While the ultimate knowledge information management system has yet to be created, we, like everyone else, have continued to struggle with existing solutions. This story was initially written in Notion and entitled “Caught in Note Hell.” It’s not that we haven’t tried, but there are just too many notes apps, all leaving something to be desired. After analyzing a whopping 342 note-taking apps, NoteApps.info came up with a TMI list of 43.
Here is our take on five of them.
Evernote
One of the first truly innovative note-taking apps was Evernote, which Walter Mossberg praised in an Aug. 11, 2005 review. We began using Evernote on July 22, 2008. On Nov. 16, 2022, Bending Spoons acquired Evernote, which TechCrunch described as “marking the end of an era.” We couldn’t agree more. Evernote has been languishing since at least 2018, which is sad given that we have collected more than 18,000 notes in Evernote.
Notion
We started using Notion shortly after it launched in 2016. We like its ability to sync notes across multiple platforms, including web, macOS and iOS apps. What we have never liked is its user interface. Notion is a solution in search of a problem. While it has an excellent web clipper, its editing and organizational features have been awkwardly implemented:
- Confusing interface – Notion’s embedded pages and tables architecture needs to be more clearly articulated and better executed. For example, why do sub-documents only appear for embedded pages and not tables? All Notion documents have a dropdown icon indicating whether sub-documents are attached. Clicking the icon displays a “View All” command that frustratingly also shows empty tables, resulting in much wasted time. How about disabling or graying out “View All” when empty? Other note-taking programs, like Bear, will only show a dropdown icon when documents are attached (see image). In recent versions, Notion has decided to cover up their faux pas by hiding it under the document icon, so you don’t see it until you mouse over it. This is lazy coding and should be banished. Every interface designer knows that the presence of a dropdown icon indicates subdocuments. And this from a company that last received a $275 million investment with a $10 billion valuation. You would think that such vast sums would help improve Notion’s customer experience.
- Web publishing – Notion can publish a note directly on the web — a feature that has attracted many a TikTok user. But is that a feature Notion needs? We wonder if our Satay recipe article will ever be found. While the market still searches for a formidable note and web clippings app, focusing on much-needed core features would be a better strategy.
On Sept. 3, 2024, Notion announced it passed 100 million users, many of whom were, no doubt, attracted by the program’s free cross-platform syncing, web-clipping and note emojis.
- Charts – Along the same lines, Notion has now introduced charts that, in addition to tables, will help produce business reports. This latest addition highlights Notion’s identity crisis: Is it a note-taking app, a project-management tool or a publishing platform?
- Exporting – Exporting is similary user unfriendly. Exported files and folders are appended with an inscrutable ID that resembles a very long password: “Ultimate Saté (satay) Peanut Sauce Recipe (pi 73080e8684374da88602051e73cf353a,” which makes reusing a bunch of notes in another product, like Obsidian, unwieldy. Or maybe that was the idea?
Sure, you can add cute emojis to identify each document, but there are a lot of niglets that make Notion irritating to use. But you don’t have to take our word for it. In this video, YouTube influencer Anna Wesley tells us it took her two years to get Notion to where she wanted it to be:
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Obsidian
If you like a technical challenge, you will love Obsidian. Aficionados claim that its infinite configurability is its secret power. But when even adding a calendar requires dismissing a “caution before installing dangerous extension” warning, you might wonder if you made the right decision. Here are more observations:
- Graph view – Users applaud its spider-web diagrams that let you navigate your data visually by exploring relationships between notes. Unfortunately, the graph view quickly became unwieldy, with only 200 notes. This was not helped by the relationships Obsidian draws between notes and attachment file names, like images.
- Features and benefits – Obsidian does offer several benefits, including the ability to import Evernote (.enex) files (we plan to import our 18,000-note database into Obsidian), cross-platform syncing using popular cloud services, robust plugin and theming support, and, best of all, it’s free to use.
- Web clipper – Obsidian just released its very first official web clipper for Google Chrome. About time! Previous attempts included hacks created by users, which sometimes even required using Terminal to install JavaScript files! Embarrassingly, in our tests, even the Obsidian Web Clipper created by Obsidian CEO Steph Ango (see minute 2:58 in video below) only worked sporadically:
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UpNote
Notion and Obsidian, meet your match. UpNote, created by “team of two from Vietnam,” is a fantastic note management app that is chockablock with features. Many features are available in the free version, but a lifetime Premium version, which is not limited to 50 notes and costs $39.99, offers more flexibility, including Markdown exporting and cross-platform syncing:
- Cross-platform syncing – UpNote is available for MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android platforms. The iOS version has a five-star App Store rating based on 833 reviews. UpNote Co. Ltd. is unusually transparent, which we like. Like many lean-and-mean startups, UpNote stores data in a Google Firebase cloud database. UpNote limits each note to about 300,000 characters or 20MB to keep a lid on bandwidth costs. That should accommodate 99% of notes, except large PDF attachments. In our tests, syncing was virtually instantaneous.
- Importing/exporting – UpNote can import a host of different note formats, including Evernote (.enex), Apple Notes, Bear, Google Keep, Markdown and Simplenote. Upnote exports text and PDF formats, while the Premium version will also export HTML and Markdown files. While you can optionally export additional data, like category and tags in Markdown, UpNote does not export resources, including images, like Notion and Obsidian do, except when exporting HTML.
- Markdown – Markdown, or plain text formatting, has become the default lingua franca of notes and other productivity applications. While many flavors of Markdown exist, all basic formatting, including headers, boldface, etc., are supported by UpNote.
- Web clipper – The Evernote web clipper is the gold standard, primarily due to its ability to capture a “Simplified Article,” but in our tests, UpNote bested the Bear, Notion, and Obsidian web clippers.
- Tagging – Unlike Bear, UpNote offers to create a new tag when a hashtag is entered, avoiding the situation where anything with a “#” becomes a tag. It was one of the annoying reasons why we ditched Bear after three years of use (the other was the need to concatenate hashtags to create an organization hierarchy).
- Linking – Like Bear and Obsidian, you can add relationship links between notes. While UpNote doesn’t offer a graph view, we don’t miss it for reasons outlined above. YMMV, of course. Use Get Info (Command/Control-Shift-I) to open an Info Panel to see any linked notes. The Info panel also displays file creation and modification dates, word and character counts, plus a lovely table of contents view of clippings and notes, which makes it easy to jump to specific sections of long notes. Obsidian only displays word and character count in the bottom right corner.
- Organization – Like Evernote, you can create separate notebooks to organize significant topics. You can even nest, an un-nest, notebooks for hierarchical organization. Then, like Bear, you can add tags to notes to quickly locate. And if notebooks alone are not enough, you can create separate spaces, like the Arc browser, which lets you separate work from personal notes, for example.
- Customization – You can give each Notebook its own graphic identity, although the ones UpNote provides are not particularly distinctive. I uploaded an emoji, resized to 110 x 135 pixels, and it looks great.
The UpNote user interface is clean and colorful. Notebooks can have custom icons. The default icons UpNote provides are shown above. Also visible are note counts and tags. You can also click on a note’s favorite icon to add them to the Quick Access list.
UpNote is so feature-rich that we will only briefly highlight the ability to share notes via a web link, lock a notebook or the whole app, automatic backups and version history, custom note filters, plus the ability to play videos directly in a note.
Of course, no app is perfect. You can’t use drag-and-drop to organize notes. You must use the “Move to another notebook” command to organize notes. UpNote also does not fully adhere to Apple’s menu interface guidelines. Menu items that open a dialog box, like “Filter All Notes,” should end with an ellipsis but don’t. And while “Filter All Notes” correctly uses initial caps “Export all notes” does not. We have already informed company executive Thomas Dao of these inconsistencies.
Our Evernote experience taught us that the viability of a note-taking solution is paramount, especially given UpNote’s low $40 lifetime plan. UpNote addresses this concern in their FAQ:
“UpNote’s lean model allows us to create efficient development cycles while optimizing costs to offer an affordable premium plan to our users. Currently, UpNote limits each attachment to 20MB and reduces the image resolution when uploading to UpNote to reduce our server costs. We are constantly monitoring our costs and will make adjustments as needed to ensure the long-term growth of the application. With the support of our users and word of mouth so far, we have seen UpNote’s steady growth, and we are passionate about maintaining and improving the app for the long term.— UpNote FAQ
Ret.: 23-Sep-24
This candid answer combined with the fact that the product was launched seven years ago in 2017, we believe, adequately addresses its viability concern.
The bottom line is that we have found a permanent replacement for Bear, Evernote, and Obsidian and are very happy to be liberated from note hell. 😎
