The following is a list of personal information managers (PIMs) and online organizers.
PIM application | Platform(s) | Software license | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
3D Topicscape | Windows | Commercial | organizes information into 3D landscapes |
Calendar | macOS | Commercial | Included with macOS |
Outlook Calendar on Outlook.com | Web | Freeware | Has a freeware offline client, Calendar (Windows) |
Gubb | Web | Freeware | |
CintaNotes | Windows | Freemium | organizes information as notes, grouped using tags |
eM Client | Windows | Freemium | Personal information manager, Email client, Calendaring software |
Evernote | macOS, Windows, Web, Android | Commercial | |
Evolution | Linux, Unix, GNOME | GPL | Included with GNOME |
Google Calendar | Web | Freeware | |
GroupWise | Linux, macOS, Windows, Web | Commercial | |
IBM Notes | Linux, macOS, Windows | Commercial | |
ical | Cross-platform | GPL | |
Joplin | Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS | AGPL | Note taking application organised as notebooks. Can import and export from Evernote |
Kontact | Linux, Windows, Unix, macOS, KDE | GPL | Included with KDE |
Leo | Linux, Windows, macOS | MIT | Python-scriptable folding editor/IDE organized around multiple views (clones) of underlying text spread across files. Inspired by literate programming and similar to org-mode. |
Lightning | Linux, Windows, macOS, others | MPL, GPL, LGPL | Addon for the Thunderbird e-mail client |
Microsoft Outlook | Windows, macOS | Commercial | |
mobile PhoneTools | Windows | Commercial | |
MyInfo | Windows | Commercial | Free form personal information manager |
Notion | Cross-platform | Commercial | |
Obsidian | Cross-platform | Catalyst license | Personal Knowledge Base |
OneNote | Windows, macOS, Web, Android, Windows Phone | Freeware | Notes manager |
org-mode | Cross-platform | GPL | Integrates with Emacs BBDB for contact management support, web browsers for hyperlink storing support. Free iPhone and Android apps available (Orgzly, MobileOrg and Beorg) |
Personal Knowbase | Windows | Commercial | Freeform note-taking organizer. Portable. |
Planz | Windows | MIT | Provides a single, integrative document-like view of personal information as an overlay to the user's file system. |
Remember the Milk | Web | Freemium | |
Tabbles | Windows | Freemium | Tagging and auto-tagging of files, emails and bookmarks. Tag-sharing for files on shared-drives or in the Cloud. |
TagSpaces | Cross-platform | AGPL | Offline application for PC, smartphone or tablet. Personal "wiki" for project tracking and storage of information. |
Taskwarrior | Linux, semi-cross-platform (Windows Subsystem for Linux, Cygwin) | MIT | Time and task management tool with command-line interface. |
Things | macOS | Commercial | Task management and scheduling |
TiddlyWiki | Cross-platform | BSD 3-clause | Single HTML file application used directly in browser that facilitates content reuse. |
Tinderbox | macOS | Commercial | |
TopXNotes | macOS | Commercial | Hybrid personal note and information organizer |
Treasuremytext | Cross-platform | Commercial | Archiving personal messages |
Whizfolders | Windows | Commercial | Hybrid Note-taking software and outliner |
Windows Contacts | Windows | Commercial | Included with Windows 7, 8 and 10 |
Wrike | Web | Commercial | |
Yahoo! Calendar | Web | Freeware | |
Yojimbo | macOS | Commercial | "Personal information manager" |
Zim | Cross-platform | GPL | Graphical text editor designed to maintain a collection of locally stored wiki-pages. |
SuperMemo | Windows | Commercial (with freeware older versions) | Spaced repetition, Incremental reading, Task management and more. |
TheBrain | Cross-platform | Freemium | Personal knowledge base that uses a dynamic graphical interface that maps hierarchical and network relationships. Like a Knowledge Graph. |
PIM application | Platform(s) | Software license | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
askSam | DOS, Windows | Commercial | Free form database |
Backpack | Web | Commercial | Todo list and calendar |
Chandler | Linux, OS X, Windows | Apache | Free form approach based on Lotus Agenda |
ClarisOrganizer | macOS | Commercial | organized Events, Tasks, Notes, Contacts |
Ecco Pro | Windows | Freeware | organizes information via full power outline and tag assignments. (Tags can contain text, numeric, or date data. Date data automatically mapped to calendar.) |
Google Notebook | Web | Freeware | deprecated by Google Docs, Google Keep |
Haystack | all operating systems with POSIX and Java | MIT | |
Hula | Linux | GPL | Replaced by Bongo project |
IBM Lotus Organizer | Windows | Commercial | 2003–2013 |
ideaList | DOS, Windows, Mac | Commercial | Free form database |
Lotus Agenda | DOS | Freeware | deprecated by IBM Lotus Organizer |
Meeting Maker | Linux, OS X, Solaris | Commercial | |
Microsoft Entourage | OS X | Commercial | deprecated by Microsoft Outlook for Mac |
MORE, GrandView | Classic Mac OS, DOS | Commercial | 1986–1990 |
Mozilla Calendar Project | Linux, BSD UNIX, OpenSolaris, Solaris, OS X, Windows, OS/2 | MPL | deprecated by Lightning |
Mozilla Sunbird | Linux, BSD UNIX, OpenSolaris, Solaris, OS X, Windows, OS/2 | MPL, GPL, LGPL | deprecated by Lightning |
Now Up-to-Date & Contact | Mac OS, Windows | Commercial | Event, Task and Contact Organizer |
Palm Desktop | Mac OS, Windows | Commercial | |
Plaxo | Web | Commercial | 2002-2017 |
Sidekick | DOS, Windows | Commercial | 1983–1999 |
A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.
Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.
A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information management as a field of study. As an information management tool, a PIM tool's purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of "personal information".
gedit is a text editor designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It was GNOME's default text editor and part of the GNOME Core Applications until GNOME version 42 in March 2022, which changed the default text editor to GNOME Text Editor. Designed as a general-purpose text editor, gedit emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with a clean and simple GUI, according to the philosophy of the GNOME project. It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages.
Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software that stores a database of bibliographic records and produces bibliographic citations (references) for those records, needed in scholarly research. Once a record has been stored, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies, such as lists of references in scholarly books and articles. Modern reference management applications can usually be integrated with word processors so that a reference list in one of the many different bibliographic formats required by publishers and scholarly journals is produced automatically as an article is written, reducing the risk that a cited source is not included in the reference list. They will also have a facility for importing bibliographic records from bibliographic databases.
DokuWiki is an open source wiki application licensed under GPLv2 and written in the PHP programming language. It works on plain text files and thus does not need a database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki. It is often recommended as a more lightweight, easier to customize alternative to MediaWiki. The 'Doku' in DokuWiki is short for Dokumentation which in German means documentation.
A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system.
Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs all built on top of a common core.
Notable issue tracking systems, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, as well as asset management systems, include the following. The comparison includes client-server application, distributed and hosted systems.
A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.
Computer-assisted reviewing (CAR) tools are pieces of software based on text-comparison and analysis algorithms. These tools focus on the differences between two documents, taking into account each document's typeface through an intelligent analysis.
DNS management software is computer software that controls Domain Name System (DNS) server clusters. DNS data is typically deployed on multiple physical servers. The main purposes of DNS management software are:
The tables below compare features of notable note-taking software.
Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki developed by Australian software company Atlassian. Atlassian wrote Confluence in the Java programming language and first published it in 2004. Confluence Standalone comes with a built-in Tomcat web server and hsql database, and also supports other databases.
Org Mode is a mode for document editing, formatting, and organizing within the free software text editor GNU Emacs and its derivatives, designed for notes, planning, and authoring. The name is used to encompass plain text files that include simple marks to indicate levels of a hierarchy, and an editor with functions that can read the markup and manipulate hierarchy elements.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software:
Productivity software is application software used for producing information. Its names arose from it increasing productivity, especially of individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill" occupations now require the use of productivity software. In the 2010s, productivity software has become even more consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever more integrated into daily personal life.
Zim is a graphical text editor designed to maintain a collection of locally stored wiki-pages, a personal wiki. It works as a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on text files using markdown. Each wiki-page can contain things like text with simple formatting, links to other pages, attachments, and images. Additional plugins, such as an equation editor and spell-checker, are also available. The wiki-pages are stored in a folder structure in plain text files with wiki formatting. Zim can be used with the Getting Things Done method.