Aeon Timeline Alternative

What does Aeon Timeline offer today?

Aeon Timeline is a timeline app for Mac, Windows, iPad and iPhone, built for lawyers, project managers and researchers as well as writers. It shows the same data in seven views: a timeline, a spreadsheet, a relationship grid that sets every event against every character, Subway (parallel tracks drawn like a metro map), a list, a mind map, and Narrative, which puts scenes on cards in an order separate from the chronology. Give your characters birth and death dates and it works out how old they are at every event they're linked to. Make events depend on each other and, when one date changes, the others move with it or the conflict gets flagged. On the desktop it syncs with Scrivener (Mac and Windows) and Ulysses (Mac).

You can also build your own calendar, setting the number of months, the length of each month, month and weekday names, eras and leap years. It can only be edited while your timeline has no dated entries, so it's something to set up first. Dates can carry hours and minutes, a start or end you're unsure of can be entered as an earliest and latest date, and you can work in relative time such as Day 1 or Week 3.

Aeon Timeline doesn't require a subscription. After a 14-day free trial, a one-time $65 license lets you keep that version for good and includes 12 months of updates; each further year of updates is an optional $35. One license covers up to five devices across Mac, Windows and iOS. Editing needs a license, but anyone can install the app in its free read-only mode to open a timeline shared with them. The interface is in English, there's no Android or browser version, and timelines can't be published on the web.

Why might you look for an alternative?

Aeon Timeline is an app you install on your devices, so you can't reach it from an Android phone or from a browser on someone else's computer. Seven views, dependencies and calendar settings make it powerful, but it takes time to learn, and an English-only interface puts some writers off. Once the trial ends you need a license to keep editing; if all you want is to keep the big events in order, that may be more than you need. And if what you really care about is the world itself, with your characters' histories, places, lore and glossary on linked pages right next to the timeline, a worldbuilding space that holds your events as well will serve you better.

When is Aeon Timeline the better fit?

Aeon Timeline is the better choice if your world runs on its own calendar with named months, weekdays and eras; if you're plotting a heist or a single tense night hour by hour; if you want events chained so that moving one moves the rest; or if you keep your scene order apart from the chronology and sync it with Scrivener or Ulysses. The same goes if you'd rather pay once for a desktop app that also works offline. yazar.io has no custom calendars, no times of day, no dependencies between events, no Scrivener sync and no offline editing.

How does yazar.io keep track of time?

In yazar.io, events live in the Calendar section, and its three tabs, the Event Flow, the Calendar and the Timeline, all show the same events. The Event Flow is free on every plan: each event gets a short title, a free-text date note and an optional short note, and you set the order by dragging. Link the characters who take part and the place where it happens, and the event is listed, in order, on those character and location pages too. Adding start and end dates to events, and birth and death dates to a character's profile, is free on every plan as well.

Yazar Pro turns those dates into views. The Calendar shows events by day, week, month and year, stretches events that last several days across the days they cover, shows your characters' birthdays, and lets you tap a day to add an event. The Timeline lines events up on a single axis in the Normal view; in the Parallel view, each character gets a lane of their own, with a lifeline drawn from their birth and death dates. Open an event and you see how old each participant was at the time. Both the Calendar and the Timeline can be filtered by character and location. On the free plan you can try them in the Sample Book; the timeline software page goes through each tab.

Dates: what works and what doesn't

Calendar dates follow the standard twelve-month calendar. BC and AD are supported with no year zero; a date can be just a year, a year and a month, or a full date, and years run up to 999,999. If you only know the year a character was born, their age shows as a range, such as 34-35. There are no hours or minutes; the smallest unit is a day.

Month and weekday names can't be changed, so there's no thirteen-month year or eight-day week. Fictional names go in the Event Flow's date note, which stays exactly as you wrote it: 'Year 3, Harvest Moon' is never turned into a date. Ages and lifelines are worked out from calendar dates only; the date note never enters the calculation. When a date note is one yazar.io recognizes, like 'May 29, 1453', it offers to put it on the calendar, and nothing changes until you confirm. If your world counts years its own way, enter them as calendar years, keep the era's name in the date note and explain how your calendar works in Lore. On Yazar Pro you can also add your own seasons, one-off or recurring occasions such as a festival, and weather to the calendar; the months themselves stay standard.

Switching over, or using both

There's no direct import from Aeon Timeline. It can export your data as CSV, but yazar.io doesn't import CSV, so open the file in a spreadsheet app and enter the events from there by hand. Start with your characters' birth and death dates, then the events that carry the story, since ages and lifelines come from those dates. You can also keep both: the hour-by-hour scene plan in Aeon Timeline, the world's records and major events in yazar.io.