Outline User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience43.7% of reviews
Neutral13.6% of reviews
Negative experience42.6% of reviews

~ Based on 462 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say

Is Outline Safe?

Outline: Notes and More appears safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Outline is 89/100.

This assessment is based on 68 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.7/5.

Safety Analysis

92.5% of ratings point to a safe experience
1.5% of ratings suggest some concerns
6.0% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 67 App Store ratings for Outline.

Is Outline Legit?

Outline: Notes and More appears legitimate, with a few gaps. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Outline is 73/100.

Based on 73 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Deleted the App Today

It seems that Outline has gone the way of so many other apps—make users subscribe and pay for more and more features of their product, otherwise you are stuck with a subpar product and an awful experience. I honestly tried to use the app today because I am searching for a note-taking product to use. I spent an hour entering notes, only to discover that to use a feature I wanted and needed, I had to pay for a subscription. I don’t need a subscription for the features I want. I don’t want AI, I just want a full-features note-taking app as is, not a product that behind paywalls their most needed features. Sorry, the app is deleted and I have moved on.
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Perfect

Outline provides the perfect space to organise and experiment with various projects and musings that are still some way from completion. I have found it very useful for my otherwise wayward academic work (PhD). Highly recommend for students of all stripes and at all stages of learning

Outline Replace OneNote

I really liked OneNote. Two catastrophic fails for me are the difficulty of exporting and moving Notebooks and being chained to Onedrive. I have a lot of Notebooks and was going to have to buy more space. So, I switched to Outline. It has worked very well but is ‘buggy’. Just today I’ve had to close the app twice to clear a problem. The first problem was just reorganizing pages. The second problem was it just locked up and I could no longer navigate.

Though I lack some confidence in Outline because of this bugginess, I am still going to use it and hope the developers improve it.
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Great app, but ONE BIG CAVEAT!

This app does almost everything I need. I can’t believe that as old as this app is, it does NOT support different fonts, and even when you copy/paste, it doesn’t always keep the same font/style you pasted. THIS IS A BIG DEAL! I don’t care what the developer says. There is a review on here that is SEVEN years old that addresses this, and the devs STILL haven’t seen fit to add font and style support. Shame on them! 2026.04.06 update: I have been trying for over an hour to sync data from iPhone to desktop. I THINK I am about to get it done, but no way it should be this complicated! Take that star-rating down to 1/2 star!
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Good

I am switching from Onenote to Outline as I prefer the iOS system to windows. This was a good switch, there are older reviews that are pretty negative but I am enjoying the app. I would find it would be better if it was a little more kept up and updated. I do see that every few weeks to month theres a new update. I do have issues with the app freezing in the middle of my work. It also has issues synching. I would like some improvements to the features. Overall it’s a great app. I am going to keep testing it for the next month and subscribe if I decide to stick to it.
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Its rubbish

Steer clear

Encore une appli avec abonnement

J’avais acheté cette application il y a quelques années… et maintenant il y a un abonnement juste pour faire une recherche dans mes propres notes… quelle blague… et qu’elle arnaque… Pour ma part hors de question de payer de payer un abonnement pour ce genre d’application qui ne fait rien d’incroyable…
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Does not even open without crashing

Opening the app is nearly impossible, it crashes before it even starts.

ATE MONTHS OF WORK

Created a project with several notebooks and multiple files for book research. Enabled synching every minute. Came back a few months later and 95% of my files were gone. Trying to restore from backup which is a confusing mess. Absolutely no customer support. Awful, what a joke!

Great app, but ONE BIG CAVEAT!

This app does almost everything I need. I can’t believe that as old as this app is, it does NOT support different fonts, and even when you copy/paste, it doesn’t always keep the same font/style you pasted. THIS IS A BIG DEAL! I don’t care what the developer says. There is a review on here that is SEVEN years old that addresses this, and the devs STILL haven’t seen fit to add font and style support. Shame on them!
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Reliability issues with saved notes

I wanted to like Outline, but I ran into a serious reliability issue. Parts of my files were getting lost over time, especially embedded images. For a notes app, losing content is a deal breaker. I would not recommend using this for important notes or lab work.

Extremely slow on MacOs 26.2

Outline used to be my favorite journaling app.
Post-Tahoe update, it’s a mess: page dragging lags 10-15s with stuttering, copy-paste often crashes or hangs. Deeply disappointed; hunting for a stable alternative now.

Excellent Software

I transitioned from Windows to a macOS environment years ago but couldn’t part with my old notetaking app because it didn’t support local notebook storage. I found Outline, and with the paid subscription, I was finally able to switch to my new setup. Outline itself is quite intuitive, with just the right amount of flair to complement all of my favorite Apple apps. I highly recommend Outline.
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Corrupts oneNote notes

Any note you open with this OneNote will show as corrupted.

Fantastic app!

The new update, with native Apple Pencil support, makes this the best notebook style app I’ve tried for the iPad. And support for Webdav syncing means all my notes stay on my self-hosted server—something no other app offers (that I’ve found). Highly recommended!

Does not work with OneNote 365

Despite promises, does not work with OneNote 365. While I could create group sections, notes therein got disrupted/damaged.

A dead-end for your notes

I've been using Outline for over 10 years when I moved to macos, and it was a great alternative to OneNote; Microsoft has never support Mac products well.

While unstable at times (it will crash regularly) Outline is an attractive and easy to use app, and preferable to a full-featured OneNote on macos.

BUT the rest of the world has moved on, and the OneNote format is slowly dying. Microsoft is forcing users to move to the cloud. Outline locks you into a poorly supported file format with no practical way of moving out; _NOTHING ELSE_ will read the files and even OneNote on Mac can't to read the notes from Outline these days.

I've migrated away and converted to Markdown and suggest others do the same. There certainly isn't any point paying for a product that has seen little development, locks your notes in a dying file format, and no ability to export or migrate to a new format.

Edit: Developer says you can export. The facts are that you can export _only_ to PDF, which we all know is generally not an accepted file content format but rather a format for final presentations. O365 OneNote allows you to export to multiple formats, and having happily moved to Joplin I'm provided with JEX, RAW, Markdown, HTML and PDF.

The facts are Outline forces you in to the OneNote file format.

MS are discontinuing OneNote on Win10 in Oct, and you have to download the O365 OneNote; MS don't have a clear strategy about OneNote. Therefore you're being locked into a dying format.

Outline isn't 100% compliant with the OneNote file format and you will find issues when you try to read files from Outline in OneNote.

Little development has been done, and the feature set actually _reduced_ when the subscription model came in. Having bought the app in. 2014 I didn't see why I would have to pay twice, but the features removed from the subscription free version forced me to upgrade and pay for features I used to have. Still no ability to change style formats, little development on new features and app stability hasn't improved.

Tools like Joplin, Obsidian, and Notion allow you to import and export notes in both proprietary and open standard formats like Markdown. Having moved to Joplin I've found editing is faster that Outline, and I've encountered fewer bugs. The UI is definitely not as nice, but there is a community developing plugins, much better file format support, improved performance and fewer crashes. Oh and it's free. I miss Outline's elegant UI but that is all.
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Stürzt ab und zu ab

Nach dem uploaden eines pdf und dem Versuch gleich danach es als printout einzubetten führt zum Absturz auf meinem Macbook air

Первое впечатление хорошее

На маке не так много альтернатив OneNote, позволяющих работать с его локальными записными книжками. Outline - одна из них.

This app is going to the Trash

I just installed the app hoping that it could read my exported OneNote files. It opened the first time and I tried to open the OneNote archive folder containing .one files. It then crashed, and kept crashing every time it tried to open in. Dragged the app straight to the Trash, Sorry.