EagleFiler Testimonials

One of the greatest apps I have ever had on my Mac.

I’m really impressed with the concept and design of the program. The open database, built-in support for mail archiving, tagging, and folders puts it well ahead of other information managers. I’ve been waiting for a sensible Email archiving tool for a long time.

I use it daily and love it. Basically, when in doubt, I stick it in EagleFiler and know I can find the info later!

EagleFiler has become essential to my work. It’s so useful that I’m embarrassed to have paid only $40 for it—so I’ve bought a few copies for friends.

I recently completed a year-long litigation project as an expert witness. By the end, I had 13,000 documents. Once I got over 500, EF was essential to keeping track of them. It has so many ways of providing assistance that I’m still discovering them. The biggest features for my daily use included extremely fast full-text searches, and instant previews of documents. And because it stores all files in their native formats, I was able to interoperate transparently with all of my applications, and with non-Mac people on the project.

I also keep a running database of every academic article I read. For that task, I appreciate the multiple ways to move documents into the database.

The level of support from the developer is amazing.

I am finding your product extremely useful for managing e-mail in connection with a legal proceeding. In such a proceeding, each side requests of the other “all communications in regards to this or that,” and EagleFiler’s features for archiving and tagging have been invaluable in managing this process, and in reconstucting events from years past.

EagleFiler is an incredible database program for my files. If I click F1 while viewing a Web page, word document, or e-mail, it is saved to my database in a folder called “To be filed.” When I get free time, I move the unfiled docs to the proper file. I am very impressed with the robustness of this program. (It will work in conjunction with a [MobileMe] account to allow for synced access [and email using Mobile Files] of your files on your iPhone.)

I’m finding EagleFiler very handy, and really enjoying using it. It has just the right balance between functionality, customisability and ease-of-use to suit my needs. Thank you for developing such a great piece of software!

Let me reiterate how much I like EagleFiler.  I looked at a dozen related products before making my choice.

I was just struck by an idle thought, I have been using EagleFiler for several years and I never think about it. It is always open and I continually use it to store and manage all of my professional and personal data. I have a relationship of complete trust with a computer application; I can't think of another example.

Your product is excellent as are the choices you make regarding its development and the clear and concise reasoning and support that you provide to your users.

This is just to let you know how pleased I am. I just imported a 500 MB Thunderbird mail folder (coming from a Windows machine at that…) containing over 100 mailboxes, many of them nested, into EagleFiler. It took less than 10 minutes (on a 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) to finish everything. And it seems to be absolutely perfect.

All I can say is WOW! What a terrific update [1.4]. Every new feature makes EagleFiler incredibly more usable and versatile.

The new custom smart folders are a huge leap forward in terms of being able to filter and modify one’s data in EF. The sheer flexibility of the criteria one can use (17 different kinds, from tags to notes to labels to file size to URL to creation date to just about you-name-it), combined with the ability to nest criterion give me unmatched horsepower in terms of seeing my gigabytes of research data the way I want to see. If such powerful smart folders weren’t enough, I can now add actions to the smart folders and further modify my data. Unbelievably cool! I’m only just beginning to see all that I can do with the new power of these smart folders. This is the first time I’ve begun to think that I could find a replacement for DevonThink Pro in my daily use; this version of EagleFiler is that much more powerful.

The new Stationery Folder function has immediately become a huge time saver for me—for example, I can now create MS Word files, or MindJet MindManager mind map files, instantly, from within EagleFiler based on templates I’ve created in these, or other, programs. Sweet!

I am especially loving and using the new tag cloud window for quickly see what tags I’m using with an item and for quickly adding or changing the tags I have assigned.

Now that I can drag individual e-mail messages into EF as free-standing .eml files, I’m finally going to start using EF as my mail archive database, because I really wanted to be able to store individual e-mail messages along side my other kinds of data in my EF folders. Now I can make a individual message a “to do” or “next action” based on tags and other criteria within the e-mail message. And to top it off, I can search for these individual files with Spotlight, and not just within EF.

Although it’s short bullet in the list of changes, perhaps the most important new function for me as writer/researcher has been the addition of a Find panel for searching within PDF and Web archives. This was one area where DevonThink Pro really outperformed EagleFiler for my daily research. I really needed to see inside the hundreds of PDFs I had, not just look at titles or tags. And what’s more, EagleFiler does this search within PDFs and Web Archives much faster than DevonThink Pro does, though DTPro still has some advantages in its interface on searches.

As a user of Punakea, I’m really pleased to see the new options for importing tags, especially since the “Import as notes and tags” helps me get Punakea-style tags into EagleFiler without having to lose my non-Punakea style info in my Spotlight comments.

Finally, I’ve used the new contextual menus dozens of times today—how cool is it to be able to select text and instantly make it the title of the something you’ve grabbed from the Internet or some PDF, or instantly to make a keyword in record a tag? Huge time-saver.

Yes, this is a rave review, but I think these improvements deserve my rave. I make my living as a writer/editor and I’m constantly doing research. EagleFiler has always been great in terms being able to instantly grab or import just about anything anywhere on my iMac or the Internet. But with these new features, it takes a huge leap forward in helping the end user filter, classify, and categorize data and research quickly and efficiently.   

In my opinion, for document management, flexibility, searching, tagging, organization, etc., EagleFiler [1.4] is now the top of the heap.

I just want to say that I’m a big fan of your excellent software. My wife and I both have SpamSieve installed and I do recommend it to my clients all the time.

I just bought EagleFiler to move some (lots) of my old email. It works perfectly and I’m very happy with it.

I’m glad to see that EagleFiler is getting some attention, as it is one of the best third party applications I have ever used. Not only does it allow users to accomplish all the goals this article seeks, but what sets it apart from all the competition is that is does not use a proprietary database. Your data never leaves the Finder: the program merely copies or moves your data as you instruct, much like iTunes.

This gives the user much peace of mind over data corruption and/or obsolescence of the software. Oh, and the developer is extremely communicative and responsive to user input and suggestions for future versions.

An incredibly Apple-like piece of software: versatile and user-friendly. Highly recommended.

This is an absolutely incredible new application. It surpasses Yojimbo, SOHO, even DEVONthink (which has other useful features though which set it apart in many ways from EagleFiler). The rate of development is breathtaking. At this pace, Michael Tsai will have knock-your-socks of v.2 in no time.

Multiple library support, transparent capture, amazing tag flexibility. Ability to archive e-mail (including IMAP)—this is not a one-trick pony. importing Mail messages also transparently imports MailTags data. It’s fast, reliable (no proprietary database) and searching is very powerful (read the Help).

All of this and it comes from a developer we can trust to provide good support and continued development. A winner!

I just thought I’d drop you a line to say how impressed I am with EagleFiler—I’ve tried a few of the rival organisers out there (as well as various Finder-based methods to keep things organised) and this is the first one that I could grasp at a glance, and start using immediately. I’m a journalist, so I have an unweildy number of text files sitting around—interview transcripts, rough drafts, published articles, &c.—and in about five minutes I had all my current and upcoming projects neatly organised, tagged and sortable, instead of sitting in one big folder waiting for me to sort them out (which never happens!).

I haven’t been using it long enough for the Mail integration and Web archiving features to have had an effect on the way I work, but suspect that having mail messages, Web research and related text files in one place, filterable by tag is going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. Honestly, the last time I had this ‘Ooh, this is going to change the way I work’ feeling was with Quicksilver (the only other application where I’ve bothered to write a gushing fan letter to the developer, too).

I absolutely love EagleFiler. (I just bought a family license.) I’m just getting started with it, but I’m definitely in the camp of users who envision your application fundamentally changing the way they use their computer. It’s very exciting!

I am really enjoying using your product.  I like the active development status, the open format structure, and the ability to tag and search PDFs (as a grad student, I have lots of PDF manuscripts and articles).  But I think the integration with Skim is perhaps the best feature—what a great way to make my highlights and notes easily searchable.  I can finally remember what I found important about that article when I read it six months ago!

What is the ‘junk drawer’ app of choice? That is a question for the ages. The place where you go to be able to drop information—text, links, images, webpages—and find it later, or have it be suggested to you, is one of the most actively developed fields in the OS X software realm. Zillions of them have sprung up. My own favorite is EagleFiler. It’s completely filesystem-based, ie, all of the stuff it stores is organized in directories on your drive where any other app can read them; it’s got a global automatic capture hotkey that can talk to the application you’re working in—Finder, Mail, Firefox—and automatically import whatever it is you’re working on; it’s got Smart Groups; et cetera.

I’ve tried pretty much every app in that field, and I like EF the best. The file-based storage is what does it for me. It makes it extremely modular, so that I can have it also indexed by DEVONthink for free, or synced with all my other computers.

I work out of EagleFiler all the time. I work from home, so the vast majority of the direction I get is in e-mails. There are at least 3 stakeholders for any one project that I’m on, so there is a ton of feedback, requests, changes, etc.

I could not keep it together without EagleFiler. I can dump all of the e-mail I get into there, tag it for the appropriate project, and forget about it. When I need to find a particular e-mail, I can search within the tag. 99% of the time I find the exact message I want in a few seconds. The other 1% I haven’t tagged the message correctly.

I also keep all of the files related to my projects in EagleFiler, with the same tag. This is also nice because I can easily find everything and it is all in one place. For me, EagleFiler has replaced the Finder for all project files.

EagleFiler is fantastic! I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, and the support for multiple file formats and the transparent organization of the internal library make it something I could imagine really committing to.

Essential Application. I use EagleFiler all the time. It has become indespensible to me—my digital filing cabinet. I have several different libraries—a personal one in which I keep recipies, photography articles, pet information, etc.; a school library in which I keep articles relevant to my students and my teaching; a research and writing library in which I keep articles for research, writing tips, etc. The hotkey setup makes saving a Web archive so simple. I can use tags to organize information. EagleFiler is just terrific (and I tried other “fancier” programs and settled on this one because it suited my work style perfectly).

As with SpamSieve, EagleFiler is working very well, and I’m extremely impressed. To paraphrase John Gruber’s comment regarding SpamSieve, EagleFiler doesn’t try to take a “kitchen sink” approach by loading the program with superfluous features. It does a small amount of things very well: import, file, and search documents. The integration with the OS and other software (including Safari, OmniWeb, a host of e-mailers, and other programs) is beautiful. I’ve paid for several organizers, including Aquaminds’ NoteTaker, Hog Bay Notebook, and Mori, and extensively used and tested trial versions of several others, including Circus Ponies Notebook, DevonThink, VoodooPad, and Yojimbo, but this is the first that has really grabbed me with its elegance and ease of use. It is also the first of these apps that I have paid for on the same day that I started testing it! Whereas previous software has made me feel tentative about storing more than a small amount of clippings, notes, and such, Michael Tsai has presented something that has caused me to import a couple of hundred megabytes worth of documents of various types, from various Applications, all over my hard drive. Thank you very much for this fantastic software.

I have been switching between StickyBrain (SOHONotes) and Yojimbo as my primary file manager for months. Neither of them completely capable of my needs. Yesterday I noticed a mention of EagleFiler on John Gruber’s Web site Daring Fireball. I installed EagleFiler and imported my saved files from SOHO and Yojimbo, spent some time tagging the files and I have to say EagleFiler performs flawlessly. The ability to tag the files with Keywords is necessary for a great File Manager. Both StickyBrain and Yojimbo force the user to use categories for filing which is very limiting. EagleFiler is awesome; give it a try and you won’t be disappointed.

The larger the [mail] app’s database gets, the more of a performance drag it incurs. Offloading either individual emails, or entire mail boxes, helps, and EagleFiler is the first application I’ve felt safe with to do just that.

EagleFiler is an example of why the Mac OS platform is the greatest system. This application is amazing.

EagleFiler has helped me organize my stuff by effectively extending the OS—not replacing it. I can still find my PDFs and other documents through spotlight, or I can navigate my stuff through EagleFiler. That’s a big plus.

The features of Eaglefiler are designed to maximize efficency while not complicating my life. Web page? No problem. PDF? Indexes it. Need to add tags? Yup. EagleFiler takes care of everything I need to ever file.

Finally, the software is regularly updated with new features, improvements and fixes.

Hearty thanks go out to Mike. You’ve helped me simplify my life!

I’m officially in love with EagleFiler. It’s the application I’ve been looking for forever. A nice lovely metadatacentric frontend onto my Documents folder, just as iTunes is on my Music folder and iPhoto on my Pictures folder.

Great for saving, organizing, and retrieving just about anything.

Select text from a Web page in Safari, drag it onto EagleFiler’s drop pad, and EagleFiler saves the text. Quite a few competing programs do this or similar. But EagleFiler goes one step further. It also appends the source URL to the text you’ve dragged. That way you’ll always be able to refer back to your source.

In addition to unusual touches like this, EagleFiler makes it a snap to tag items. And you can easily add icons of your choice to the tags. The icons are great for spotting items in a long list.

You can take a minimalist approach to organizing. Or you can add structure by putting stuff in folders nested several levels deep if that’s what works for you. Unlike with Yojimbo, which imposes a philosophy, EagleFiler leaves it up to you.

EagleFiler is also a great e-mail archiver. And so much more. The developer is incredibly responsive.

Highly recommended.

I’d just like to say how much I like this application, although I haven’t had time to delve into it in depth. I tend to collect large amounts of textual info, mostly from the Web. I have been a happy user of DEVONthink since its very early days, and would have been lost without it. However, I find EagleFiler is just so convenient for capturing a Web page that I have been using it a lot for that purpose. And its rich text capabilities are perfectly adequate for taking captured text and manipulating/formatting desired portions of text.

Great Stuff. I’ve been using EagleFiler for some months now and must say that it develops to one of the best notetaking, e-mail and data storing apps. I like the fact that all data is stored in native formats, so I can backup and retrieve all data the way I like. It can do nested folders. It has great search capabilities. It imports all my mail and I can search it. And much more.

This relatively new application is updated very often, and most bugs that I ever encountered are gone by now.

Comparing various notetaking apps, this one seems to develop into the creme de la creme of them all, it’s just really really great, and of course I do recommend it to anyone who’s looking for this kind of application!

EagleFiler has become completely indispensable for me. I do have a catch-all Reference library, but I also have specific use libraries. I have a Recipes library that allows me to categorize my recipes, track which ones we liked (and who liked them), which ones we haven’t tried, where they came from, etc. I also start a new library for each project I work on. I can dump all of the e-mail correspondence, random notes, research, requirements documents, etc. into this one library. Since it is searchable, I can easily find that one e-mail about how this drop-down is supposed to look on the page. Light years better than sifting through everything manually.

I’ve also started a Movies library to track my VHS tapes and DVDs. I tag them according to genre and media. This allows me to quickly see which movies I need to get on DVD. When I’m in the mood for a specific type of movie, I can easily find all of the comedies or horror movies. I can also easily track who borrowed one.…

Probably the best notes/archive program.

I tend to take contemporanous notes from many regular meetings (i.e. my personal minutes of meetings), and I also like a program I can drop various PDFs and documents onto and easily catalogue them for later reference. I’ve worked through most of the Mac notes-taking programs. I used to use DEVONthink Pro Office, and there wasn’t much wrong with it, though the versions aren’t particularly pretty in terms of design. Yojimbo also worked well. In the end, though, I’ve settled with EagleFiler. It archives e-mails easily, handles multiple libraries well, you can store private libraries in encrypted disk images (e.g. managed via Knox, or EagleFiler can do this itself). The encrypted library feature is the thing I that really sold EagleFiler to me. In the end, DEVONthink and Yojimbo aren’t bad programs, but having multiple libraries, including some kept privately, has been very handy.

I’d love it if it sync’d easily to the iPhone, but at least there are good instructions for getting files from EagleFiler to the iPhone via AirSharing or equivalent. Sadly no syncing, at least not yet.

Anyway: EagleFiler is robust, reliable, well-developed and with a responsive developer, can work with encryption and multiple libraries, searches quickly, and is easy to use. I can’t see me changing anytime soon.

General comment to anyone thinking of switching to EagleFiler: do it. Compared with alternative managers of unstructured files, EF handles more data types, well beyond PDF and Web pages. It stores all files using the native Mac file structure, so other programs can work with them transparently. (That is, you can still access your files without going through EF.) This is also safer with respect to multi-year storage. I don’t know about robustness of other applications, but EF seems very robust, and has never lost a spec of my data. The developer responds to questions/problems within hours, on average.

Here’s a data point: am using EF 1.2 with a 1.2 Gb library collection, of which roughly half are 80K+ e-mails, and most of the rest are several hundred PDF’s and Web archives. I can confirm that EF works impressively well on a modern high-end MacBook Pro. RAM use is in the dozens of MB’s and CPU use is 0% when idling—IOW, perfect. I can definitely see myself using this for many years to come, scaling up easily as more contents get added (and Moore’s law will do the rest).

Kudo’s and many thanks to M.T. for getting everything “just right.”

Having been a long time user of SpamSieve, and now using EagleFiler, it has been added to my list of must have apps. The question I have, unfortunately at work I am forced to use a PC, and I am wondering if anyone knows of a program that is similar that will run on XP? I’m addicted, and I’d like to make my work computer as organized as my Mac.

I just bought EagleFiler after reviewing it and Chronos SOHO Notes 6. Thanks for creating such a great application. It’s just what I was looking for to organize all the bits of information I have scattered across Sticky notes, draft messages in Mail, various TXT/RTF/DOC files and scraps of paper.

I wanted you to know that in my academic and professional work I am always on the lookout for new databases that will solve my problems. I’ve gone though DEVONthink, ChronosNotes, Yojimbo, and a few others. Each of those had some features I wanted, but not all. EagleFiler has them all. (One of the most important features of your program to me is the ability to tag while retaining a database of used tags that can be drawn from in subsequent tagging.) To summarize the purpose of this letter, Thanks! It is a beautiful piece of programming.

I recently moved from DEVONthink (Pro) to EagleFiler. After using DT for several years (and the scanning is a helpful feature) I was concerned about relying on an application that is poorly integrated into other Mac software, uses a proprietary database which can get corrupted and result in data loss, and that has been promising better export capabilities for years but hasn’t delivered. To be fair, after my database got corrupted I was able to recover from a backup, but it made me think very hard about relying on something other than the file system.

EagleFiler uses the filesystem and Apple’s Core Data for storage, and my impression (after importing my DT files) is that it’s faster, my safer (files remain in their original format) and it’s easier to edit files. DT doesn’t store excel files, and although it imports word files in RTF format, you have to retain the original word file somewhere else on your hard drive. So for me I like the fact that I can just keep 1 system of storage in EagleFiler.

I still scan my information using a third party scanner, and have found that I actually get better accuracy. So sometimes integrated is not always better, and it may be worth relying on separate programs (scanner and EagleFiler)

I wanted to write to you with an unqualified positive note of thanks, because I suspect that you, like umpires in baseball or referees in football, rarely hear anything from your clients unless it’s either a question or a complaint.

I became aware of you and your product(s) a few years ago, when several Mac-related Web sites spoke highly, nearly glowingly, of SpamSieve. At the time, I didn’t know what Bayesian spam filtering was, nor why I might want it, but the repeated occurrence of your product’s name in publications which I trusted was enough to convince me to purchase Mailsmith from BBEdit, which came bundled with SpamSieve.

And it was exactly as good as those various reviewers said it was. I was thrilled—especially with the idea that I could switch out of Mailsmith if I so chose, and take SpamSieve with me to another mail client, but also with the performance. My inbox is clean! And, after having (sadly) purchased [a competing product], I discovered EagleFiler. I wish I’d discovered it sooner. While I have been impressed with the attention to detail displayed by the folks at [company], theirs is a system which is proprietary, which is always troubling, at least to me. I will pay for any application I feel is well-designed, but if given a choice between an open-source application and a commercial one with proprietary mechanisms, I will always prefer the former. Perhaps it’s why I’ve never been a big fan of Microsoft, LOL.

And when I found EagleFiler, I knew I’d found the organization software for me. It was obvious from the very start of my “audition” of EagleFiler that you had devoted quite a bit of time to thinking about—and creating—a product which provides the people who use it with the greatest degree of flexibility and compatibility possible: in short, a product that you yourself would be likely to desire, were you interested in purchasing such a thing. And that impressed me a great deal. [Company]’s products—though thorough—require one to learn “The [company] Way™,” while yours opens each file contained within an EagleFiler database in its original application. So there’s no fear that I’ll be unable to get needed data out of a format which I no longer use (should that be the case) at any time in the future.

In short, your products function correctly—not only the way they’re supposed to, but the way a thoughtful user would want them to—and it makes each of them valuable beyond their retail price. Thank you, again, for your commitment to designing superior, best-in-class applications for the Mac platform.

I’m an academic, and I try to keep copies of every paper or article I read. (Given the vagaries of library contracts with publishers, documents that were accessible can disappear.) EF allows this in a very robust way. I used to track documents in EndNote (a bibliography program), but this is much easier—and EndNote is poorly supported on Mac, with lots of crashes etc.

EagleFiler has also became my default method of grabbing material from the Web that I wanted to keep for any reason. It is very flexible—it will import any kind of file, although it does not index everything. A nice feature, for example, is that it can capture either an entire Web page, or just the text. Once captured, the page can even be edited without leaving EF.

Developer response is fantastic.

It keeps all files in their native format, which is important for security and other reasons. For example, Spotlight treats them as normal documents, and when I need a file for another purpose there is no need to do a conversion.

Moving to EagleFiler was one of my largest workflow improvements in recent memory.

I am an academic working on a book project and have been looking for a piece of software to help me organize all of the news articles, academic papers, etc. that I am collecting. Your EagleFiler is just what I was looking for. I have spent a lot of time looking for an app and now spent a few days in the app and I am really happy. I just purchased it.

You’ve hit a home run with this one. I use barely any third party software, and when I do there needs to be a really good reason for it. In this case, the reason is that I’ve been wanting something that does what EagleFiler does for years now (decades?) and finally had to face the fact that Apple isn’t going to do it themselves.…What you’ve created with EagleFiler however is incredibly Mac-like in its usability, simplicity and power.

EagleFiler is a terrific app for organizing the thousands of documents and thousands more other types of files on my Mac.

I just want to let you know how much I appreciate your software program EagleFiler. I recently downloaded the latest version and tried it out. I was so impressed with this program that I purchased it after using it for about two days.…EagleFiler suits my needs perfectly. I store some 17,000 files (mainly PDFs) in an archive that I regularly need to search. The tagging and search system is great.

Kudos to the developer. One of the few Mac programs that unfortunately has little buzz—but is worthy of much praise.

[…]

The way in which the data is saved is very reliable. And, I have had a few catastrophic crashes where I had to restart the computer after another program hanged (I know, not supposed to happen in X—but I found a way!) and the data I had been working on in EagleFiler was saved. Quite unexpected and pleasant—to say the least.

[…]

I should also mention that I have a PowerPC G4 (1 GHz)—a relatively slow & old computer—EagleFiler works well. An added bonus—since I use Tiger—the latest version of EagleFiler is still relevant.

I have been trying all kinds of Mac organizing programs and finally found EagleFiler. I absolutely love it.

Unlike others, it handles just about every type of file and keeps it intact as that kind of file. You click on it and it opens in the default application. I have PDFs, QuickTime movies, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and more in it.

[…]

I really, really like this program. It has organized my whole chaotic life.

This is an excellent information organizer.…You may wonder if you really need a program like EagleFiler. Why not just use Finder? That was certainly how I felt at first, but I’m glad I tried it. I personally find it much easier to keep my data managed using EagleFiler.