Hi,
I am a subscriber of more than 30 ONLINE SERVICES, and DYNALIST is the only that at support has nobody.
I sent message from e-mail … also tried the feedback form to send same issue … and NOBODY is answering.
And the reason is about payment and credit card.
INCREDIBLE that a business acting THIS WAY WITH PAID USERS!
I never saw something like this!
As far as I know, they’re a two-person team—with a young family—and spend most of their development time on their other product, Obsidian.
Honestly, Obsidian is fantastic—and I can see Obsidian subsuming Dynalist in the future. I’ve officially ditched Dynalist in-place of Obsidian. Give it a try!
There’s been no Dynalist updates since September. Dynalist is done. If you’re desperate for a dedicated outliner that will continue to evolve, Workflowy is becoming a better choice now as they’re regularily releasing new features. And their ‘mirror’ feature is tha bomb!
Otherwise, cya over at Obsidian 
This is a bit painful to read…
The team has stated several times that they’re not going anywhere and don’t plan to shutdown Dynalist. I wouldn’t say it’s a done product.
However, it’s clear it’s not getting too much attention lately. I believe that in order for them to implement something really new, it would require some code refactoring, rewriting, etc etc… So it’s not that easy, and they’re choosing to stick with bug fixes and minor changes rather than the big ones. I don’t know for sure what is going on in the backstage. That’s just my vision based on what I’ve been reading.
I could say Dynalist is still a great product and I don’t plan to switch to any other tool. Came from Workflowy and don’t plan to switch back because I consider Workflowy awful in comparison with Dynalist, but that’s just my opinion. Dynalist just suits my needs and it does it very well. And I’m sure others agree with me.
What is really bad and annoying is the lack of a decent communication, in comparison to what we used to have a couple of years ago. Even on Discord, replies/comments are not that frequent anymore. It’s true since Obsidian was born, things have changed a lot down here. BUT as I said, they stated many times that they don’t plan to shutdown this product. Hope they can keep seeing the value on it for the long haul. And this gives me hope… a bit of hope.
True. But have said maintenance mode. At least for now.
I think that’s true. Taking Dynalist forward is a major piece of work.
Their time is limited, Obsidian is voracious and still growing fast and something has to give. Even in Obsidian their personal input in the forums is limited but they have a big team of volunteer moderators. I don’t see the input into the forum getting back to where it was unless they employ staff, and I don’t know if the Dynalist revenues can support that.
Don’t forget the kanban! Certainly competition from Workflowy has ramped up massively - they’ve gone from 2 developers to 16 and that’s a big increase even taking account of the extra time that will have to be consumed my formal planning and management.
Hi there, if you used the in-app option I should have replied to you, unless there’s some technical issues there.
I’m not seeing any Pro user emails from more than 7 days, so could you submit feedback in-app again please so I don’t miss it? Please use the in-app option whenever possible, because otherwise your email will not end up in the priority support queue. Thank you!
Hi Jamie, I appreciated reading your note here! I’m a researcher in Mechanical Engineering and been avid Dynalist user for 2 years (Thank you Team Dynalist!). However, I’ve been failing to understand how Obsidian is better than an outliner like Dynalist or Workflowy (especially since Obsidian has like two levels of nesting, whereas Dynalist has infinitely many.)
I’ve been following the marketing for Obsidian since it came out and whenever I read what Obsidian is, I get bogged down by jargon like Markdown Upon Hypertext Markup Files Information Management blah blah (sorry!).
Could you please explain in simple what Obsidian is?
Obsidian lacks the full outlining prowess of DynaList, but its advantages lie in these respects:
Local, plain text files. This is extremely important to many. Gives them full control over their own information.
Ability to create nice formatted documents (notes). Not like MS Word, but much closer to that paradigm than DynaList.
Wiki style linking. It’s easy to make connections between notes and discover and generate new connections.
Very open with a powerful and heavily used extension API.
Multi-note display.
If Obsidian had the same kind of outliner functionality I would totally jump over to it. But it seems to not have it. It would get pretty unmanageable very quickly. I think there’s basic expand/collapse functionality for bulleted lists, but it’s pretty limited. I wonder if there would be a way to integrate both of them together, having a link from obsidian to dynalist whenever I need more robust outlining features.
Okay, thanks for your explanation!
I’m hoping Obsidian gets outliner functionality too!
In the meantime, there’s a popular community plugin that can be used
I think that’s quite different to being an outliner. And local files rather than a web database.
Roam and Logseq are outliners.
Obsidian can contain outlines, and their capability can be supplemented by plugins.
It can be made to mimic being an outliner using tags, links etc.
But they still don’t make it an outliner and what matters will vary from user to user.
The best way, imho, to achieve Dynalist type outliner functionality and all the benefits of Obsidian is actually to use them both. So long as they don’t need to be used simultaneously with the same dataset, this works very well. Dynalist will import/export OPML, that converts to and from markdown very well. It wouldn’t work for a whole Dynalist database, but works for outlines 6/7 deep and it is quick and easy to convert such an outline into a markdown file. The bullets become headings, and the notes become body text under the heading. If you only want the bullets, they can just be pasted into a file.
Obsidian notes are just as easy to manage - easier in many ways - but the management would be conceptually different, whichever system you chose to use in Obsidian. If your primary interest is in pure outliner use, I’d suggest staying as you are until you need features accessible only in Obsidian.
I want to use Obsidian given the attention the Team Dynalist is giving to it. But its not an outliner and I just don’t understand it. Is there any chance for Obsidian to become an outliner and able to import from Dynalist?
Obsidian is general text documents. You can put an outline in a document, but this does not make the program that supports this an outliner. You can export DynaList documents into Obsidian documents and it will show as an outline. You can add Logseq to Obsidian to give it outlining prowess. I don’t think it will match DynaList in this regard.
