It's 2022 & I still don't know which note-taking app I should use

I'm a huge fan of Notion, and I take most of my notes there so that my notes can "live" in the same app that I also do the rest of my work — including scheduling tasks, tracking progress, managing my CRM, and more.

However, Notion is slow af and has a recent history of crashing entirely. And sometimes I need to be able to just jot a thought down quickly while cooking food or walking outside.

So I supplement Notion with a second app: Dynalist. It's a super simple outlining app. (If you're familiar with Workflowy, Dynalist is basically the same thing but with a few more features.)

In short, if I'm already at my computer working and I want to take notes, I'll do so in Notion. If I'm away from my computer and I want to take notes, I'll pop Dynalist open on my smartphone (it's right there in the dock for easy access) and dash off a few of the key points in my head.

Bonus: I also occasionally take notes on a ReMarkable e-ink tablet late at night when I want to avoid screens. But it's more about novelty than convenience, so I won't go into more depth about it.

I've spent a good chunk of 2021 researching the note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management space for my project.

A few tools have stood out for me:

1. Notion: I use it as a place to store information about my projects, my home, my family, my processes, to maintain databases of different kinds (eg personal CRM). The versatility of the blocks is mind blowing; you can do a ton of different things with Notion thanks to those.

I would not recommend Notion for personal knowledge management (assuming you write a lot and want to benefit from your writing in some way vs just keeping a journal from time to time).

2. Obsidian: I currently use it for most of my knowledge management. Obsidian has a few great advantages:

• Super fast desktop application
• Everything is stored locally in a single folder (Markdown files) that you can easily synchronize (e.g., using Google Drive, OneDrive etc) across devices
• They have a mobile app
• It's free
• There's a huge & friendly community around
• There's a vast plugin ecosystem
• You can tweak it in lots of ways (not as many as emacs, but still 😂)
• You can publish your content to create a so-called "Digital Garden"; basically exporting your notes as a static Website you can host anywhere. Here's an example: https://publish.obsidian.md/alexisrondeau

Obsidian has very good support for linking ideas, tagging and searching. You can also edit multiple documents at once, which is super useful. I love using it as a tool to think, reflect and explore ideas.

3. LogSeq / DynaList: Those are infinite outliners, which is a different style for note-taking. You create bullet points and nest those. You can expand/collapse children. You can also "zoom" into a bullet point as if it was a document, and then you only see what's inside, meaning that you can actually store A TON of information.

Interestingly, DynaList has been created by the same Indie Hackers behind Obsidian.

One important benefit of outliners is that there's absolutely no need to organize content in folders and fiddle with files and renaming stuff; you just continually edit your "infinite" outline. Of course it also requires some level of organization, but you can surface streams ot thought by tagging and linking bullet points all around the place.

I'm seriously thinking of moving more of my writing to LogSeq at the moment.

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There are a gazillion more tools, and as others have mentioned, you first need to identify your requirements for such a tool, then try a few, see which one you prefer, and stick with one for long enough to really appreciate how it works for you.

BTW if you want to explore this further, I've published my research as an infoproduct on Gumroad: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/PersonalKnowledgeManagementLibrary

I've found, before finding a notetaking app that works for you, it's helpful to list 1) your notetaking use cases 2) devices.

For instance:

1. for notetaking use cases: I've found I usually take notes for a) bookmarking a link on my browser and then adding my notes underneath b) creative notetaking, say, when I'm walking c) jotting down meeting notes

2. for devices: I take notes only on my iPhone + Mac

By looking at my list, I've decided Notion is best because its product serves my list. i.e., it has Mac & iPhone apps but most importantly it has the Chrome extension which is crucial for my bookmarking use case.

Another thing that is probably important is to be disciplined with using one app only and setting it up on all your devices & browser.

Last year I tried a few as well: notion, logseq, obsdian. I finally decided on https://obsidian.md/ because of its great defaults, plugins, and powerful scripting. If you know basic coding, you can write up your own custom views and do a lot of cool stuff.

Supernotes

Notion or the good old Notes app does it for me.
Whenever I'm not happy with a tool I always ask myself if I'm actually procrastinating. Most of the times I am 😅

Notes are ... hard.

I've tried almost everything, and have orphaned notes in so many apps it's not funny. Used Evernote for the longest time for its web clipper; use Apple Notes now more than anything partly just because it's right there, and the new iPad notes linked to apps are really nice. I keep Tot around as a scratchpad, and write anything as a note that might turn into an article or larger content later in iA Writer, Ulysses, or whatever other writing app I'm using at the moment. Never quite got Obsidian or Roam to stick but the idea behind them is great. And I've used Notion extensively in teams, then more recently have been building out a new set of team documentation in Github wiki.

And through it all, the notes I actually remember later are typically ones I write with pen and paper. Go figure.

The best advice is likely to just pick one app, anything, and stick with it. Weirdly I almost wish I'd just stuck with Notational Velocity way back when.

Now I'm off to go try another notes app...

I use the 'Safe Notes' app on android. It doesn't have a lot of fancy features but it's simple to use, have offline access, and when needing to read/edit notes from desktop it is accessible via protectedtext.com (if you choose to sync your notes).

I spent a long time trying all sorts of apps and ended up building my own because none of them fit my needs.

I'm a programmer so a lot of my notes are tied in with web bookmarks as references. I needed a note taking app that gave me full text search of the scraped web pages along with my notes.

I found that I also had need for a lot more bookmarking and email features than I did notes. I really only needed basic note taking capabilities around all the content I consumed.

I'm gonna come right out and say there's definitely no one note-taking app that does it all in every situation (or most situations?). I don't believe there's anything that can truly solve this problem lol. We use Notion as well, and it's kind of amazing, but more for organization and managing than "note-taking." I think the most important thing is just to try the different apps until you find one that

• is natively cross-platform, and convenient for you
• makes sharing or searching through it easy (that's where the exhaustion can seriously creep in...just trying locate/move the information that's everywhere)
• makes sense for your most pressing use case and plays well with the way you process and sort information

I've really enjoyed using Obsidian (obsidian.md) since I came across it. I like the layout and flexibility to connect all of my notes. And there is a growing number of plugins available. I'm able to automatically back up my notes to a private GitHub repo, so I don't have to worry about losing anything.

I use Google Keep for the quick thoughts and Notion for writing in general.

Google Tasks.

Recall (https://recall.wiki) is a note-taking tool focused on building knowledge around your interests and keeping you informed on them. It let's you quickly create notes on things/topics with summarized semantic information from the web which you can then subscribe to news/updates on a particular note keeping you informed on your specific interest (kinda like Google Alerts). Its pretty different from a traditional note-taking application but solve a specific problem.

It's an offline-first PWA and supports bidirectional linking and automatic hierarchical categorization based on information type.

Hey! I'm actually trying to solve this problem by building a "feed-like" notes app. It's meant for quick notes, so it's instead of competing with Notion/Google Docs/Obsidian, it's a complementary tool to them.

You can tag each note, and then view notes by tags (or multiple tags at a time).

I just finished building out the MVP so it's super bare bones. I'm currently building out the Chrome extension which should be out soon.

Here it is: https://flowmoh.com/

Notion don't allow copying multiple blocks. on mobile. That's my major complaint.

Even I am looking out for alternative.

Nothing beats plain old text files organized sensibly into directories.

Except perhaps a physical notebook.

People make this shit more complicated than it needs to be.

For fast note taking I usually use NoteFly Pro https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/notefly-pro/id1596558634?l=tr we build it for ourselves with @kemalserbet but general note taking iPhone notes is best because of the synchronization.

If you'd like to take notes on audio/video content i.e. YouTube/Vimeo videos, SoundCloud podcasts, Twitch broadcasts, or your own files/recordings I would recommend S-K-I-P #skiptothegoodbit

Check out "Why some of us don't have one true calling | Emilie Wapnick" on S-K-I-P https://s-k-i-p.com/s/demo/pyVVAK2OzDAI6CkZhxxQ

You can add your own personal chapters, the aforementioned timestamped notes, and even create "director's cut" edits / shorts (if you add start end times), without the need to re-upload anything.

Keep the marks/notes in a private group, export (available soon), or share the link with others on social, in email newsletter or post on Slack / Twitter!

Disclaimer: it's an indie tool, and I've made it 😅

P.S. Any feedback very much appreciated 🙏

I'd say there's no single best app or notebook to write notes on. I would instead focus on improving the content of the notes by staying consistent and developing a system that suits you best. I'm a software engineer and I find that pen & paper combined with a system like the bullet journal method or GTD works best to retain knowledge. I'm also working on a journal business to help developers stay organised and reduce stress/anxiety and I'd love to read your thoughts too.

I bounced back and forth between a whole bunch of note taking apps.

The one I settled with and which I’m using daily is Agenda (https://apps.apple.com/de/app/agenda/id1370289240). Works on my Mac, phone and tablet, integrates perfectly with calendars, has backlinks, notes attached to calendar events and a whole lot more.

An interesting alternative is NotePlan (https://apps.apple.com/de/app/noteplan-3-markdown-planer/id1505432629), but I haven’t tried it yet.

I wrote a simple CLI script that files markdown notes into different directories based on their categories. It opens the notes in neovim for editing. Before that I was using Org Mode. I like using plain-text files for notes because it being locked into one product. Markdown is easy to convert to other formats with pandoc, and allows the notes to be searched and edited with other CLI tools like ripgrep and sed.

Bear is great

I'm loving good old Notes on mac - syncs with iPhone and supports folders. Simple!

I use Google Docs. It has so many features. The only thing it lacks is a way to organize documents in collections. Also it supports importing and exporting to multiple formats and I think it also provides an API in case you'd need it. The mobile apps are really good and you don't have Conflicts after editing a document from different devices like in Evernote.

none.

it makes my life easierto go without

The best one that worked for me has been https://workflowy.com/ but ultimately I realised that none of the notes apps out there really do what I want them do - my requirements are simple.

Unlimited hierarchy with folders
Add not only notes but links and shortcuts to local files
Nice to type interface

And that's it - but there isn't a single one that does it to my liking. So I have been thinking for a while to start building my own (solve your own problems and all that). But for some reason sitting down to actually build the damn thing is really hard - because ultimately notes are kind of boring

I use Remarkable 2 if I'm in the mood for taking notes by hand. I can sync them to my digital space later. Otherwise, iPhone notes app is my default. The simpler the better mentality has worked really well for me.

I use Bear App on my Mac and Apple Notes on my iPhone.

If Bear would have synced across devices for free, then I would use it also on the phone, as the main advantage between this and Apple Notes is that in Bear, you can write markdown, which makes notes more elegant, and the user experience is on point.

That said, if Apple Notes will support markdown, then I'm switching to it entirely.

Try capacities.io. I'm one of the co-founders, here are the reasons:

1. It's simple to use and media is a first-class citizen. It exists as entities like all your other notes.
2. It's a typed note-taking tool. This will change how you think about notes: You can define ideas, meeting notes, or people. No need to think about how to organize your notes first but just create what you had in mind.
3. It's associate. You have all your notes at your fingertips and can simply connect them with each other to create a network of thoughts.

Feel free to reach out :)

My pick for now is Apple Notes, UpNote and SideNotes (for quick handy notes).
I think I would be lost with to many note-taking tools.
I see here and there that people can take a long time to find the best app for notes. The choice is huge on the one hand, and on the other many apps do the same thing. Thanks for your list.

Google Doc. You don't need anything else.

I am amazed that nobody mentioned Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) so far.

• Super fast desktop application
• Everything is stored locally in a single folder (Markdown files) that you can easily synchronize (e.g., using Google Drive, OneDrive etc) across devices
• They have a mobile app
• It's free AND open source
• There's a huge & friendly community around
• There's a vast plugin ecosystem
• It's cross-platform

I've been struggling with this as well - so much so, I decided to build out my own notes app. Here were a couple of my pain points with existing ones I used (evernote, google docs, and mac notes app)

• I'd constantly be creating new notes for the same recurring meeting. I'd end up losing context of what was discussed prior
• It would be painful to start a new note / find existing notes (looking at you google docs)
• Lastly - I always jot down todos in my notes, but they end up becoming lost / I never refer to them again. Yes, I also use todo lists, but you lose the context of what the todo is for. Also, it's tough to switch between different apps (while taking a call or something).

I'm building https://notedo.app/ - it lets you capture notes + todos together (it smartly aggregates all the todos into one central location regardless of where you capture them in your notes). You create todos all through simple slash commands as you're typing your notes.

I've been using for a couple weeks now and currently testing with a couple of friends - let me know if you want to be a beta tester!

I stoped my search for a note-taking app when I started using Obsidian.

Why I love it:

• local files: no server outages will affect my notes
• plain text: even if Obsidian die, I will have my notes
• bi-directional links: because of this I can find stuff more easily
• the community is top notch and friendly
• it's fast
• search function is great

Basically I never knew in which folder my notes were and it was a struggle. Now, I don't worry because I can find stuff around in different ways.

I've wrote a short piece about how it impacted how I do stuff in my garden:
https://tiagosilva.xyz/obsidian-is-probably-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-my-productivity-in-a-long-time

I've been using Evernote for like ever but growing increasingly unhappy with the lack of markdown. Unfortunately they basically ignored the community on that.

But last month I started with Craft. It has markdown and does not suffer from the same slowness UI as Evernote. If I find an easy way to export and import all my notes to Craft. I'm good to go.

We use notion at my startup http://thefullstack.network but it's more like a collaboration document management tool.