NotePlan vs Agenda – Calendar-Centered Note Tools Compared
Getting started is cluttered on both
Okay, first off—neither NotePlan nor Agenda makes a rockstar first impression if you’re someone like me who’s constantly chasing half-finished TODOs across a dozen calendars. I literally had both open side by side after a caffeine binge, hoping one would just… feel smoother to onboard into. Nope. Both throw a lot at you. Agenda tries to look elegant with its timeline and narrow typographic style, but it hides everything behind weird interactions. Like that odd invisible menu bar thing when editing notes? Why make me hunt for buttons? :/
NotePlan, on the other hand, loves Markdown and loves dates. Maybe too much. It starts with a Today note and is like “Here, write your whole life here.” If you’ve used apps like Obsidian or Bear, you’ll feel a little more at home here. But as a beginner? I accidentally saved five different notes titled “Today” during my first hour because I didn’t realize every day gets its own note. Yeah.
Also, Agenda’s linking system confused me immediately. You can create a new note and then link it to a calendar event, or start from the event list and create the note there. But if you turn off system calendar access during onboarding (which I did the first time by accident), you lose a bunch of functionality and don’t really get a second prompt. I had to dig through settings to re-enable system calendar sync.
Meanwhile, NotePlan connected to my Apple Calendar but for some reason pulled in duplicates of recurring events and then promptly desynced after a Time Machine restore. Still not sure if that’s on NotePlan or macOS. It gave me a phantom alert for a meeting that had been cancelled a week prior 😐
Working with notes day to day
Let me say this right now: Agenda’s note editing experience is weird. It’s more semantic than stylistic. You don’t get true Markdown—but you can style things using buttons for tags, checkmarks, people, priority levels. It wants you to tag along like a good little structured writer.
Which sucks if you’re mid-meeting and trying to just dump brainwaves into a document. You’re slowed down by workflows like:
– Assigning a note to a date? Requires a click.
– Want to open this in a new window? Click three dots → Extra menu → Open Separate Window. Why hide it?
– Need to link across notes? Agenda does it using a weird `::` syntax or drag and drop. Took me three tries before I got a link that didn’t break the layout.
Now—NotePlan is messy but familiar if you’re a Markdown note hoarder. You get editable daily notes with full Markdown support, and todos magically roll over to the next day if incomplete. It’s chaotic good, kinda like me 😛
I like that you can write todos inline, sync them to Reminders, and then they appear contextually on the right under ‘Open Tasks’. But I had a moment where the right panel stopped syncing updates from the note itself unless I switched tabs. Turned dev tools on and yup—`syncTasks() → null reference`. Loved seeing that at 1am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Agenda tries to be structured with its notes. NotePlan just gives you a playground. Both give you dates next to each note, but only NotePlan actually treats each calendar day as its own canvas. That appealed more to my chaotic journaling habit—Agenda kept trying to organize my notes way too nicely.
Calendar integrations are touchy and weird
Here’s where things fell flat: calendar syncing is not clean.
Agenda uses EventKit on macOS and iOS to pull in your system calendar. It shows meetings in a timeline strip on the right and lets you attach any note to a calendar event. But you can’t edit events from Agenda—you have to do that in Apple Calendar. Lots of read-only behavior. And if your app doesn’t have calendar access approved at the system level… yeah, the entire sidebar just stays empty without telling you why.
NotePlan also uses native calendar hooks, but it’s slightly more proactive. When I edited an event title inside NotePlan, it actually pushed that change back into Apple Calendar. That’s the good news. The bad news: recurring events are unpredictable. Changing the note attached to one instance sometimes updated the note across the entire recurring set. I lost a whole meeting record that way. No undo.
You also can’t trust either of them for perfect cross-device sync unless you live 100% in iCloud. On one iPad, Agenda was missing three days’ worth of edits that had synced fine to my MacBook. Force-quitting and relaunching fixed it, sort of. I still don’t trust it during travel.
Oh, and NotePlan sometimes shows events from “Webcal” calendars with no time—but still floats a gray line into your daily view so you wonder what it’s for. Rested mouse over it, nothing popped up. “Event Unknown”. Useful.
Tagging and organizing long-term notes
This is where they completely diverge.
Agenda leans hard into projects. Notes live **in** projects, and every project gets its own list. You organize over time using tags and by assigning dates or linking to calendar entries. Great in theory, but in practice, it feels limiting. You can’t just drag a note into another space or view everything across all projects—unless you make a smart overview, which is basically saved searches. Took a few tries before I understood that too.
NotePlan has tags as well (#tags like in Twitter days), but no project structure by default. It’s notebook-based and navigated mostly by the Calendar view, or manually browsing folders. If you’re someone who journals, logs meeting notes, and mixes in personal tasks like “Buy pickles,” this feels more forgiving.
You can use hashtags, link notes to other notes wiki-style using double brackets (like [[Meeting with Mark]]) and use filtered daily views. I created one that showed only notes with #followup and incomplete checkboxes. Pretty handy for weekly reviews.
Also, NotePlan supports linking out to external files or even folders, which Agenda doesn’t really love doing. I tried linking to a PDF in Agenda and got, basically, just the plaintext file path. Zero render.
In short: Agenda is for people who want neat project piles. NotePlan is for people building a paper trail across dates and tasks and don’t care if it’s a little bit messy.
Cross device behavior is twitchy at times
Both tools are Apple ecosystem-first. No web. No Android. So if you’re Windows-curious, skip both. Here’s what happened to me:
I wrote a bunch of meeting notes on NotePlan for Mac, then opened the app on my iPad after a few hours. The sync pulled down stale versions and marked them as latest. I literally watched my edits disappear. This was caused by iCloud Drive being glitchy that day, sure, but NotePlan doesn’t gracefully prompt you about merge conflicts.
Agenda is more safe-minded. It shows fewer outright sync bugs, but has a habit of abandoning note order when switching to mobile. A set of meeting notes that were in chronological order on Mac showed up sorted by edit time on iPhone, which made a “Meeting Recap” chain basically useless. Had to re-tag and reassign dates just to make it look readable again.
Also, in Agenda, your sidebar projects can sometimes disappear on iPad if you open the app in portrait first. I thought I lost a whole project once. Turns out: swipe in from left. That’s it. Just iPad things 🙂
File attachments are another mess. Neither tool handles embedded images that well. NotePlan lets you paste them in, but they’re stored in iCloud in app-specific folders and not easily retrievable. Agenda turns them into floating thumbnail previews, but once you export the note, they vanish unless you export as .agenda format, which… good luck sharing that with anyone.
So yeah, great ideas in both. Gorgeous looking apps. But if you live across three or more Apple devices, be prepared for sync delays and some occasionally lost edits.
Cost and long term usage feelings
Agenda does something super weird. It’s free to use, with paid features unlocked by purchasing a one-time Premium Pack. You get all updates released over the next year, and you keep them forever—but any new features released after your year ends? You don’t get them unless you pay again. It’s kind of like a rolling license.
NotePlan is subscription. Monthly or yearly. Which I usually hate, but at least it means the updates and syncing stay consistent. When the app updated to support templates, I got them automatically—unlike with Agenda where I’d have to check my purchase date to see if I qualified.
The funny part is: I paid for both. And I keep bouncing between them. Agenda *feels* more polished for formal note taking, like project summaries, shared meeting notes, client overviews.
But NotePlan? It’s where my real life lives. Daily mess. Scribbled thoughts. Grocery lists. Drafts of stuff like this article. Because when I open Agenda, I feel like I need to be serious. NotePlan just lets me be me. And when a recurring task rolls over and magically lands back in my daily note? That never gets old.
Still—last week, my NotePlan app stopped launching properly after I updated macOS. Left a cryptic error log:
“`
[NoteRender] failed to initialize renderer (Code 42: NPViewContextUndefined)
“`
Sent the log to support. They replied with “Try moving your storage folder and relinking manually via Preferences > Advanced.” Didn’t work. Ended up clean reinstalling. Not fun.
Both are terrific if you’re okay with quirks. But if you’re like me and constantly rebuilding workflows that fell apart randomly one night in February… bring backups 🙂