I’ve ‘run out’ of notes on TickTick
Hi,
I’m hoping to tap into the collective knowledge base. I have officially ‘run out’ of notes on my task/notes app Tick Tick. I had no idea this was a thing.
I prefer to avoid paying subscription fees so I’m looking for a pay once alternative that fits my needs.
Tick tick is primarily a task / to do list app but I use it more extensively for the notes feature. I value having different spaces for notes and being able to quickly see my notes tags when looking at lists of notes. I also use the countdown feature to know which events are coming up first and how many days away they are.
I use the notes to organise bookings I have for upcoming events. I use the tags system to quickly see if deposits have been paid and what category of booking the event is. I also value being able to import a template first to keep notes structured in the same way.
Another thing that works for me is that tick tick is available on Mac, iOS and Android. All platforms that I use.
If they had a pay once option I’d pay it but I work hard not to rely on too many subscriptions, perhaps naively in this economy.
If anyone has any suggestions for similar apps then I’d love to know your recommendations.
Thank you so much
I’d suggest Obsidian. It’s free (except for their cloud sync, but you can use something like Dropbox to sync notes if you prefer). It utilizes Markdown format, so you can never really lose your notes since it just pulls from text files. There’s a world of plugins you can use with it as well - I don’t know if it has a countdown type of plugin, but everything else you’ve mentioned seems well in hand. I use it for everything.
I really like Obsidian. You can also use #tags to connect notes and interlink Notes.
I really like Obsidian, but personally, I find both the mobile experience and task management to be distinctly "meh".
The tool is incredibly powerful, but really better suited to desktop use imo.
I primarily check my notes on mobile but try to do my typing up on desktop. Perhaps the mobile experience being meh will keep me in good habits. It’s worth a shot. Plug-ins sound like they may lend themselves to getting things set up in a way that works for me.
I tried using Obsidian for task management, but honestly it's not built for that. You CAN make it work, but it's still going to be a bit of a chore.
I personally went for Things for task management, but it's sadly Apple ecosystem only. But it is pay once keep forever.
I've been using simplenote which is free and has no paid tier. You can import or export notes. At one point I was using sncli which is a CLI for it if you want to take notes in vim or nano. Android, iOS, and MacOS apps plus a website.
Edit: it supports markdown as well.
Edit2: re reading the post, simplenote is of course missing a lot of those features you're currently using. I hate to say you might be stuck paying for it but it sounds like it's doing a lot for you.
Thank you so much. I’ll at least check it out. Being able to use markdown and sync is definitely good.
There are several options for you depending on how much work you want to put in!
The first thing to ask yourself is if you really want an all-in-one solution or not. Yes, it's practical, but it's also often a victim of its own versatility. Jack of all trades, master of none.
If you want an all in one:
I would suggest first Obsidian. Open-source, easy to use, free, can be synced with any syncing software (though they offer a sync for 10$, and it works really well). It's all markdown all the way down, so you're probably used to it already. You CAN use it easily for pretty much anything, including task managements, with plugins. Use Tasks and with Dataview, you can make an easy task dashboard.
You could also use outliners, like Dynalist, workflowy, Roam Research and Tana here. I prefer Tana of all of these but they do mostly the same things and are great at referencing information in multiple part of the tree, which really fits my brain.
Then finally, what you've been using is the other side of those, it's task management with notes. Here there are other apps you could try, like Superlist and I think Taskade, though I haven't used that one. But Superlist is pretty cool now. It was barebones a bit when it started but it's growing quickly, and it's available on all the platforms you want.
If you want to separate the two, you could do worse than having a combo like Ticktick and obsidian for your notes!
Obsidian is not open source, it's probably great, and it is very popular, just correcting that little detail.
Thanks so much for such a comprehensive response. I’ve definitely got a lot to investigate here. Quite a lot of recommendations to try Obsidian but it’s nice to have alternatives. It looks like it can do a lot but may have a small learning curve. I’m willing to give everything a go though.
As a tick tick fan, even though I hear you on the subscription model, I say give em the $36/year money. Consider the analogue equivalent: you would be buying a new physical planner every year anyway. They have an educators / students license if you're using it for such by the way.
Another consideration is if you want to restart two free accounts, one for personal and one for work?
Unless something involves an ongoing server/cloud hosting costs; subscription model is useless. The good old pay once ought to be the norm.
Things like music or video streaming make sense as a subscription model; something like this does not. This is just enshittification , as Cory Doctorow would have put it.
But all the notes are indeed stored on their cloud and synced across all your logins? By the time I came to ticktick, they already charge money, so I don't know if they've started off being free and then slowly got enshittified, vs if this has always been their clearly stated two tier pricing model.
You may be the voice of reason. There’s some exciting new apps to try out here but I’m beginning to recognise that TickTick is performing quite a specific role for me. It’s at least something I can ‘expense’; as it’s become a vital part of my workflow.
I will try many of the options people have recommended but at least I can fall back on TickTick if there’s no pay-once solution.
Both note taking and task management are so personal, so you might need to try a bunch, but lets see.
There's the big "everything" apps like Notion and Obsidian, albeit Notion is also a subscription-oriented business which might have limits.
As a todo-manager, I adore Todoist, but they too have limits and the note-taking really isn't as robust as you might need.
I'm not sure other typical task managers like Any.do, Tasks.org, Google Keep or Microsoft To-Do will deal with the note taking either.
Anytype.io might fit, it seems less known but does have quite a few features of Notion and alike, as well as a very free form organisation system and very good sync, which even works peer to peer for free, although you might need an always online device or pay for their service if you don't want to or can't have both devices active at the same time to sync.
I like their tech but haven't used the app all that much.