- Yeti has tiered levels where each level is more secure but more effort than the previous level. Tordl is intended to be a set of guides that provide different balances of tradeoffs. Some of the guides are more secure than others, but others may be more redundant, or have requirements that are less difficult for some people and more difficult for others. Torld attempts to quantify several key characteristics of these methods so they can be compared to each other and any new method someone might come up with.
- Yeti's guides are self-contained and monolithic - each guide stands alone and is built to be used in full. Tordl has many smaller guides that are each stand alone and built to be usable by any larger wallet protocol. The guides have the concepts of passing in arguments into parameters that subguides can use, just like functions in programming. Similarly, many pieces of these protocols link to deeper explanations meant for the uninitiated, allowing those who already know about that particular thing to simply skip that part and move on more easily.
- Yeti's guides has very few options and chooses pretty much everything for the user besides the specific brand of equipment (laptop, CDs, CD reader) and storage locations. Tordl's guides provide options for the user to choose from, like type of host device, storage locations, and backup methods.
- Yeti primarily focuses on setting up the wallet, using the wallet, and restoring the wallet. Other things you might need/want to do with your wallet are left to the user's imagination. Tordl attempts to offer holistic guides that direct the user on how to properly maintain the wallet, what to do in less likely or less frequent cases (like loss of backups, intentional tampering, theft, inheritance, moving backups between locations, updating the protocol, etc). The idea is that if the protocol is fully followed, the user will have a secure wallet forever.
- Yeti primarily uses Ubuntu laptops for hosting wallets and explicitly discusses reasons it chooses not to use hardware wallets. Torld offers multiple options for host wallets, and recommends but doesn't require using hardware wallets.
- Both Yeti and Tordl discuss justification for the steps required, but Tordl separates the justification from the steps themselves to make it cleaner to follow the steps without bogging things down with explanation. The philosophy is that power users don't need most of the justifications, and normal users only need them once, so separating them can keep the steps easy to read while not requiring justification information to be abridged.
- Yeti advocates storing seeds on CDs. Tordl offers multiple options and is agnostic to storage method, but I personally don't see much advantage of CD seed storage vs storing on paper. CDs are probably less durable than paper, CD writers are becoming less common, and there's a much greater possibility of exposing your seed to an insecure computer.
- Yeti recommends storing a large number of seeds / copies of a seed. Tordl is agnostic to that. However the wallet protocols that are available don't use more than 3 seeds (the 3 of 5 wallet has 3 backed up seeds, with a password on top of 2 of the seeds to make up the additional 2 wallets). In general, my personal philosophy is that having secure storage locations are the most difficult part of securely storing a wallet, and more than a couple would either put the protocol out of reach for most people, or would lead to people cutting corners and storing their seeds in unsafe locations.
- None of Yeti's protocols eliminate a single point of failure, while 3 out of 4 of Tordl's protocols do eliminate any single point of failure.
- Yeti's setup is helped by command line scripts you download as part of the setup. All of Tordl's current guides have no helper scripts, but this is not an ideological difference. I'm certainly open to using scripts where they're useful.