Cloud Outliner vs Fractal Note

Cloud Outliner is an outlining app for organizing plans, projects, and ideas as interactive notes. Its editor supports drag-and-drop reordering, multi-selection, checkboxes, automatic numbering, item notes, rich-text formatting, and highlighting. A multi-tier document manager adds color stickers, password protection, customizable templates, and document duplication. Search covers outline names and text; entries can be collapsed or expanded, filtered by checked status, and viewed in light or dark themes. The maker says outlines sync through iCloud and Evernote. Export options include PDF, OPML, HTML on macOS, and plain text, with sharing through email, instant messaging, and listed social or Apple services. It runs on iOS and macOS, with iOS read-only mode, indentation gestures, orientation support, and wireless keyboard shortcuts. Downloads are free with in-app purchases; Pro plans add cross-device sync and remove banners or ads.

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.