Remly vs Raycast

You remember what’s inside. Remly helps you find it

Nobody remembers filenames. You remember that there was a deck about moving into Germany, that it had the Berlin hiring plan in it, and that it was some time in the spring. Remly is built to take that description and give you the file.

the presentation about expanding into GermanyReplay

Local files · Documents · Apr 896%Q2_planning_v4.keyMarket entry: Berlin first. Hiring plan, 6 roles. Localisation timeline.

Google Drive · Apr 889%DE_market_sizing.xlsxAddressable market by segment, Germany. Referenced from the Q2 deck.

The file that matches is called Q2_planning_v4.key. The words “Germany” and “expanding” are not in its name – they are in the third slide. Remly ranks it first because of what the file is about, and shows the passage that matched so you can tell it is the right one before you open it.

What Raycast already does

Raycast is a launcher, and a very good one. Its File Search is not filename-only and it is not without AI, so let us be precise about what it does before comparing anything.

• Filenames by default.Raycast’s manual states that “By default, File Search matches on file name alone.”
• File contents, once you turn it on.Content Search is a setting that makes File Search “also match on the text inside your files, not just their names.”
• Natural language, through AI.Raycast’s AI Extensions let you use @file-search in AI Chat or Quick AI and ask in plain words. Raycast AI is included in paid Pro plans, not the free one.

So the honest framing is not “Raycast can’t do this.” It is that the two products put the same idea in different places: in Raycast it is a launcher feature you enable and an AI add-on you subscribe to, and in Remly describing what you want is the only way search works.

The same search, past your Mac

The second difference is reach. Remly’s file search and its connected-app search are one index, so a description can match a local file, a Drive document and a Notion page in the same ranked list – and then you can ask a question about them.

what did we decide about hiring in Berlin?Replay

Remly

Six roles for the Berlin office in Q2, weighted to engineering, with the first two hires starting in May. The plan was approved at the Q2 planning session and the budget sits in the DE market sizing sheet.

Q2_planning_v4.keyQ2 planning – decisionsDE_market_sizing.xlsx

The answer is assembled from a local Keynote file, a Notion page and a Google Drive spreadsheet, and each claim carries the file it came from. Remly connects to Google Drive, Notion, Slack, Confluence, Dropbox, GitHub, Jira, Google Calendar and Granola today.

Side by side

Where a cell says “not verified”, that means exactly that: we could not confirm it from Raycast’s public documentation, so we are not asserting it either way. We have not run head-to-head retrieval tests, and you should be suspicious of any comparison page that shows you one without a method.

Which one you actually want

These are not really the same category of tool, and plenty of people will want both. Raycast is a keyboard launcher that does a hundred things – window management, clipboard history, snippets, scripts – and file search is one of them.

Remly does one thing: make everything you have worked on findable by describing it, whether it is on your Mac or in an app you connected, and answer questions from it with sources. If the problem you are trying to solve is “I know this exists and I cannot find it,” that is the whole product.

Questions people ask

Sources

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• ComparisonRemly vs SpotlightDescribe a picture or a document and find it on your Mac. How Remly compares with macOS Spotlight, and what each one covers.Read the comparison