Alfred
I recently rediscovered my old friend Alfred after seeing it mentioned on another blog. Alfred had slipped off my radar a while after Raycast came out. I was doing the Raycast + Keyboard Maestro thing for a bit, but now I've ditched both Raycast and KM and gone back to Alfred. Nothing against those other tools. They're great! But consolidation is a simplicity win, and I like simplicity.
Here are a handful of areas where I prefer Alfred to Raycast. Keyboard Maestro is a different sort of tool, so I'll exclude it from the comparison for now.
Speed
Alfred feels very snappy. I have a fast computer. I want things to feel snappy! Raycast just has that hint of extra latency. This is my highly non-scientific take.
Sync
This is the big one for me. Alfred can sync its config across machines using your sync service of choice. I use iCloud Drive.
In Raycast, you have to buy a monthly subscription to automatically sync. I want sync, but I don't want to pay $8/month for it.
I'm generally happy to pay for software. I even feel good it. These apps are expensive to build, market, support, and maintain. I want them to be around for the long haul. For example, even though I bought the Alfred Powerpack lifetime license many years ago, I opted to chip in another $20 when I rediscovered the app a few weeks ago. I can afford it and was happy to support the team.
If I were excited about any of the other features in the Raycast Pro subscription, I might pony up the $8/month. I've tried to convince myself to be excited about them to justify the cost. But I'm just not. And paying $96/year solely for configuration sync feels out of balance. For comparison, the Alfred Powerpack license is currently $42 (£34) or $74 (£59) for the lifetime version. I sent Raycast feedback a couple years ago asking for a cheaper subscription for people who are primarily interested in sync, because I would pay what I perceive to be a fair value for it.
Now, contrast this with Obsidian Sync, for which I do pay a monthly fee (albeit at the early-bird rate). I use Obsidian Sync heavily. I'm in Obsidian on my work laptop, my personal laptop, my gaming machine, my personal phone, and my work phone. I'm editing and hopping between these devices all the time. I want everything sync'd immediately and perfectly, and I'm willing to pay for that because it's a non-trivial thing to accomplish and very annoying when it doesn't work.
But with tools like Alfred and Raycast, I make config edits far less frequently, and I make fewer of them the longer I use the tool. So it feels more obnoxious to pay a monthly fee for sync. In some months I may not need sync at all.
Workflows
I finally taught myself how to build custom Alfred workflows. It turns out they're easy, fun, and quite flexible. I was able to quickly build some super handy things I hadn't figured out how to easily do in Raycast. I'm sure they're doable. But I want to build these things in scraps of extra time, and I feel that Alfred accommodates that better than Raycast.
For example, suppose I want to write a custom Python script to power part of workflow, which is true most of the time. In Alfred, that's just a simple .py file in the workload folder. I can often do the needful in just a handful of minutes.
With Raycast, it looks like I need to manage an npm environment to build an extension (other than with the simple Script Commands, which don't give much flexibility). Granted, that environment can give a lot of benefits like type checking, linting, unit tests, etc. But for my purposes, it's overkill.
Escape!
I like that the Escape key actually escapes Alfred. It gets rid of the Alfred modal with one click. In Raycast, Escape takes you up one level in the nested UI. There's a different shortcut to escape completely that I can never remember. The consequence is that I tend to hit Escape thinking it will exit Raycast, but it doesn't. Then I just start hammering the key without knowing how many presses I'm going to need to get out.
Update: I think the correct shortcut in Raycast is ⌘W. That's reasonable!
But still, it never felt intuitive enough to remember.
Perhaps because I associate ⌘W with destructively closing a window,
whereas with these modals what I want to do is temporarily hide them.
And Escape feels like the right key for that.
Universal actions
They're cool.
The VC thing and the AI thing
Raycast is VC-backed. I don't have a philosophical problem with this, but it does give me some concern about the pressure the team will face to drive revenue rather than do the best thing for the customer.
Case in point: Raycast seems very caught up in the AI hype. A lot of the releases over the past ~18 months have been AI-focused. I don't use or want Raycast's AI features, so they kinda lost me here. I'll speculate that some of this pressure is coming from the VCs, since my perception is that companies dependent on funding often want to posture as being on the breaking edge of the AI wave.
Meanwhile, Alfred is a more humble affair. I don't know what their team looks like, but I imagine it's lean. Their intentions seem more pure.
For example, Alfred's About page starts with this one-sentence paragraph:
Our love affair with Apple began in the 1980's with our first Mac Plus.
That gives me the warm-fuzzies. 💖
Meanwhile, Raycast's Why page, referred to as the "Manifesto" page on the table of links at the bottom of the website), feels like it came from an LLM trained on Steve Jobs transcripts and cocaine.
(Okay that's not fair. It's fine. It's just a different vibe.)
Approval overhead
This is not at all Raycast's fault, but: at my company, I have to get approval each time I run a non-allowlisted executable binary. Raycast isn't allowlisted, so each time it does a patch update, which it does often, I have to go get it reapproved before I can run it. And while I'm waiting for approval, I have to live without it. That's frustrating, as these tools are central to my workflow and I feel a bit lost when I suddenly lose access to them.
Alfred doesn't have this problem. Maybe because it's a native Mac app, or because someone got it on the allowlist at some point, or something else.
Whatever the reason, it was a relief to opt out of this tug of war.
In closing
Again, none of this is to throw shade at Raycast. Raycast is an excellent tool. It was good enough to make me forget about Alfred! And in some ways it's better than Alfred.
If I didn't have to pay so much for Raycast sync, I'd do a more thorough evaluation of the two before choosing Alfred. But until then, sync is the obvious tiebreak, and I'm enjoying rediscovering Alfred and exploring all it can do for me.