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I'm the developer of a new alternative to both Alfred & Raycast, etc called Monarch that strives to merge the best features of all the launchers into one — just wanted to state that for transparency. Despite that, I think I can give a good perspective on this as someone who has not only used both but many launchers on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Alfred
Alfred's strength is in its raw speed. Just about every action you take in Alfred is directly accessible, often times through short prefixes. Where it suffers is the user interface & experience. For starters, there's no free trial. You either buy the Powerpack or you have what is effectively another Spotlight Search. Alfred's extensions are called workflows and they can be great when they work, but it's very inconsistent and sometimes outright unreliable. I cannot stress to you how fast Alfred is though.

I think the main reason for Alfred losing ground to Raycast is due to the fact that when Alfred first launch there just wasn't much choice. Now there is, but their user interface and experience has more or less remained still. This is what many Raycast/Spotlight users value above all else.

What Alfred can do that Raycast cant: It can do everything in 1 to 2 steps less, sometimes more. A big issue people struggle with in Raycast is the fact that your goal seems to always be nested within several layers of menus. When you have multiple things you want to do through Alfred, it can be a whole 3 seconds faster than in Raycast with less mental overhead (this matters so much more than people think).

Another reason someone would choose Alfred over Raycast is because if you bought Alfred 7 years ago, you're still good. There's a smaller fee to upgrade to the latest version if you wish, but if you have no need for it, the entirety of the app still works minus whatever the new features of the new version would be. Compare that to Raycast's subscription tiers where it's $10 - $20/month, and if you look at 7 years from now you've spent $840-$1,680 ... and if you decide at any point to stop paying, you just lose access to those features. I don't have to say why that's unappealing.

Raycast
Raycast's strength is in the UI and user experience. It's not slow at all. It's just not as fast as Alfred. It is, however, markedly easier to wrap your mind around. Everything is in behind some layer of some menu, sure .. but for the most part you always know exactly where you are. This can be annoying for specific tasks.

What can Raycast do that Alfred can't: Raycast integrates with a lot of things and has an amazing extensions platform where these extensions can be searched and installed in 1-2 seconds ... no joke.

It's as reliable as it is ironic — installing the extensions in Raycast is lightning fast, but using them is slow due to the way the UI is designed to have you constantly searching for things. Installing workflows in Alfred is slow due to poor support/reliability but using and accessing them is much faster than in Raycast.

Lastly, of course, you have Raycast AI which gives you access to many different models, but increasingly they are putting newer models and new model capabilities behind their Advanced AI plan which is $20 a month. And you can't access Custom Themes, Custom Window Management, the new note taking feature, or ANY extensions that use or interact with these things, without subscribing to at least the standard Pro plan. I think we all agree that this is the "investors coming home to roost", given that they raised 17 million USD in funding.

If pricing is an issue, you absolutely should make a concerted effort to try Alfred or Monarch (my take on the launcher). Monarch has a free trial, no login, credit card, or data collection or any of that + student discounts.

Alfred is still amazing, but I think that as expectations around user experience change, it may see less new adoption. A comment in this sub the other day also reminded me that we should pay attention to the fact that Raycast does spend a LOT of time & money on marketing and partnership to get it in front of everyone. It's why there is such a gap between the pricing of the free plan and the paid plans. Free to up to $20 per month is a massive gap.

These aren't the only two (three?) launchers out there by the way, but I'd say that they are the best crafted of this class.

Also want to note that I haven't slept in a while. I'm likely to pass out so if I don't respond to any questions about Monarch, feel free to go through my post / comment history to get an overview in the meantime and/or ask new questions here and I'll get to them when I wake up. I think that Alfred, LaunchBar, Quicksilver and Raycast have some things they've done really well and that the best launcher is something that contains the best of all of them.

Edit: I think it's fair to say that Monarch doesn't quite yet serve the needs of OP's use cases to fully replace Raycast right now, so wanted to be clear on that however do keep an eye out because features are added pretty quickly and Monarch AI is the next major feature (which will be BYOK, not subscription)



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Caughill
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3mo ago
Fantastic comment, but I think you should have added a section about how Monarch is better (and worse) than the other two. There is not a chance in hell that I’m leaving Alfred for Raycast (I tried it and it was like trying to swim in lead flippers compared to Alfred), but I am open to trying Monarch and I’d like to hear more of you feel it compares to the other two.



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u/thievingfour avatar
thievingfour
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3mo ago
Yes, I meant for the comment first and foremost to serve as informative though. Mentioning Monarch needed to happen since people may or may not know that I have a horse in the race, so I wanted to be transparent about that.

I do kinda hate when devs come into a thread with "Have you tried my app?" as the sole answer to the question and OP asked a really good question that I think is at the top of a lot of people's minds now and especially when it comes time to renew those subscriptions.

I'm currently working on how to communicate the differences between the 3 because Monarch has its own things that I'm doing that I haven't seen in launchers, but there are so many things that each one gets right that I feel would work together, but for some reason all launchers seem locked into a very specific UX.

At this time, I don't imagine any veteran Alfred users would move to Monarch, and realistically that's probably a year or so out, but I am looking forward to putting this together with everyone's feedback, it has been great! Several people suggested adding the functionality of the HandMirror app into Monarch and to be honest I was skeptical. But I implemented it in my pre-release version of Monarch and today I had a call and it was in fact super handy, so now that's going in the next update v0.6.5!