Comparison

Plain and Simple Thoughts vs Planned Experiment

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Plain and Simple Thoughts

Save articles, recipes, receipts, and important documents from any app. Automatically categorizes saved items and displays them as they were originally saved. Offers a clean reading experience and smart organization for your digital life.

Highlights
  • Save links and text from any app
  • Automatic categorization of saved items
  • Preserves original page appearance
  • Extracts recipe ingredients and methods
  • Organizes receipts and warranties
  • Stores important papers like IDs
  • Offline indexing for Home Screen search
Features
Read full description

Share a link. It is waiting when you want it. For anyone who keeps meaning to read something later and has run out of places to put it — a pile of open tabs, a message sent to themselves, a bookmark folder nobody opens. It has since grown three more shelves for the other things that end up in a drawer: recipes, receipts and warranties, and papers like a passport or a licence. Each stands on its own, and the ones you do not need can be ignored. HOW IT WORKS In any app — Safari, a message, a social app — tap Share and choose it. That is the whole of using it. The sheet saves and closes by itself. Start typing before it does and you can leave yourself a note about why you kept it, which three weeks later is the harder thing to reconstruct. It works whether the other app hands over a web address or a lump of text with an address buried inside it. If you would rather not use the share button at all, there is a + on your library: paste an address straight in. IT SORTS ITSELF Saved things are grouped by what they are — an article, a video, code, a reference page, a post — and by where they came from. A long list stays findable without you filing anything. What you have not read yet is what you see first. They turn up in your Home Screen search as well, from an index built on your own device and offered to nobody. IT LOOKS LIKE THE THING YOU SAVED It fetches the page's title and its preview picture, so a saved link reads as the thing it is rather than as a row of characters. That request goes to the site you saved and to nowhere else. It is the one thing this app sends anywhere, and it is described in full on the privacy page rather than left to a label. It strips the tracking parameters off a link before storing it, so what you keep is the page rather than a record of where you found it. READING Tap to read it inside the app, in Safari's reader. Archive it when you are done, or delete it. You can pick several at once to archive them or mark them read — there is deliberately no way to delete a pile, because archiving can be undone and deleting cannot. RECIPES Share a recipe page and the ingredients and the method are pulled out as you save it. That is reading rather than guesswork — recipe sites publish their recipes as structured data — so nothing is invented and no step is dropped. You can also paste an address, write one out yourself, or photograph a cookbook page and let the phone read the words off it. Amounts double, halve and convert, and a cooking mode shows one step at a time with the screen kept on. RECEIPTS AND WARRANTIES What it cost, where it came from, and when the cover runs out — listed by whatever expires soonest. Photograph the receipt and your iPhone reads the shop, the total and the serial number off the picture and offers them to you before anything is saved. Search finds them by the serial number too. PAPERS A passport, a licence, an insurance card: the number, the expiry, and a picture of it. The tab can be put behind Face ID or your passcode, and that is off until you turn it on. Pin one and its number can sit on your Home Screen or Lock Screen. A warranty or a paper can carry a reminder before the date, scheduled and delivered by your own iPhone. There is none unless you ask for one. YOUR OWN iCLOUD Your library syncs through your own iCloud account, so a link saved on the phone is on the iPad — where it lays itself out as an iPad app rather than a stretched phone screen. It sits in your private database, under your Apple Account. There is no server of mine — I have no access to it and no way to read it. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO • No adverts, no purchases, no subscription • No account to create and nothing to sign into • No analytics, no tracking, no reading history shared with anyone One thing to know before you start: iOS makes you switch a share button on by hand the first time. Tap Share, scroll the icons to the right, tap More, and switch it on. You only do it once, and the app explains it.

About

Planned Experiment

Read full description

PlanExp is a complete environment for design of experiments, ordinary-least-squares regression, and response-surface work — from the planning matrix to 2D contours, 3D surfaces, and ternary diagrams. Build a plan, enter replicate measurements, fit a polynomial model, test it, and read the optimum inside the coded cube [−1, +1]^k. Factor coding follows the classical DOE convention x = (X − X0) / ΔX. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Choose a design: one-factor grid, 2^k and 2^(k−p), Box–Draper B-D13, rotatable / face-centered / inscribed CCD, Box–Behnken, Plackett–Burman, Doehlert, 3^k, Taguchi arrays, simplex lattice for mixtures, D-optimal, Latin hypercube, and definitive screening. • Fit OLS models with main effects, two-factor interactions, and quadratic terms. Optional three-way interactions for 2^k. • Run Cochran’s C for variance homogeneity, Student’s t on coefficients, and Fisher’s F for lack of fit. See R², adjusted R², and RMSE. • Drop insignificant terms and refit. Canonical analysis locates the stationary point; a constrained search reports the best feasible point in the experimental region. • Plot response curves, filled contours, interactive 3D surfaces, and ternary (mixture) diagrams in natural units. FREE AND FULL The free version includes a one-factor grid, full factorial 2^k with up to three factors, two parallel runs, PDF reports, and JSON of your own project. Local gallery save is always free. The full version unlocks every design (including a custom matrix), up to 12 parallel runs, and CSV export — a single lifetime purchase. WHO IT IS FOR Researchers, process engineers, chemists, metallurgists, and students who plan laboratory or plant trials and need transparent classical statistics rather than a black-box optimizer. PlanExp continues the lineage of the PlanExp 2³ and PlanExp B-D13 desktop tools, rewritten for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with a shared math core.

Screenshots

Plain and Simple Thoughts4 screens
Planned Experiment4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Plain and Simple Thoughts at none against Planned Experiment's 1. On price, update cadence, ads and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Planned Experiment sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Plain and Simple Thoughts asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 6, 2026 and October 7, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
Plain and Simple Thoughts versus Planned Experiment: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPlain and Simple ThoughtsPlanned Experiment
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (1 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings1 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 4 daysEvery 4 days
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, Mac — better
Requires iOS18.017.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size4 MB7 MB
Age rating17+4+
DeveloperPlain and Simple Solutions LLCIlya Obraztsov

In-app purchases

None

Plain and Simple Thoughts

No in-app purchases

1 purchases

Planned Experiment

One-time1
  • Full version$17.99

Questions

Is Plain and Simple Thoughts free?
Plain and Simple Thoughts is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Planned Experiment free?
Planned Experiment is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Plain and Simple Thoughts or Planned Experiment have ads?
Neither Plain and Simple Thoughts nor Planned Experiment shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Plain and Simple Thoughts or Planned Experiment?
Plain and Simple Thoughts ships an update every 4 days, and Planned Experiment every 4 days. Most recently, Plain and Simple Thoughts was updated on October 6, 2026 and Planned Experiment on October 7, 2026.

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