Picture this: You're typing away at your keyboard, cranking out response after response to customer inquiries. Suddenly, you realize you’re tired. From typing the exact same thing...for the hundredth time. Enter: Magical Text Expander & Autofill! It's like having a personal genie in your computer, just waiting to grant your typing wishes.

What is Magical Text Expander & Autofill?

Magical Text Expander & Autofill is a productivity app that “makes tasks disappear”. In other words, it automates your repetitive tasks so that you can focus your limited time and energy onto things that require the indispensable human touch (or human intelligence).

With this text expander, you create abbreviations or shortcuts of your most frequently used phrases, words, sentences, paragraphs, emails and so on. And when you type those abbreviations, bam! The tool magically expands them into the original, full text. No more tedious typing.

Magical also comes with autofill capabilities. It lets you transfer data between tabs without copy-pasting. This means that you can, for example, automatically populate a spreadsheet with prospects’ names, designations, email addresses, and companies when you have their LinkedIn profiles open in one tab and your spreadsheet in the other. 

Why do people use Magical Text Expander & Autofill?

Magical Text Expander & Autofill is like having a typing fairy and a data entry ninja rolled into one! 

Here are the top reasons people use Magical Text Expander.

1. Lightning fast typing: With Magical Text Expander & Autofill, typing is like riding a high-speed train—it's fast, smooth, and gets you where you need to be in record time. It’s a boon for people in customer-facing roles (such as Sales and Support) who deal with a large volume of repetitive enquiries and queries everyday.

2. No more typo troubles: While you can program any text expander to autocorrect words you mistype often, autofill acts as your personal memory and spellcheck champion by fetching the data you need, where you need it—in its correct form!

3. Productivity boost: Magical Text Expander & Autofill is a boon for productivity nerds as it takes repetitive tasks off of one’s plate and frees up the better part of one’s workday to take on more challenging tasks. That’s a double boost in productivity!

4. Effortless workflow: Work flows smoothly, especially when you don’t have to switch between pages, tabs, and apps trying to find text you use often and resorting to the tedium of copy-pasting it everywhere you need. By letting you look up shortcuts everywhere on the web, Magical eases your workflow even further.

5. Lighter workdays: With its simple and intuitive interface, Magical Text Expander & Autofill can make typing and data entry tasks more enjoyable, like a ray of sunshine in a sometimes dull workday.

Despite its many benefits, Magical suffers from some limitations.

Limitations of Magical Text Expander 

No tool is perfect and Magical Text Expander & Autofill is no exception. Here's a list of its major limitations:

1. Lack of cross-platform support: Magical text Expander & Autofill only works on Chrome and Edge browsers for now, limiting its utility for users on Firefox, Brave, Safari etc. It also lacks a native app for Mac as well as Windows and doesn’t have mobile support yet.

2. Inconsistent data: Autofill is only as accurate as the information you input, so if your data is inconsistent, your autofill results may be too. You’ve to be extremely cautious while using Autofill as it can cause unexpected errors and inconsistencies, especially when your source has inaccurate data to start with.
   
   
3. Limited access to snippets’ insights: Magical offers detailed analytics of snippets’ creation and usage only for users availing the Enterprise plan. If you’re using it individually or as part of a small team, you will not be able to estimate, for example, which snippets were used most often, how much time each snippet saved you, or whether there are redundant snippets that you can delete from your workspace. 

In conclusion, while Magical is a fantastic tool with many benefits, it's important to be aware of its limitations. If these limitations are a cause of concern for you, you can try the following alternatives to Magical Text Expander.

7 powerful alternatives to Magical Text Expander that you need to try this year

1. OSlash

OSlash is the text expander that does everything for you—from automating things you type repetitively to making it oh-so-simple to recall your shortcuts and summon them everywhere you work. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg!

There are hardly any apps out there that can match what OSlash has to offer in terms of letting you build your own productivity suite. OSlash text expander doubles up as your knowledge management solution by letting you find, access, and organize your links seamlessly, in addition to your snippets.

OSlash = Magical Text expander + URL Manager + Knowledge Hub. Is it a surprise then that it can help you claim back ~30 hours every month?

Here’s the complete lowdown on OSlash as an alternative to Magical.

Top features:

• Transform your long links and snippets into quick, easy-to-remember shortcuts that come with advanced access control
• Organize, discover, and collaborate across apps, webpages, and documents with your team by opening URLs at lightning fast speed
• Create customizable templates for routine messages, emails, and other texts via a rich-text editor, macros, and variable snippets. Get access to readymade templates in the OSlash snippet library
• Highlight anything on the web and save it as a snippet instantly
• Use the launcher to navigate all your shortcuts, tabs, and browser activity in one time-saving window

Available for

‍Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Brave (extensions), macOS, iOS (coming soon)

2. TextExpander

If Magical has magic packs to get users started with templated snippets, TextExpander boasts Public Groups with a host of snippets supplied by power-users. They range from snippets of auto-corrected entries for misspelled words to snippets of foreign words that require special accent marks or unusual keyboard characters to type out. 

This is just one of the reasons why TextExpander is one of the most popular text expansion tools out there, even three decades after its release. Another one is strong cross-platform support with a Chrome browser extension, native apps for Windows and Mac, as well as an iOS app.

Top features

• Search and expand snippets, abbreviations, and suggestions inline as you type
• Create snippet groups to organize snippets thematically and share them with your circle
• Create unlimited snippets, no matter which plan you are on
• Get free app updates irrespective of the plan chosen
• Auto-subscribe users to snippets and get snippet statistics

Available for

‍Chrome (extension), macOS, Windows, and iOS

3. Text Blaze

With Text Blaze, you can create, save, and insert text snippets anywhere on the browser. Text Blaze is a text expansion app that is currently available on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. It also has a native Windows app.

My favorite Text Blaze feature is the rich repository of commands that lets you fetch dynamic values such as current date, current time, URLs, emails, and even results of a mathematical formula applied within a snippet. 

Top features

• Automate repetitive workflows such as clicks, keypresses, navigating between fields, form submissions etc. on the browser with Autopilot
• Create and share snippets with colleagues that get updated automatically for everyone when edits are made
• Use Forms to create a variety of fillable fields within the snippet, including dropdown menus

Available for

‍Chrome/Chromium, Edge (extensions)

4. PhraseExpress

I’ve special regard for user-centric text expanders such as OSlash and PhraseExpress, which allow us to autocomplete and/or point-and-click the right snippets instead of making us memorize each cryptic abbreviation.

Another great (and rare) thing about PhraseExpress is that it gives you the flexibility to assign the same shortcut to multiple snippets. So a shortcut like /ty can expand to both “Thanks for your email” and “Thanks for getting on a call with me” depending on the context. You can simply choose the best fit from a smart dropdown menu. 

Because of its distinct features, this app happens to be one of the pricier ones on the list, but totally worth it if your work involves a lot of repetitive typing and other everyday tasks that can be automated.

Top features

• Automate most repetitive workflows with Macro Recorder 
• Generate full-fledged documents from scratch using custom templates 
• Store snippets locally and share them via the cloud or network-shared folders. Sync between multiple Windows and Mac computers effortlessly
• Organize snippets in a tree structure rather than flat groups, to identify and locate them effortlessly
• Create snippets that automatically adapt to the gender of the recipient
• Translate individual snippets or switch the entire phrase library into other languages instantly 

Available for

‍Windows, macOS, iOS

5. Espanso

What makes Espanso a one-of-a-kind text expander is that it’s not just free but also open source. No wonder it’s a darling among developers who form a bunch of its strongest advocates online. 

Incidentally, the tool uses a code-based method to create shortcuts instead of a GUI (graphical user interface) which might take some getting used to, especially for non-coders. A GUI is planned in the future roadmap, though.

‍Top features

• Use custom forms to include dynamic inputs
• Forward form values into custom scripts to handle complex workflows
• Use eccentric, extensive packages (collections of snippets) put together by the Espanso community for writing non-standard text including foreign language accents, scientific symbols, tricky emojis, and more. They even have one for dad jokes. I know! ;’)
• Enjoy cross-platform support for Mac, Windows, and Linux
• Create app-specific configurations to disable Espanso on the apps you need

Available for

‍Windows, macOS, Linux

6. ProKeys

A true gift for the mathematically lazy like me, ProKeys is a text expander that doesn’t just take over typing but also performs dynamic mathematical magic (read: calculations) automatically, without needing to leave the text editor. 

You could type "[[ 20% * 385 =]]" and ProKeys will return the correct value, 77, instantly. It also supports advanced mathematical operators including parentheses and exponentiation. How brilliant!

The only limitation is that the text expansion doesn’t work properly in Facebook, Messenger, and Quora. It is also incompatible with Google Docs (editor) but works for Google Docs’ comments. 

Top features

• Use the keyword "pk" to directly expand snippets inside of the omnibox/address bar
• Autocomplete quotes ('"') and braces - ( { [ 
• Store the past 20 revisions of your data on your PC so you don’t have to be afraid of losing important snippets
• Ability to switch between local storage and cloud sync‍

Available for ‍

Chrome and Opera

7. FlyMSG

FlyMSG is a text expander and writing assistant in one tool that comes with over 200 FlyPlates or readymade messaging templates to ease writing woes for your teams—from sales to Customer support to Recruitment and others.  It makes searching for and categorizing snippets easy with multiple categories and subcategories included in all plans. 

‍Top features

• Ability to change font size and type in snippets
• Ability to embed images and GIFs/videos in snippets
• Auto-conversion of rich-text into plain-text on unsupported websites
• All-in-one Linkedin and LinkedIn Sales Navigator engagement tool
• Automatic spell-check for snippets in ALL languages

Available for

Chrome and Edge (extensions)

This list of alternatives to Magical Text Expander & Autofill is by no means exhaustive. There are multiple text expansion apps that suit various scales of companies and various use-cases. There are also platform specific text expanders which are customized for browsers or operating systems. 

You can explore different text expanders for Chrome, Firefox, Mac, and Windows on our blog if you’re looking for more information.

What is the best alternative to Magical Text Expander?

The best alternative to Magical Text Expander for you will be one that suits your and your team’s requirements, feels intuitive to use, adds to your overall productivity, and doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket.

Which is why I’d strongly recommend giving OSlash a try. OSlash is being used by over 3500 teams across Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Human Resources, Engineering, and IT today. It helps them manage their URL and snippet shortcuts, find the right information at the right time, and obliterate repetitive tasks that hurt everyday productivity.

With OSlash, it takes nanoseconds to find the resources you need to get the job done. And just a couple of seconds to get started. Download the extension (or the native macOS app) and you’ll be good to go!

Try OSlash text expander for free. It’s one of the best alternatives to Magical!