hushvault vs DEVONthink

DEVONthink is the deepest document manager on the Mac, and it earned that reputation over two decades. hushvault is not trying to out-feature it — it's built on a different idea: your library should be a plain folder. This page is honest about what that trade buys you and what it costs.

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Where DEVONthink wins

AI assistance. "See Also" and auto-classify suggestions are DEVONthink's signature, refined for years. hushvault deliberately has nothing like them — no models, no suggestions, by promise.
Format breadth. Email archiving, web clipping, bookmarks, RSS — DEVONthink ingests whole categories hushvault doesn't touch. hushvault is Markdown, PDFs, images, and plain text, full stop.
Ecosystem depth. Companion iOS app, AppleScript automation, smart rules, a long tail of power features. hushvault is a young desktop app with a fraction of that surface.

If those are the features you live in, buy DEVONthink — it's excellent software.

Where hushvault wins

Your library is a plain folder. Not a database package, not a proprietary store with an export button — a folder of ordinary files you can open in Finder today and in anything else in twenty years. There is nothing to export because nothing was ever imported. Search-index metadata is a disposable cache the app rebuilds from your files at any time.
It runs on Windows. DEVONthink is Mac-only. hushvault ships for macOS (Universal) and Windows x64 from one purchase — and because the vault is a plain folder, the same library moves between them with any sync or a USB stick.
Price. DEVONthink is three-digit software with paid major upgrades. hushvault is pay-what-you-want (from $12) during the beta, one-time, with 1.0 free for beta buyers. No subscription, ever.
Absolute privacy, verifiable. hushvault makes no network calls at all — no telemetry, no accounts, not even an update check. That's an architectural promise, not a settings toggle.
Calm. One window, notes beside documents, search that narrows with tag: / kind: / in:, PDF highlights that live next to the PDF, and a batch PDF toolbench — without a manual's worth of concepts first.

Scale, measured rather than promised: against a generated test vault of 10,000 notes, 12,000 wikilinks and 200 PDFs on an M1 Mac, a full cold index takes about 8 seconds, relaunching with no changes about 0.1s, and an edit is searchable in about 0.1s. OCR of scanned documents queues separately, at roughly 50 pages a minute on the same machine.

Annotating a PDF in hushvault: the highlights live in a small JSON file beside the document, not inside a database — so they move with the file and are readable without us.

The philosophical difference

DEVONthink asks you to bring your documents into it, and pays you back with intelligence about them. hushvault refuses to own your documents at all: it opens a folder you already have, adds search, links, tags, highlights, and PDF tools on top, and can be deleted without leaving a scratch. Which trade is right depends on how much you want to depend on any one app — including this one.

Try the folder-first way

hushvault is pay-what-you-want during the beta and takes about a minute to try: download it, click Create a sample library, and poke around — the sample is just a folder too. Get hushvault, or read the promises it's built on first.

Using Windows? See a DEVONthink alternative for Windows.