Bike Outliner vs Fractal Note

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.

Fractal Note is a free, MIT-licensed note environment inside VS Code. It combines a WYSIWYG Markdown editor with outliner, database, mindmap, and file-manager views. Notes remain plain Markdown and JSON files organized through a virtual folder and file tree. Full-text search covers outlines, Markdown pages, and PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments. A built-in viewer handles Office documents, PDFs, HTML, images, and text or code files. The Chrome extension clips web pages into an outliner or Markdown and writes them to disk through the File System Access API. Backlinks, collapse and expand controls, subtree scoping, filtering, and PDF or Markdown export support navigation and sharing. Bidirectional S3 sync and Amazon Translate require AWS credentials; HTTP(S) proxy connections for those services are not supported. Published AI skills support note searching, reading, and writing in named AI IDEs.