Outliners For iPad

OmniOutliner for iPad is the essential outliner app for the iPad. This app is in a league of its own. It is open-ended enough to become a to-do list, an inventory tracker, and so much more. This outliner lets you have limitless columns. You could essentially make spreadsheets in this app. The outlining functionality is top notch. The interface and design are fantastic. Competition cannot touch this amazing app. OmniOutliner for iPad is both beautiful and powerful.

Circus Ponies Notebook provides a digital notebook. We love how the developers have gone out of the way to make this app feel like a true paper notebook, only digital. Audio that is recorded pairs with the text you type. The outlining abilities are okay and suitable for the majority of its users. If you are a power outliner we would still recommend OmniOutliner. For many people, this app will be a great choice.

CarbonFin Outliner for iPad is a nice lower cost alternative to OmniOutliner. At a quarter of the cost you get a quarter of the elegance, power, and usefulness. The sync feature is the only thing that this app has over OmniOutliner. The sync is not very useful. There is no desktop app that it connects with. It will sync to your iPhone and other iPads. The app is easy to use and includes TextExpander support (something not currently in OmniOutliner). There is much to like here, but compared to the competition it has a long way to go.

ThinkBook is more than just an outliner. You can launch this app up simply to take notes in the notebook area of the app. We found organizing documents to be easier in this app than in OmniOutliner. The interface is very nice, but not quite as good as the OmniOutliner app. The price is what truly makes it a winner. At $1.99 it is a tenth of the price of OmniOutliner. You get some great functionality in a beautiful app.

Simple Outline provides a very simple outlining app for both your iPhone and your iPad. We found the iPad interface to be totally inadequate. The iPhone version is quite nice, but on the iPad it is almost unusable. We hope to see this app improve over time. Right now it is an app suitable for some iPhone users.

An app to avoid is iOutline. This app is both simple and non-functional. There are too many features missing in this app for us to recommend it. Even if you want a barebones app, this one might be too much so.