ForumsQuestionsPros/Cons of Alternatives to Toodledo.

I'm just wondering if anyone has found a good substitute for Toodledo's Notes module (not the task notes, but the notebook notes). Toodledo has said they don't plan to do much development on this feature because there are so many other options out there, which -- to me -- makes good business sense at this point.

I've looked at SimpleNote, Standard Notes, and Zoho Notes. I didn't really like Zoho Notes, so I crossed that off the list.

Standard Notes was okay and has a good encryption story, plus automatic backup, but it's open source and I don't know how long the project would continue (yes, it's true that many open source projects last much longer than commercial projects, but...) The big drawback was that it wasn't clear to me how I could move to another app if I wasn't happy with them or if they disappeared. Having spent a lot of time researching and trialing other apps, I don't want something I can't leave easily.

SimpleNote is also at least partially open source, but the company that provides it, Automattic, also created WordPress.com, so I don't think they're going to go away soon. Their support group was very helpful when I asked about a Toodledo Notes import. Though they don't have a specific import for it, they suggested I try their text file import. This, however, involves saving each note as a .txt file. You can get to that point by exporting the notes as .CSV, then opening the CSV file and stripping out the columns you don't need. Basically, the only column their import uses is the Notes column itself, so you lose the note title and folder. If you know VBA (or know someone who does), you can write a little script that instead writes the folder name as a tag (for example, #HomeRepair) in the note body, and then saves the note using the title as the filename. To make the Title into a valid filename, you have to do a search and replace on all the entries in the Title column and changing all spaces and special characters to a hyphen or underscore. I'm probably not explaining it clearly enough, and there are probably quicker ways to do it, but you get the general idea: It *can* be done with a little work, and support is very helpful. I had 600+ notes, but I saved only 300 as text. I've imported a few of those as a test.

Why didn't I just go with OneNote? I didn't see a good way to export if I wanted out. (I might have missed something, though.)

Why didn't I go with Evernote? Same thing. Also, I keep hearing rumors that they're not doing so well or that they're focusing so much on the business audience that soon there won't be lower-cost plans for the individual user. None of these rumors seem well-founded, but, as I said, I don't want to go through this again right away.

However, if you were ok with using the plaintext Toodledo notes, then looks like you don’t need any of that added functionality. Why don’t just use plaintext or Word /Doc notes saved in OneDrive or Google Drive ?

BTW, getting notes out of OneNote is doable, you can export them to PDF.

Posted by Ummagumma:


Yes, for the most part I'm okay with plain text notes; if I need something more full-featured (for example, a draft of an article I'm writing), I'll save it in Word on either Office online or Dropbox. But usually I have lots of smaller plain-text notes.




True, but let's say I want to use another note app (maybe one with different features). I don't see PDF a lot as a supported input type.

For the past hour I've been looking at Simple Note (so far my preference) and Standard Notes. Simple Note has a better "escape plan" of plain text files, one per note. Yes, it's true that plain text is not always an import option, but I have seen it (Nimbus Note, Standard Notes). Standard Notes, however, has a better security story: notes are encrypted in storage.

I'm running out of time to do any more research :( I may end up flipping a coin :)

@DrFrankBuck Did you import your Toodledo notebook Notes into Evernote? Or did you just use Evernote from the beginning?

I have 333 notes in Toodledo that I want to move over to a different note app. Evernote appears to import only Evernote or OneNote exports.

I have 525 notes in Evernote from when I used it in addition to Toodledo.

Ideally I'd like to get my 333 + 525 notes in the same place, but so far I haven't found a solution.


Edited to add:

I just added Evernote's Web Clipper to Chrome (Chrome extension), opened up one of my Toodledo Notes in Chrome, and was able to clip the note, which adds it to Evernote! I did have to change the name of the note by copying and pasting from the body of the note into the title space, but that isn't hard at all on a desktop. So, that would work, but I'd have to do it 333 times :( I'm going to email Evernote's support and ask if there's an easier way.

Edited again to add:

That didn't work well. It looks like the body of the note is not searchable. That is, if I search for a word that's only in the body, not the title, the search doesn't find it.

Here is a couple of other ways to import your text files into Evernote. Did you try any of these? I suggest you have the Evernote client installed for better results.

https://superuser.com/questions/981985/how-can-i-convert-standard-txt-files-to-evernotes-notes
You may need to add Evernote to your list of Send to options. Just search for "add program to sendto"

Toodledo features not available in RTM:

People are complaining that you need multiple clicks to reschedule overdue events, and yet it's acceptable that you need to click TWICE to mark a task completed?.

Clicking the checkbox for a task in RTM doesn't mark it completed (it selects the task, and then you need to click the "check" at the top).

People are complaining that you need multiple clicks to reschedule overdue events, and yet it's acceptable that you need to click TWICE to mark a task completed?

They almost had me, but that's just idiotic.

I just don't think Jake would have slapped his loyal customers with double the subscription price all of a sudden. What does that tell us? If such desperate measures are required (?) here, it can only tell us this may be the last-ditch attempt to save Toodledo from extinction. How can you expect "good vibes" from that?