Notesnook vs Shortcut
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Notesnook is on a steady alternating Desktop/Android point-release cadence with no inline changelog detail.
Notesnook is shipping a Desktop or Android point release roughly every 3–4 days (Desktop v3.3.15 → v3.3.19, Android v3.3.20 → v3.3.24). The GitHub release notes are uniformly empty — each one points to the blog rather than enumerating changes. The one detail-bearing release in the window (Desktop v3.3.16) was entirely bug fixes: scrollbar cutoffs, submenu lazy-item cutoffs, urgent-reminder segfault on Linux, backspace crash, paddle iframe crash, note-subtitle length cap.
The product is in a maintenance-and-polish phase on both Desktop and Mobile, judging from the one release that did publish detail and the steady point-bump pace. The opaque release notes are themselves a signal: directional reading has to come from the company blog, not the repo. There is no public hint of a 3.4 or 4.0 cut in this window.
Cadence continues — another paired Desktop/Android release within the next week, almost certainly more crash and UI fix work in line with the v3.3.16 pattern.
Shortcut redesigns its API for AI agents and pushes Korey beyond its own walls.
Shortcut is making concrete bets on agent-based work. API v4 entered alpha on May 12 with explicit framing around expanded capabilities and 'agent compatibility' — a positioning shift, not just a version bump. Their in-house AI assistant Korey is expanding outward: right-click access in February, then a dedicated Chrome extension in April that runs on any webpage. Around the strategic work, smaller improvements (Teams on Roadmap, March's SLA Alerts) keep shipping, alongside feed-noise from brand-guide pages being scraped as if they were releases.
Shortcut is positioning itself as the project-management surface that AI agents naturally operate against, not just a PM tool with AI features bolted on. Korey is being pushed from in-app helper toward general-purpose web assistant; the API is being redesigned with external agent consumers in mind. That's a coherent strategic stance the bigger PM players — Jira, Linear, Asana — have not yet made as explicitly. Underlying release cadence stays steady, suggesting these are strategic plays, not panicked pivots.
Expect API v4 to surface MCP-style tooling endpoints and structured action surfaces aimed squarely at agent frameworks. Korey's Chrome extension is likely a stepping stone toward a 'Korey anywhere' positioning — deeper integrations with browser, email, and calendar are the natural next dominoes.
See more alternatives to Notesnook →
See more alternatives to Shortcut →