Einfall vs Tot vs Drafts

There are two well-loved capture apps on the Mac and in your pocket already. Tot is a seven-note scratchpad — tiny, opinionated, and proud of its limit. Drafts is the opposite: a full capture-and-automation platform with a scripting language and a devoted following who've spent years building on top of it. Einfall sits between them. It has more range than Tot — tags, a fixed set of routing actions, an AI action, your own agent on the stream — but far less to learn than Drafts: no scripting language, no workspaces, no folders. The pitch in one line: capture stays as fast and plain as Tot's, and what happens after capture goes further than Tot but never as far as Drafts asks you to go.

At a glance

Capture

Tot's capture surfaces are deliberately narrow — a menu bar summon, a widget, a Watch complication — matched to its seven-note ceiling. Drafts goes further than anything here: a keyboard-ready editor, dictation, Siri, widgets, a share extension, and Watch quick-capture, all feeding one inbox. Einfall's surfaces are built around the same idea as Tot's — get a thought in without opening the app — but across more entry points: a menu-bar popover that never shows the stream, home- and lock-screen widgets, Control Centre buttons, a Shortcut you can bind to the Action Button, the share sheet, a Mac Services-menu entry for selected text, and on-device voice transcription. All of it runs on Mac, iPhone, and iPad at launch. Apple Watch isn't part of the launch lineup — no capture surface here should be read as implying otherwise.

Processing and routing

This is where the three apps diverge most. Tot doesn't really have a processing step — a dot is a dot, and Shortcuts can only store or retrieve its text. Drafts has the deepest processing layer of any app in this comparison: its Actions are small JavaScript programs, backed by a community directory of ready-made ones, capable of reaching almost any destination or transformation you can code. Einfall takes a third path — a fixed roster of 16 action templates, each covering a specific destination or transform (send a thought to Reminders, Calendar, Mail, iMessage, or a file; drop it on the share sheet or a Shortcut; transform its case, listify it, timestamp it, clean it up with on-device AI) — fired from a picker, with nothing to write or configure beyond naming an instance (which list, which contact). There's no scripting language to learn because the roster is built to cover the common destinations without one; anything genuinely custom has an escape hatch through run-shortcut.

Organisation philosophy

Tot's organisation is its constraint: seven dots, no folders, no list. Drafts gives you the full toolkit — an inbox, tags, flags, an archive, and workspaces to view slices of it. Einfall sits closer to Tot here: tags exist, but only for filter and search — they don't fire anything, and there's no folder or archive state to file a thought into. A thought either stays in the flat stream, gets routed out to where it belongs, or gets deleted; there's no fourth category where it sits half-organised.

AI and agents

Neither Tot nor Drafts has an AI or agent surface — Drafts predates the assumption that an agent might be working alongside you; Tot's scope never asked for it. Einfall was built around that assumption from the start, through two routes: an in-app apple-intelligence action for one-off AI work on a single thought (on-device, via Apple's FoundationModels), and a Mac-based MCP server that lets your own AI agent — Claude Code or anything else that speaks MCP — read and act on your whole stream, off by default and configured explicitly. This isn't a claim that Einfall is the only cross-device capture app; plenty of apps in this category run on several devices. The edge is the combination — cross-device capture, OS-native routing, and agent access, at one price.

Pricing — total cost of ownership

Tot's premium unlock is charged per platform: $19.99 on Mac, $19.99 again on iOS, $1.99 more for Watch — roughly $40 to fully unlock Tot on a Mac and an iPhone, and that unlock is mostly cosmetic (text dividers, smart-bullet styles, indentation, bonus icons). Drafts Pro is a subscription: $1.99 a month, or $19.99 a year — a recurring cost with no option to pay once and be done. Einfall asks for $29.99 one time, and that single purchase unlocks unlimited routing on every device you own, with Family Sharing included. Capture, reading the stream, and the table-stakes text transforms are free forever on all three apps; the difference is what happens after that free tier, and what it costs over time. A year of Drafts Pro alone already costs more than Einfall's lifetime price; Tot's per-platform model means the more Apple devices you use, the more it costs to unlock the same feature set everywhere.

Choose Tot if…

You want the smallest possible surface for jotting things down — seven running notes, nothing more, and you like that the limit forces you to keep them current. You don't need routing, tags, or an action layer; a scratchpad is genuinely all you're after.

Choose Drafts if…

You want to build your own automation platform on top of capture — custom JavaScript actions, workspaces, a full inbox/archive workflow — and you're comfortable with (or excited by) a scripting language and an ongoing subscription in exchange for that depth. Drafts is the most powerful tool in this comparison, by a wide margin, if depth is what you're optimising for.

Choose Einfall if…

You want capture as fast and unencumbered as Tot's, a routing layer that reaches the common destinations without asking you to learn anything, and the option to hand your stream to your own AI agent when you want it to work in bulk on your behalf — all for one payment, on every Apple device you own.

How is Einfall different from…

1. How is Einfall different from Funnel? Funnel is the closest functional comparable on the shelf — pre-configured "Destinations" route a capture into any of 17 named PKM and task apps (Things, Obsidian, Todoist, and more), with per-destination templates and natural-language due-date parsing. It's the deepest "feed my existing app stack" tool here. Einfall routes to the OS itself — Reminders, Calendar, Mail, iMessage, Files — so there's no destination app to install, sign into, or keep configured. Funnel is iPhone-only and prices its lifetime tier at $39.99–$49.99; Einfall covers Mac, iPhone, and iPad for $29.99.

2. How is Einfall different from SupaSend? SupaSend shares the closest pitch of anything on the shelf — capture fast, then route it out — but the routing itself works differently under the hood: SupaSend sends to other services' clouds through OAuth connections, bot tokens, webhooks, and inbound email addresses. Einfall routes to the OS itself, so there are no accounts, tokens, or webhooks to set up or that can quietly break. SupaSend is iPhone-only; Einfall ships on Mac, iPhone, and iPad at launch.

3. How is Einfall different from Capture — Quick Notes? Capture ships on more platforms than Einfall does at launch — it adds Apple Watch and Vision Pro, and Einfall's Watch app isn't part of the initial lineup — so the honest comparison isn't platform count, it's what happens after you capture. Capture is built as an organiser (merge and split entries, several display modes, a 30-plus-app export list), which drifts it toward a sort-and-file tool; Einfall stays a flat stream with a fixed set of routing actions and no folders or sorting to maintain. Capture also collects some usage and diagnostics data; Einfall collects none.

4. How is Einfall different from Bebop? Bebop is a plain-text file writer — each capture gets appended straight into a .txt or .md file in a folder you choose, for an app like Obsidian to pick up from there. It's iPhone-only, has no routing beyond that single file write, and no AI. Einfall's files action covers that same use case as one of 16 routes, alongside Reminders, Calendar, Mail, iMessage, and an on-device AI action, across Mac, iPhone, and iPad rather than a single capture screen.

5. How is Einfall different from Apple Notes and Reminders? Einfall doesn't try to replace Notes or Reminders — it's the fast front door that feeds them. A thought lands in Einfall in under a second, without opening a note-taking app and deciding which list or folder it belongs in; once it's ready to become a reminder, a calendar event, or a line in an existing note, a routing action sends it there directly, including into Notes itself via the files action or a Shortcut. The difference is capture speed plus a deliberate routing step, not a bigger feature set than Apple's own apps.

What Einfall deliberately doesn't do

• No folders. A thought never has to be filed before it can be captured — there's no filing decision to make, or get wrong, at the moment you're trying to get the thought out of your head.
• No graph or backlinks. Nothing to maintain as the stream grows — the hundredth thought costs exactly as much attention as the first one did.
• No scripting language. The 16-template routing roster already covers the common destinations, so there's nothing to learn before Einfall can do useful work for you.
• No engagement mechanics — no badges, streaks, unread counts, or nags. The stream is a trusted holding place, not a backlog you're meant to feel behind on.
• No subscription. Pay once and the routing layer is yours for good — a capture tool you might lose access to on a lapsed payment would undermine the trust it depends on.
• No archive to tend. A thought either gets routed to where it belongs or gets deleted; there's no third, half-finished state where it just accumulates.
• No accounts. Nothing to sign up for and nothing of yours sitting on a server to be breached — sync rides your own iCloud, and Einfall's own data collection is "Data Not Collected."
• No AI acting on your captures uninvited. Capture tools are increasingly built around an assistant that auto-organises, summarises, or learns from every thought as it arrives. In Einfall, nothing reads or reworks a captured thought until you explicitly fire an action on it or connect your own agent — and both of those are choices you make, off until you turn them on.