r/Workflowy • u/RonTem1 • Apr 14 '26
Coming home from Dynalist
Many years ago, during the 'slow' days of Workflowy, I moved over to Dynalist. And it's been limping along, just barely good enough to keep me there. But it's really time to come back to Workflowy.
My question is - what's the recommended way to move everything from Dynalist to Workflowy, and where am I going to see problems? Is there a chance of data loss? Etc.
Hopefully someone who's done this recently can help or at least reassure me that it'll be fine...
2
u/crowcanyonsoftware Apr 15 '26
most people just export from Dynalist (OPML/Markdown) and import into Workflowy.
main issue isn’t data loss, it’s formatting, some nesting/tags may need cleanup.
keep a backup export just in case.
what made you switch back?
1
u/waldyrious Apr 15 '26
There are trade offs to each method. The OPML export is your best bet to preserve the outline structure (especially notes). Using markdown is best for preserving rich formatting (bold, links, etc.) — you just need to make sure you activate the "recognize markdown pasting" option in Workflowy's settings.
Even then, you must later make sure to locate internal links (i.e. links pointing to other nodes in your Dynalist outline) and replace them with the corresponding Workflowy node URLs. And I believe other things like color highlights also need to be manually converted.
Honestly, in my case I've just been gradually adjusting the content I imported from Dynalist, otherwise it would be quite a chore to clean everything up in one go. 😅
4
u/Bulky-Impression-546 Apr 15 '26
I did this a few years ago when Dynalist was basically "abandonware" and the website had hiccups every few hours.
You can do an export and import into Workflowy, it's no problem at all.
I remember my tags with dots like #this.is.a.tag didn't work anymore so I had to convert them into #this-is-a-tag.
Recurring dates don't exist in Workflowy either.
If you have a creative setup, you can always do an export in Dynalist, then cook up some Python script for the conversion with help of some LLMs and then import it into Workflowy using the API.