 days (non-running) trial if you donā€™t log into the app for days and auto-cancel Pro set to x amount of days are missing so the credit card arenā€™t running.

  2. Since psychiatrist can prescribe drugs that mess with the mood and narcissistic parents can leave lots of broken hardware around mixed with moving pieces of paper: the traditional way to gather secure content on paper has never worked for me. Encryption is worse what with different hardware and software having different interfaces. (I just happen to forget the OPPO phone PIN code because I was kidnapped and it just happened to have 6 digit pin rather than 4. Something I could remember before being prescribed with memory and hormone destroying drugs such as Depakote, Lithium, Tegretol. This even with undergoing ECT before which should have ruined my memory pre-signing up for Dynalist.)

I havenā€™t figured out the solution yet. Friends seem like the safe bet like how services like Lastpass Premium offers but 100% of my friends have betrayed me in the worst of times. Most likely because I pretty much meet these people inside facilities like psych wards. Collaborated we can do great stuff such as be there for grieving victims and make people who will never be let out smile but once they get out - psychiatrists manipulate their fear and they turn into fearful people that would defend their psychiatrist to death just because in their head it was the psychiatrist who let them out and they arenā€™t insane, weā€™re the ones insane. They just have ā€œmental illnessā€ issues (psychiatry would never admit that thereā€™s no way to measure the chemical imbalance issues they promote). This has left me with lots of cluttered links in Dynalist and other services that I have to spend time re-collecting and while the spread out data is a life saver for going back in time. (Say 2 years prior like when I was kidnapped by 6 men who said they didnā€™t care for my human rights back in October 28, 2018) - It isnā€™t perfect in addressing the needs for an outliner with Roam Research graphs rather than Obsidian with graphs as my brain focus dies after 1 minute and I lose huge pieces of memory after a 3-6 hour period.

I can literally reread a previous page for example and find new paragraphs I should have remembered since I remembered the page having just recently read it but huge sentences would pop up that are crucial that my brain flat out couldnā€™t remember. I would pour a hot cup of water, lay it besides me and everytime it would get cold. This isnā€™t purely from the drugs alone but the combined reality that there are people being kept locked in forever or will be re-sent back (I am on Temporary Discharge for ex. due to Co-Vid quarantine) and we have to consume knowledge fast and e-mail people who donā€™t reply about psychiatric laws (ex. Jim Gottstein who wrote the Zyprexa Papers revealing how the company purposely hid warning labels) and psychiatric help groups such as Mindfreedom Shield all while the whole internet censors if not cyberbullies anyone mentioning these facts in detail because psychiatrists and psycho psychiatrist fans and clients have hijacked the idea of antipsychiatry as being Tom Cruise cults while hiding the history of concentration camps and lobotomies to the general public.

#googlesheets

dynalist is top-notch during her time, and better than a whole bunch of things out there. Just couldnā€™t ever find much use for it. Not being able to do regular notetaking and not being able to copy/paste into it I believe were a few of the key deal-breakers

#googlesheets is a bundle of useful though

Iā€™m less and less happy:
I use it for noting code, snippets and ideas:

  • the search is terrible, with two possibles search by document or entire dynalist
  • the code format does not work, I lose formatting in python and I begin to be fed up with it
  • the endless sublists does not work well to organize subjects, because the search is so bad it is hard to quick find topics

For me the bad support for code snippets and search becomes a deal breaker.

Iā€™m in the process of switching from Dynalist to Shidaā€™s & Ericaā€™s newer creation, Obsidian, right now. The search is a whole lot more robust there compared to Dynalist, and code formatting should be flawless as well. You should definitely give Obsidian a good look.

Erica & Shida have said Obsidian is not meant to replace Dynalist, but I find that, in fact, for almost everything, it can replace it, and so Iā€™m making the switch.

The piece of Dynalist functionality I currently find the toughest to replicate in Obsidian (or replace with other, but equivalent functionality) is to-do tasks management. (Something that Erica used to warn in this forum Dynalist was never meant to do anyway!) :joy: Obsidian, being a conglomerate of plain-text/Markdown files, as opposed to Dynalistā€™s database approach, will force you to re-think the way you capture your notes, but I find that it can eventually be done in Obsidian in ways similar to or even superior to Dynalist. And, the Obsidian Publish add-on is just fabulous ā€“ and thereā€™s no such thing in Dynalist.

Paying $300 per year for both Obsidian (Sync & Publish) and Dynalist is too hefty for me, however, and so, with regret, Iā€™ll in all likelihood have to cancel my annual Dynalist subscription when it comes up next on February 11th. (If there was at least some Dynalist discount for active Obsidian Sync & Publish subscribers, I might keep the Dynalist subscription, but paying the full $100 per year for software thatā€™s no longer being developed? Nope.)

If youā€™re looking for a ā€˜second brainā€™, nothing beats Personal Brain (at https://www.thebrain.com) IMO. Rather than trying to describe it here, I would encourage readers to go to the website and explore it.

I use it in combination with Dynalist.

Nope, I ainā€™t, and never have been, ā€œlooking for a second brainā€. I suffer from so much work overload I sometimes have trouble locating my first brain, you know. :joy:

Or, to put it differently: I was convinced that for the last 5 years, Dynalist was my ā€œsecond brainā€. Hands down the most important software in my life!

Yet here I am, abandoning it now in favor of Obsidian, because thatā€™s what Erica & Shida did as well. And it makes perfect sense.

Thank you for the Personal Brain recommendation, although Iā€™m currently not looking at anything else. And, I bet Obsidian has at least some functionality missing in Personal Brain (vice versa, too, no doubt), because thatā€™s exactly what youā€™d expect from Erica & Shida; for example, the Obsidian Publish functionality is absolutely terrific.

I have now concluded my research on the replacement of Dynalistā€™s to-do functionality (always only improvised in Dynalist, never really intended by Shida & Erica). Itā€™s going to be Todoist for me, to the tune of $58 per year. Not exactly cheap, but itā€™s considerably less than the $100 per year for Dynalist. And, Erica & Shida & company will now be getting $200 per year from me, for Obsidian Sync & Publish.

(I also gave TickTick a good look, which is even cheaper at $35 per year, but I find Todoist to be the clear winner. Iā€™ve just posted more about this on Reddit, in case anyone is interested.)