CarbonFin Outliner vs Leo Editor

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.

Leo Editor is a free, open-source programmable editor, outliner, and knowledge base for arranging code, writing, and research in flexible outlines. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, through an API, and as self-hosted software. Cloned nodes allow one idea to appear in several outline locations while remaining synchronized. Navigation includes expanding and collapsing, hoisting, promoting, clones, and clickable links, with backlinks available for related sections. Users can automate workflows with Python scripts, commands, and plugins. Outlines export to HTML, MORE, Markdown, Org mode, reStructuredText, and Vim outline formats. Jupyter integration lets @jupytext nodes represent notebook cells and save changes back to .ipynb files. The leoBridge module exposes Leo content to Python host programs. A WebSocket server accepts JSON queries and changes, using password challenge-response authentication; TLS is optional. Leo requires Python 3.9 or later and is distributed under the MIT license.