Mac Productivity Apps: 7 That Fit a GTD System

The best Mac productivity apps are the ones you still trust at 4pm on a bad Tuesday, when a client rings, your hands are on the keyboard mid-document, and the thought you cannot afford to lose is one sentence long. Feature lists do not help you there. Seconds do.

The honest conclusion, up front: most people need four apps, not fourteen. A capture layer, one action list, one reference store, and one filing rule engine. This piece names seven apps because two of the jobs have a genuine fork in the road, and you pick one side of each. Nobody should install all seven.

Why most Mac productivity app lists make you slower

Roundups tend to be shopping trolleys. A window manager, a screenshot tool, a note app, a habit tracker, a menu bar calendar, all rated on features rather than on whether they make your commitments findable. Install six of those and you have not built a system. You have built six places a promise could be hiding.

That is the real failure on a Mac, and it is almost never a bad app. It is three half-inboxes: something in Apple Notes, something in Reminders, and a text file on the Desktop called notes2.txt. Your brain quietly notices that no single list is complete, so it stops trusting any of them, and you go back to holding things in your head at 3am. Getting Things Done only works when there is one place things land. Which app you choose matters far less than that rule.

The five jobs your stack has to cover

Judge every candidate on these, not on the feature grid:

• Time to captured. Hotkey to saved thought, in seconds, with no template to fill in.
• One trusted inbox. Everything lands in a single place you empty on a set day.
• Retrieval from half a memory. You remember “that blue supplier quote from around Easter”and nothing else.
• Exit cost. What leaving looks like in three years, with attachments and structure intact.
• No daily admin tax. The app should not charge you a chunk of every day in tags, statuses and tidying.

Here is the test before you install anything. Mid-call, hit the global hotkey, type “ring the accountant about the VAT return”, press escape. If it is now sitting in the same inbox you process on Friday, the app passes. If you had to pick a project, choose a notebook, or open up a second window first, it does not. That is a practical working benchmark rather than an official rule, but it sorts the field fast.

Seven Mac productivity apps, one job each

Two forks: pick one task manager (Things 3 or OmniFocus) and one reference store (Obsidian or DEVONthink). The other five slots are more or less settled.

1. Drafts, for capture in seconds

Drafts opens on a blinking cursor in an empty draft. No title field, no folder picker, no “choose a template”. You type, you escape, it is saved, and you decide later whether that line becomes a task, an email or a note. That deferred decision is the whole point, and it is why a blank-page capture app beats capturing straight into your task manager, where you are tempted to start filing before you have finished thinking.

Best for

• People who capture on the move and process in one weekly sitting
• Anyone who wants dictated notes landing in the same inbox as typed ones

Pros

• Global hotkey on Mac, share sheet and widgets on iPhone
• Free tier covers plain capture; Pro adds actions that push text into Things, OmniFocus or Reminders
• Plain text in, plain text out

Cons

• Pro is a subscription, and the useful automation sits behind it
• Becomes a fourth half-inbox if you never process it
• Apple ecosystem only

Free alternative worth taking seriously: Apple Notes with the Quick Note hot corner. Zero setup, already installed, syncs everywhere. If you use it, use one note or one folder as the inbox and nothing else, or you have recreated the problem. Voice capture belongs in the same place too. A separate pile of voice memos you never listen to is not capture, it is a graveyard.

2. Things 3, the action list that forgives a missed review

Things gives you GTD’s shape without GTD’s ceremony: an Inbox, Areas, Projects, headings inside projects, tags for context, and a Today view that does not shout. Quick Entry with autofill grabs the thing you are looking at and files it without leaving the app you are in.

The reason I put it ahead of the heavier option for most people is unglamorous. Skip a weekly review in Things and you open Monday to a slightly stale list. Skip one in OmniFocus and you open Monday to a wall.

Best for

• Freelancers and managers running a lot of live projects at once
• Anyone whose review habit is real but imperfect

Pros

• One-off purchase, no subscription, free sync
• Fast to file, fast to read, low daily admin tax
• Export to plain text or JSON, so leaving is possible

Cons

• Priced per platform, so Mac, iPhone and iPad are three separate purchases
• No custom saved views or nested tag logic
• Weak on delegated work and dependency chains

3. OmniFocus, for people who genuinely run a weekly review

OmniFocus 4 is the serious tool: defer dates, sequential and parallel projects, tags (what the old versions called contexts), per-project review intervals, and custom perspectives in the Pro version. Set a project to review every fortnight and it surfaces itself. That is the feature almost nobody else copies properly.

It rewards the review habit and punishes its absence. Defer dates quietly stack a backlog that lands on you all at once, and the app is unapologetic about showing you every one. Buy it if you already do a real weekly review. Do not buy it hoping it will make you start.

Best for

• Heavy project loads, multiple roles, work that has to be deferred rather than deleted
• People who want to build their own perspectives and live in them

Pros

• Review perspective with per-project intervals
• Deep filtering, forecast view, strong automation and URL scheme support
• Sold as a one-off licence or a subscription, so you can avoid recurring cost if you prefer

Cons

• Steeper setup, and easy to over-configure instead of working
• Punishing after a missed week
• Pro features and web access cost more

Before you buy either: Apple Reminders is now a competent next-action list. Tags, smart lists, sections, subtasks, Siri capture, free. If your work is straightforward next actions rather than multi-stage projects, spend the money on something else and stay put. The point of a gtd app comparison is to find where you stop needing more, not to justify the upgrade.

4. Obsidian, for reference you can copy to a USB stick

Obsidian stores notes as Markdown files in a normal folder on your disk. Delete the app tomorrow and every note opens in TextEdit, BBEdit or anything else, because Markdown is a documented, open text format rather than a container only one vendor can read. That is exit cost handled before you have a problem.

Best for

• Project notes, meeting notes, checklists, research you will still want in five years
• Anyone who has been burned by a note app shutting down or changing terms

Pros

• Free for personal use; local files, no lock-in
• Instant full-text search, backlinks, community plugins
• Works fine with iCloud Drive if you would rather not pay for Sync

Cons

• Check Obsidian’s current licence terms for business use before rolling it out at work
• No OCR, and PDF handling is basic
• The plugin rabbit hole is real and eats evenings

5. DEVONthink, for a decade of PDFs, scans and receipts

Different job entirely. If your reference material is paper that became files, invoices, contracts, scanned letters, warranty documents, DEVONthink is the Mac app that files it properly: OCR on scans, smart groups, search inside PDF text, and suggestions for where a new document probably belongs.

Run the half-a-memory test on it. “Blue supplier quote, around Easter.”You want a date filter, a tag search and full-text search inside the PDF itself, all in one query. DEVONthink does that. Obsidian does not.

Best for

• Consultants, accountants, anyone with years of client paperwork
• Households that scan everything and need it findable in 2031

Pros

• One-off licence, several editions, no forced subscription
• Serious OCR and searching inside documents
• Index mode leaves files in Finder rather than swallowing them, which lowers exit cost considerably

Cons

• Interface is dense and unfashionable
• Import mode puts your documents inside a proprietary database, so test an export early
• Overkill for pure text notes

If you export from a proprietary store and get a heap of files with the folder structure flattened and attachments detached, that is your exit cost, and you should know it on day one rather than in year eight. Our write-up of Evernote alternatives and what the migrations actually cost goes through what a real export looks like when it goes wrong.

6. Raycast, the glue that removes the daily admin tax

A launcher is not a productivity system, but it is the thing that keeps the other apps two keystrokes away. Raycast gives you app launching, clipboard history, window snapping, snippets and extensions that push a line straight into Things, OmniFocus or Reminders without switching apps.

Best for

• Keyboard-first workers who hate hunting through the Dock
• Anyone who pastes the same six things all week

Pros

• Free tier is generous and covers clipboard history and window management
• Extensions for the major task managers
• Snippets replace a separate text expander for most people

Cons

• Pro tier is a monthly subscription in US dollars
• Another set of shortcuts to learn
• Spotlight, with its recent improvements, already covers launching and calculations for a lot of people

On text expansion specifically: try macOS Text Replacement in System Settings first, then Raycast snippets. TextExpander is capable, but it is a subscription for a job two free options already do. Skip it unless you are sharing snippet libraries across a team.

7. Hazel, for filing you never have to think about

Hazel watches folders and applies rules. Say your Downloads folder has hundreds of files in it, a mixture of client invoices, screenshots and scanned letters. One rule moves any PDF whose contents contain an invoice number into the right client folder and renames it by date. A second bins screenshots older than 30 days. That is a weekly chore gone, permanently, rather than a chore you feel guilty about.

Best for

• Anyone with a scanner and a recurring paperwork routine
• Downloads folders that have become a landfill

Pros

• One-off licence, Mac only, priced in US dollars
• Matches text inside PDFs, not just filenames
• Runs whether the app window is open or not

Cons

• Rules that misfire move files somewhere you will not think to look
• Nothing on iOS
• Tempting to build clever rules for tasks you do twice a year

The rule for automation: only automate a step you have already done manually many times over. Build Hazel rules before your capture and review habits exist and you have simply added a second system to maintain, with its own bugs.

What a Mac productivity stack costs a UK buyer

The figures below are rough ballparks taken from the developers’ own pricing pages at the time of writing, and they are worth rechecking on those pages before you pay, because prices move and several of these are set in US dollars, so your card settles at the day’s rate plus any VAT.

• Capture: free (Apple Notes, or Drafts’ free tier). Drafts Pro is a modest annual subscription on the developer’s own pricing page.
• Task manager: on the developer’s own pricing page at the time of writing, Things 3 is a one-off in the region of £50 for the Mac app, with iPhone and iPad sold separately. OmniFocus is sold as a one-off licence or a subscription; the Pro tier costs more either way.
• Reference: Obsidian is free for personal use; check Obsidian’s current licence terms for business use before rolling it out at work. DEVONthink, on its developer’s own pricing page, is a one-off licence, typically in the higher two figures upwards depending on edition.
• Glue and filing: Raycast free, or roughly £8 a month for Pro on Raycast’s own pricing page at the time of writing. Hazel is a one-off licence, usually in the £30 to £40 range once its developer’s listed dollar price is converted.

Take the sensible build: capture free in Apple Notes, Things 3 on the Mac, Obsidian free, Hazel one-off, with Raycast free on top as glue. On those same published prices, year one lands somewhere under £100 and years two onwards cost nothing recurring. Swap in the subscription route (Raycast Pro, Drafts Pro, OmniFocus subscription) and, again on those developers’ published prices, you are comfortably into the £150 to £250 a year bracket. Both are defensible. Only one of them keeps charging you after you stop opening the app.

Free is not automatically cheaper, mind. An app you abandon after three weeks costs you the migration twice, once in and once out, plus the fortnight where you trusted neither system. Budget a trial week per candidate and then commit for a quarter.

Build order, and when to stop buying

Order matters more than the shortlist. Capture first, on its own, for two weeks. Then one action list, and move everything into it, including the notes app tasks you have been pretending do not count. Then reference. Automation last, once you know which chore keeps coming back.

For the trial, run each candidate against a real week: your actual meetings, your actual half-finished projects, the invoice chase you keep deferring. Demo projects with three tidy tasks tell you nothing. What you are watching for is whether you captured things on the bad days, not the calm ones.

And here is the signal to stop spending. If you have tried three task managers in six months and each one felt right for ten days, the problem is not the software. It is that nothing has been reviewed since you set it up. No app fixes a missing weekly review, which is exactly why the too many productivity apps spiral keeps going: the next purchase feels like progress and costs nothing but an afternoon. Fewer apps, wired together properly, beat a beautiful shelf of software you never open.

If you want to go deeper on individual slots, the scoring in our best note taking app for Mac comparison covers capture speed in detail, the Mac email app round-up handles the inbox that generates most of your tasks, and there is more on Mac apps for GTD workflows across the site. For the AI question, we treat it as one more capture channel in the piece on making ChatGPT work with GTD, not as a replacement for a list.

Frequently Asked Questions About Mac Productivity Apps

What are the best Mac productivity apps for someone using GTD?

Four slots, filled once: a capture app (Drafts or Apple Notes), one action list (Things 3 for most people, OmniFocus if you already review weekly), one reference store (Obsidian for text, DEVONthink for documents) and Hazel for filing. Raycast free sits on top as glue. The rule that matters more than the picks is that everything lands in one inbox.

Do I need OmniFocus, or is Apple Reminders enough?

Reminders is enough if your work is mostly next actions with dates, because tags and smart lists cover the basics at no cost. OmniFocus earns its price when you need defer dates, sequential projects and per-project review intervals, and when you genuinely sit down each week to use them. Buy it to support a habit you have, not to create one you do not.

How much does a full Mac productivity app stack cost per year?

A one-off-heavy build (Apple Notes for capture, Things 3 on Mac, Obsidian personal, Hazel licence, with Raycast free on top) typically lands under £100 in year one and near zero after that, based on the developers’ own published prices at the time of writing. A subscription build with Raycast Pro, Drafts Pro and an OmniFocus subscription is more likely in the £150 to £250 a year range on those same published prices. Check current pricing on each developer’s site before you commit, and note that several of these are dollar-priced.

Is it better to use one all-in-one app or several specialised ones?

Several specialised apps, provided each one owns exactly one job and there is only one inbox. All-in-one tools tend to blur reference and action, so your task list slowly turns into a wiki and you stop opening it. The failure mode with specialised apps is duplication, which you avoid by writing down which app owns which job and refusing to break it.

How do I move my notes and tasks between Mac apps without losing everything?

Export a real sample first, ideally a project with attachments and nested folders, and open it somewhere else before you migrate anything. Markdown folders copy cleanly; proprietary databases often export as a flat heap with attachments detached, which is the moment to discover it rather than mid-move. Keep the old app installed and read-only for a quarter, and process the backlog into the new system as part of your weekly review instead of in one heroic weekend.