Valutorio vs Workflowy: One outline vs a real vault (2026)

Workflowy stores one document. Everything you write is a bullet inside it, nested as deep as you like, and the whole outline sits in Workflowy's cloud in a proprietary shape. You can export OPML or plain text. Valutorio has no document and no database. A vault is a folder of .md files that Finder lists, that any editor opens, and that a shell script can grep without asking permission.

The difference gets concrete the day you want to leave. Workflowy's export is a conversion, and conversions lose things: mirrors, collapse state, the exact nesting you built. Valutorio's notes are already the format you would convert to. Moving out is copying a folder.

Click any bullet in Workflowy and it fills the screen, with its children as the new top level. No markdown app does this, Valutorio included. It is why list thinkers stay with Workflowy for ten years, and nested markdown bullets are not a substitute.

Workflowy also has mirrors, which are live copies of a bullet that update in every place at once, and kanban boards built from the same outline. Valutorio has neither of those.

Workflowy is cloud-native. Your outline lives on their servers, sync is automatic, and offline editing works, but the storage is theirs and the format is theirs. Pro costs about $4.99 a month for as long as you keep the account.

Valutorio's sync is an optional subscription on top of the app purchase, so it is not the cheaper arrangement. What it is instead: automatic, in the background, encrypted in transit and at rest, 0.56 s a cycle on a 2,000-file vault, with roughly 30 seconds for the first full pass and nothing to configure. When two Macs edit the same note, three tiers of automatic resolution run in order: a three-way merge, then markdown-aware keep-both blocks, then keep-both artifacts. Valutorio never writes a conflict marker into a note and never leaves a conflicted copy behind. Decline the subscription and the app still opens local vaults indefinitely.

Workflowy has wikilinks and backlinks, which surprises people who dismiss it as a to-do app. It has no graph view and thin support for images and attachments.

Valutorio's numbers on a 2,000-file, 55 MB vault: cold index 1.07 s, full-text search 1.8 to 6.6 ms, wikilink autocomplete under 0.5 ms, backlink lookup 0.65 µs, graph snapshot 10 ms. The graph is force-directed with filtering, and tags carry counts. If you want to see the shape of what you know, Workflowy has nothing to show you.

Workflowy runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and in a browser. Valutorio runs on macOS 14 and later. There is no Windows build, no Linux build, and no iPhone app, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The partial answer is that a Valutorio vault is not locked to the Mac even though the app is. The folder is plain markdown, so the files open in any editor on any operating system, including on a phone. That covers reading and light edits away from your desk. It does not give you Valutorio's editor there.

Workflowy's free plan caps how many bullets you can add each month, and Pro runs about $4.99 a month, near $60 a year, for as long as you keep using it. Ten years of that is roughly $600 with no version you own at the end. Valutorio is a paid app on the Mac App Store and its price has not been announced, so no figure from me here, and syncing between Macs is a separate optional subscription that is also unpriced. The part that is settled is the shape: the purchase covers the editor and local vaults permanently, and the subscription covers the syncing.