Whether it’s Apple Notes, Obsidian or something else, everyone has their own favourite app for taking notes…

If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — What Makes a Good Note-Taking App?

However, there are some options that rise above others in terms of popularity. But what makes these options the best?

This article’s going to go into detail about what makes a note-taking app popular — features that seem to be a must-have, as well as unique functions that set some unique offerings apart.

Let’s get started…

Non-negotiable features

There aren’t many features that seem to be completely universal except for simply being able to edit and organise text files or documents, but there are some that a lot of people deem to be a must-have, such as:

  • Sync — almost everyone wants access to their notes on multiple devices. If an app doesn’t offer some kind of built-in sync, it ruins its chances with these people. As such, almost all note-taking apps offer integrated synchronisation of their notes, and if not, some kind of integration with other services, like Dropbox, Git or somewhere else in the cloud. This is too much friction for some people regardless, so they settle for services where they don’t have to think about moving their notes between devices.
  • Collaboration/publishing — people want to see your notes, so most apps have some kind of feature to host a single note, or multiple, on the web, sharing access to the note with a link. Less common is some kind of collaboration feature, so that multiple people can take part in editing the note (e.g. Evernote, Notion or Craft).
  • **Searching note content **— there’s no point writing things down if you can’t find them again, therefore most note-taking apps have a full-featured search function, which can quickly locate notes containing certain text from across the entire application. This can often be accessed via a hotkey, to reduce friction of finding notes to as little as possible.

Other features like this are rich formatting, security and offline access.

As I said, most apps offer these features, so it’s really the nuances and powerful functions of the top apps that set them apart…

“Standout” features

These define the character of the note-taking app.

They’re often the features that you can find on the landing page of the application’s website.

Examples include:

  • Notion’s databases (or wikis, projects and docs, as the website says)
  • Tana’s supertags — a novel implementation of databases
  • **Capacities’ Objects **— categories for the different types of notes you create, rather than folders
  • Obsidian’s customizability with community plugins and themes

These features are normally what determines whether a person chooses one app or another.

Which standout feature best fits the style and organisational structure that their work takes?

You can hear people saying how a certain app ‘works how their brain works’ — this is the standout feature of the app setting it apart from all the others:

  • Project managers might prefer databases in Notion to keep track of time and tasks to complete
  • Knowledge workers might prefer Obsidian for the customisable linked-thinking approach to PKM that the app takes

My current system and why I chose it

Having recently purchased a MacBook, I moved over to simply using Apple Notes for my creative notes for the time being. This was because I was getting distracted by all the friction points that come from moving to a new OS.

I was fed up of trying all the new options that MacOS offered and finding that they weren’t what I was looking for, so I just closed myself off from trying new things and focused back on creating again.

I maintained my university notes in Obsidian, however, because of the customizability and systems that I’d built in it for the purpose of studying. Replicating this functionality in any other notes app would be near impossible.