Hey everyone,
Just last week, I shared a post about Notion introducing backlinks as a feature, probably to compete directly with the likes of Roam Research.
When it comes to note-taking apps, we're spoilt for choice. I will be amazingly surprised if someone comes up with a use-case that's not already tackled by an existing app.
Don't believe me? Check out this Roam alternative built on VSCode & GitHub called Foam 😎
Of course, I'm not discounting any of these apps or the use-cases they tackle. But I'm curious to hear what our community uses and their thoughts on note-taking apps in general.
I myself use Slite for our team wiki, Notion for personal planning & notes and Milanote for project planning & visualisation.
Slite/ Notion because it allows me to document & index information in a structured manner.
Milanote, on the other hand, lets me just dump my thoughts and later connect them (more like a visual alternative to Roam maybe?).
P.S. Collaboration in a remote environment can be aced only with the right set of tools. So what are the various collaboration tools you'd require and how do they work? Find out in this blog.
Here's what our users had to say:
Hrishikesh Pardeshi said "@sophia, @benoit-391, @shirinnada-406, @thiagomonteiro-438, @calvincheng-439, @sigurdseteklev-487, @kirill-495, @brookssime-501, @sascha-at-acework, @rhyd, @akhil-563, @steven, @tpieper-573, @shubham-570, @cora-443, @george-417, @maria-426, @kevinsimons-476 Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Of course saw that Notion is already a part of your tool stack."
T. Pieper said "Our technical docs are captured in GitLab Wikis, everything product & team-related around CoScreen is captured in Notion. This works extremely well, the only annoyance is that Notion can’t handle large pages with more than a few hundred blocks which you reach easily if you use it to capture meeting minutes like we do. Hopefully just temporary growing pains."
sophia said "Hi! We also use notion as a "writing" tool (collaborative docs with medium complexity to be published or sent) as well as a wiki for large projects. We tried to use it as a note-taking tool but it revealed to be more complicated to maintain than anything else. So for daily and personal todos that don't require to be on our backlog, we use https://www.faden.cloud/. We love the philosophy of the founder and have been very happy with the product."
Hrishikesh Pardeshi said "Ah, I always thought my connection sucked when Notion took forever to load bulky pages. I use it only for my personal notes & writing, so not a lot of pages actually go beyond 100-200 blocks. Also, now curious to know whether the desktop app performs better than the browser version in such cases. Have you experiemented with this?"
Kevin Simons said "We use Notion as the only "writing tool" in our team, of course apart from Kitemaker where all of our product/task discussions happen. Notion basically fills the role of place for me to scribble stuff down for myself (notetaking) and place for the team to collaborate on things like blog posts, etc. that we're doing together. We don't really use it as a traditional wiki yet, though I assume we will as our team grows. Things I like about Notion: - Really nice editor - Has everything I may need in terms of tables, images, etc. Even though no one feature is great, together they're all pretty alright - Works well for commenting/discussions on documents - Public docs mean we serve our "terms and conditions" and "privacy policy" right from Notion. No need to move them elsewhere for hosting (see https://kitemaker.co at the bottom to see what I mean) That being said, if we didn't use it for our collaborative documents (in place of e.g. Google docs) I wouldn't bother to use it for notes. I just use it because I always have it open. I'd just use Notes in macOS as it's good enough and, like you said, is a simple choice compared to evaluating the myriad of options out there."
Hrishikesh Pardeshi said "Great points about Notion, I think that's pretty much our rationale for using Slite in our team (except for the public docs - we don't use it much). I think the biggest problem with MacOS notes is its editor/ interface. Quite unintuitive & painful to use."
Sigurd Seteklev said "To add to Kevins (and I'm definatley not the one that has this figured out): For thinking and note-taking during meetings, I use an iPad with a pen and Notes. I don't share them and I like "writing" as it is more physical. I do have a daily todo list and personal documents to keep track of work as well (like lists of investors, resources/links if I'm working on something specific, etc.). However, I'm never able to stick with one tool for that. I often come back to MacOS Notes since I have my handwritten notes in the same place, but in periods I'm using Evernote since it allows me to structure my notes better. Right now I'm trying out Roam for this which is nice because it automatically sets up daily notes, but I'm missing a desktop app..."
Hrishikesh Pardeshi said "I've never tried writing (or taking notes) with a stylus. Does it mimic the writing experience well? Also, any recommendation for an iPad stylus? Exactly, that's also why I wanted to try out Roam (besides also seeing what the hype is all about). But yes, the non-existence of any app comes as a real blocker. I keep jotting down my thoughts on my phone in the Notion app or even native notes app. For Roam, I've to actually go to my desk."
Stella Russo said "I like to manage my tasks and to-do's through bullets and I have been using Workflowy for this. It can be used to create multiple nested lists and keeps my tasks very organized. Also, the web & mobile apps are super responsive and fluid."
Hrishikesh Pardeshi said "See I keep learning about new to-do & notes tools 😅"
Charley said "I'll invite everyone in this community to try a new product that's in early beta from Unitonomy: it's called GLVVV -- it's a better way to email yourself. Send anything from your normal email addresses to @GLVVV.com and GLVVV will organize the information for you. Video overview We want your feedback. What do you email yourself? What context would you like GLVVV to surface with the types of things you save? What board templates would be helpful? What connections would you like to 3rd party systems (like Trello, or Notion, etc.)"
Charley said "I'll invite everyone in this community to try a new product that's in early beta from Unitonomy: it's called GLVVV -- it's a better way to email yourself. Send anything from your normal email addresses to @GLVVV.com and GLVVV will organize the information for you. Video overview We want your feedback. What do you email yourself? What context would you like GLVVV to surface with the types of things you save? What board templates would be helpful? What connections would you like to 3rd party systems (like Trello, or Notion, etc.)"
Charley said "I should mention: Email me at charley@unitonomy.com with your feedback and I'll send you a coupon code to get lifetime free access."
Mark Walter said "Hey Charley, the explainer video looks amazing and I especially liked the idea of sending mails to @Glvvv.com to organise everything. I'll give this a try soon!"