Bike Outliner vs CarbonFin Outliner

Bike Outliner is a macOS app for thinking, writing, organizing lists, notes, and documents. Its outlines support headings, ordered lists, task lists, and other row types, while a rich text editor handles formatting. Full-screen, typewriter, and focus modes provide distraction-free writing. Navigation includes keyboard movement by focus heading, back and forward controls, breadcrumbs, inline buttons, and a navigation bar. Deep links remain valid when an outline file is moved or renamed. Bike uses an HTML-based .bike format and also supports .opml and .txt files, with Markdown support, printing, Quick Look previews, and Finder thumbnails. Scripts, Shortcuts, and AppleScript can control the app. Free mode never expires and covers reading, writing, and editing outlines; additional row types, rich text formatting, Shortcut Actions, and AppleScript require purchase.

CarbonFin Outliner organizes thoughts, tasks, and projects in nested outlines. Tasks can contain subtasks, with progress indicators for parent tasks that have them. Its editor supports inline changes, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, drag-and-drop reordering, search, and controls to collapse or expand items. Outlines can be tagged and filtered by tag, searched across the collection, archived, and optionally numbered. Each outline can include notes, with configurable checkboxes, note previews, and numbering. The iPhone and iPad app costs $4.99, paid once. Outliner Online is a free browser-based companion for syncing, editing, printing, importing, exporting, and sharing outlines. Outliner users can invite other Outliner users to view and edit shared outlines; published outlines can be viewed read-only by anyone with the URL. The app can sync outlines as OPML files with Dropbox or OneDrive, import OPML, and export plain text or OPML. Shared editing through Outliner Online is limited to iPhone or iPad app users. The app lacks native printing, though synced outlines can be printed through Outliner Online in a browser.