Fractal Note vs Workflowy

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.

Workflowy is a note-taking app built around one expandable document and list. Users can nest items, focus on a bullet by zooming into it, and search across the document in real time. A bullet can become a checkbox, heading, board or table. Tags, dates, backlinks, mirrors and templates help connect or reuse material. Workflowy says it saves automatically and synchronizes across devices. Its API can read and write Workflowy data for apps, scripts and automations. Users can also enable multi-factor authentication with an authenticator-app code and recovery codes. The free Basic plan includes 100 nodes per month and 100 MB of uploads; reaching the node limit brings up a subscription prompt, though users can continue adding nodes. Pro lists unlimited nodes and uploads at $6.99 per month billed annually or $8.99 per month billed monthly. The annual option lists a seven-day trial. Workflowy supports web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and lists a Chrome extension. Its integrations include Readwise, Kindle Highlights, Google Calendar, Zapier and Workflowy Desktop MCP.