Tidy vs Sortio: the day you stop paying

Sortio is a subscription with an account and a cloud step. That buys real things. It also means the order you built is rented.

Written by the developer of Tidy — bias disclosed. Verified on their own site, 5 September 2026.

The 20-second verdict: If you want cross-platform sorting with team features, shared workspaces and an admin console, Sortio is built for that and Tidy is not. If you are one person with a messy Downloads folder who would rather pay once and own the result, that is Tidy.

Side by side

What	Tidy	Sortio
Price	One payment, lifetime updates	Free tier · Pro $14.99/month or $99/year · Team $29/seat/month · Enterprise $50+/seat
Account required	No. No account, no sign-in, no email	Yes, email sign-in
Where documents are read	On your Mac, always	Indexing and rules run locally; for AI decisions, filenames and metadata go to the provider (OpenAI by default)
Data kept by the vendor	None. There is no server	30-day rolling retention on cloud-processed content
Local-only option	It is the only mode	Yes, via Ollama, if you set it up
Platforms	macOS 14+	macOS 11+, Windows, Linux
Teams	No	Yes — shared workspaces, admin console
Reads scanned PDFs with no text layer	Yes, on-device OCR	Content features are optional and local
Search inside your files	Yes — global panel, including scans	Not its focus
Deletes anything	Never. Trash only, one-click undo	Moves and renames; backs up before changes, with undo
Interface languages	English · Spanish · German · Portuguese · French	English

Their figures come from getsortio.com as published on 5 September 2026, including the description of what is sent for AI decisions.

Where Sortio genuinely wins

Teams. Shared workspaces, pooled allowances and an admin console are real work that Tidy has never attempted.
Three platforms. macOS, Windows and Linux, from one subscription.
Scale in one run. Their Pro tier advertises AI sorting of up to 5,000 files per run, which is a different shape of job than Tidy's steady background pass.
They back up before changing anything, which is the right instinct and I will say so.

If you are organizing files for a team across three operating systems, buy Sortio. Tidy would be the wrong tool.

Where Tidy wins

The day you stop paying, nothing stops. There is nothing to stop paying. Your files keep their names because names are just names, and the folders are ordinary folders.
No account. No email, no sign-in, no password to reset. The licence is a code that is checked on your Mac, offline.
Nothing is sent, not even filenames. Sortio sends filenames and metadata to a provider for AI decisions by default. Tidy has no server to send anything to.
Nothing is retained for 30 days, because nothing was ever received.
It reads scans and searches inside them, which is where Spotlight gives up.

Frequently asked

What does Sortio send to the cloud?

By their own description: indexing, content extraction and rule-based sorting run on your Mac, while AI decisions send filenames and metadata to the selected provider, OpenAI by default. File contents stay local unless you switch on content features. They also offer a local-only mode through Ollama.

If I stop paying Sortio, do I lose my organization?

Your files stay where they are — they are ordinary files. What stops is the tool that keeps doing it, and the AI allowance. It is worth asking any subscription tool this question before you start.

Does Tidy work for a team?

No. There are no shared workspaces, no admin console and no seats. It is a single-person tool and the licence is per person.

Is Tidy cheaper over five years?

Very much so — one payment against a yearly subscription. But price is not the only difference: the architecture is what makes the price possible.

Try the quiet one

One payment, no account, no server. Uninstall it tomorrow and your Mac stays exactly as tidy as it is today.

Get Tidy

One-time payment · 14-day guarantee · macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel

Prices and features checked on getsortio.com on 5 September 2026 and quoted as published. Sortio is a trademark of its owner. If anything here is out of date or unfair, write to hola@tidymacapp.com and I will correct it — that has happened before and I did.

The other comparisons: Tidy vs Hazel · Tidy vs NameQuick · Tidy vs Zush · Tidy vs Keep It Shot · Why these apps charge monthly