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My Workflowy review

In this post I’ll tell about my experience with Workflowy - famous outliner service, which I’ve been using for half a year at the moment of writing.

Why

I don’t suffer from information gathering much, but I have pretty minimal needs - sync bookmarks, keep some text notes and todo items. I used to keep bookmarks with Firefox sync mechanism and my text notes/todo items with the help of protectedtext (which is a great service!). But because firefox became unusable, I switched a browser from Firefox to Vivaldi on a smartphone, while on a laptop I was still using firefox. That broke my bookmarks workflow, and at that moment I had two bookmark lists, and each of them was living its own life. What about notes? - I was happy with how I dealt with them, but it changed over time because of bad usability on a smartphone. I tried a lot of note management tools (Trello, TickTick, Notion, Org mode, Simplenote, Standardnotes, Google Keep), but finally I’ve picked Workflowy. The main reason was that I thought that I would be able to adopt it for all my needs (And strictly speaking, I succeed at this). I was using it for less than a month before I bought PRO subscription. Now the story begins…

Interface (Desktop)

Workflowy has a great UI. It’s clean and consistent, what else do I need? In general, nothing. There are some issues with the mobile app - I’ll list them in the next section.

Here, it’s worth mentioning DynaList - a clone of Workflowy, which in my opinion has a terrible user interface:

Interface (Mobile)

This is a list of my issues with the mobile interface:

Everything else is very nice.

Keyboard shortcuts

I had been using only mouse for the first few months, but when I tried to use a keyboard, I was thrilled. Now, on desktop/web platform, about half of my actions are done with a keyboard. You can always toggle the help panel with shortcuts in three steps:

  1. Click options button
  2. Pick “Settings”
  3. Toggle the “help me learn the keyboard shortcuts”

My day to day shortcuts are:

Slow startup

On a smartphone, the application starts very slow. I hate it when I take the smartphone to write out a quick note and have to wait more than 5 seconds for application to be loaded. Any default note taking application starts in a moment on any android device, and such slow Workflowy’s start speed is very irritating. I’m not the only one who have faced with this - there’s a ticket with this problem. The support says that 10-15 seconds for startup is “expecting” and “pretty standard for now”.

In the march of 2023, Workflowy announced “Significant speed improvements” of load time - now it’s 40% less in average. However, I personally haven’t noticed any speed improvements - maybe this is because I have a very small amount of list items, while they seem like they have boosted load time only for accounts with a large number of nodes, I don’t know.

Complex content

Workflowy is an outliner. It’s poorly suited for rich content with images, paragraphs, tables etc. With this service, you should consider every node as one single, atomic block of the whole text. Do you want to insert an image? Create a node. Need a list? Create a node for each item. Want to split some notes into paragraphs? You know what to do. And this way of working with documents may be unacceptable for people who want to use Workflowy for writing long text and complex documents.

Kanban

They’re selling it as the feature that would incline Trello users to make a switch to Workflowy.

I think this is silly. Trello sucks, but if someone uses it, Workflowy’s unintuitive kanban implementation will just enhance his attachment to Trello.

Summary

In summary, I like Workflowy, but I’m afraid that the team will be adding more and more features to it in pursuit of new users, and as a result, Workflowy will become everything, and nothing. Will I renew my subscription? Definitely not - I don’t use it heavily enough to pay for it.