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Edmund vs Apple Notes and Shortcuts

You can build a fair bit of Edmund yourself with Apple Notes and Shortcuts, for free. Here’s honestly what you get, and what you’d be building and babysitting.

This is the free, built-in route, and it’s a reasonable one. Apple Notes is a solid place to keep things, and Shortcuts can automate capture and even fire a note at another service. If you enjoy assembling your own tools and don’t mind the upkeep, you can get a long way without paying anyone a penny. Edmund is for when you’d rather not build and maintain that yourself.

Side by side

The same job, two ways.

Edmund
Apple Notes and Shortcuts
Capture-first, into a triage inbox
Type or dictate straight in
A Shortcut can capture quickly, once you’ve built it
Works out where it belongs
On-device AI picks the type and project
You file it yourself, or write logic to guess
Sends to issue trackers
Built in, one tap to Linear, GitHub, Jira and more
Only if you build a Shortcut against each API yourself
Knows when it’s finished
Routed note marks itself done
You’d have to build and maintain that too
Setup & upkeep
Nothing to build
You assemble the Shortcuts and keep them running
AI
On-device triage, no key needed
None, unless you wire one in yourself
Privacy
On-device, no account
Apple Notes + iCloud; routing depends on your own Shortcuts
Price
Free tier; Pro £29.99/year
Free
An honest steer

Neither one’s wrong. It depends on you.

Reach for Apple Notes and Shortcuts when
  • It’s free, and free matters more than the time you’d spend building it.
  • You enjoy making your own Shortcuts and keeping them alive across updates.
  • Your needs are simple: capture to a note, and that’s mostly it.
Reach for Edmund when
  • You want the triage and routing to just work, without building it first.
  • You route into developer tools and don’t fancy maintaining API Shortcuts.
  • You’d rather one app owned the job than a chain of moving parts.

Try the one that files itself.

Free to start, on the iPhone, iPad and Mac you already own. No account, nothing leaves your device.

Coming to the App Store

Apple Notes and Shortcuts are Apple’s own, and genuinely capable. This is about the effort of assembling the job yourself versus having it done. What they can do changes with each OS release, so treat the specifics as a snapshot.