Bike Outliner vs Tine

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.

Tine is a free, local outliner that works with Markdown files in the same on-disk format as Logseq, so users can open the same graph in either app without importing or exporting. It supports split panes, separate tabs and histories, and layouts that remain after a restart. Search can use filters, and a visual query editor keeps in sync with query text while showing results as a list, table, or board. Sheets can turn bullets and their children into grids, typed-field tables, or boards, with formulas, filters, aggregates, grouping, and CSV or TSV import. Tine can publish graph pages as a static site with search, tabs, split view, and navigation, without requiring a server. It has no built-in sync; users need to bring a service such as Syncthing, Dropbox, or git. The maker says graph and note contents are not uploaded to Tine servers. Plugins run in a capability-limited sandbox, but the plugin API is experimental and does not support Logseq or Obsidian plugins. Android builds are available through F-Droid or GitHub; iPhone and iPad access is a public TestFlight beta with no App Store listing yet.