AC
Aidan ClarkeVerified
Oct 15, 2026
Workable but not elegant
Another release cycle or two could turn this into something I would recommend without any caveats.
Another release cycle or two could turn this into something I would recommend without any caveats.
Sync has been broken for months on at least one of my devices and the public status page refuses to admit it. Battery drain was so severe that my phone died by lunch on the first day I installed this.
Hands down the best choice I made this quarter and the whole team now relies on it without complaint. Zero bloat is a design philosophy you can feel in every menu and every settings panel.
Running this reduced average CPU usage on my laptop compared with the Electron based tool I used before. This hits the sweet spot between powerful and approachable without forcing me to read a thick manual. A quick glance at the activity log shows exactly who changed what and when which my auditors loved.
Hidden fees popped up at checkout for exports api access and even a surcharge for using a corporate card. Support never replied to three different tickets opened over two months about a login loop that still happens today.
Smart search beats every grep script I ever wrote and surfaces results across pdf attachments and old emails.
Export options cover every format I care about from markdown to rich text to a tidy pdf.
Overpriced for what you get and the free alternatives cover eighty percent of the functionality without the drama. Every feature that mattered to me ended up locked behind a paywall after a promotional period I never agreed to.
Granular export control meant our legal team could share only the exact subset of records they needed.
A quick glance at the activity log shows exactly who changed what and when which my auditors loved. Automation triggers hook into my existing shell scripts without any wrapper code which keeps my toolchain simple.
Developer updates include changelogs that explain tradeoffs honestly rather than hiding regressions behind marketing language.
Keyboard first design wins the day for me because my hands never leave the home row during a flow state. I used to live in spreadsheets and this replaced that entire workflow with something far easier to maintain.
Cross platform really means cross platform here and even the Linux build has feature parity with the Mac version. Even without an account I could try the full feature set in a sandbox before committing a single email address.
Decent free tier limits are so tight that I bumped into them in the first few hours of a weekend project. An overall okay experience with a few small annoyances that collectively erode my patience over a long week.
A thoughtful onboarding flow walked me through the useful features without burying me in modal popups. Uptime has been rock solid for the entire year I have been paying for the professional tier. At this price point I expected cut corners but every feature feels considered and tested in real workflows.
Buggy desktop client leaks file handles until my operating system refuses to open new windows and forces a reboot.
I noticed real improvements to my focus because distracting notification sounds have thoughtful opt in defaults.
Full of ads despite paying for the premium plan and support claims these are not ads but service announcements. Paying for basic features that competitors offer free made me regret every month of this subscription.
After switching from a bloated enterprise tool my morning routine finally stopped including a reboot. Productivity jumped once I set up the shortcuts and templates for recurring report writing on Monday mornings. Local first architecture means my notes stay on my disk and syncing is just a convenience not a dependency.
Linux build does not feel like an afterthought and the maintainers respond to issues on the tracker within days. Plugin ecosystem is active without being overwhelming and the ones I installed have all been well maintained.
Billing charged me twice for the same month and the refund took forty five days to appear in my account.
After the latest update the app is effectively unusable and rolling back is not supported by their installer. Each update breaks more than it fixes and the release notes are now hidden behind a login wall. Open source claims turned out to apply only to a stripped down community edition missing every feature anyone would want.
Average performance when my library stays small and noticeable slowdown once I crossed a few thousand entries. Shortcut customization works until you discover the system reserves half the useful combinations without any warning.
Battery impact is barely measurable even when I leave the app running in the background all day long.
Diff view for revisions is clear enough that non technical teammates can actually review changes without my help.
Being able to run the same binary on every operating system removed a surprising amount of friction from onboarding.
Mobile sync completed within a few seconds every time which has not been my experience with similar apps.
Productivity jumped once I set up the shortcuts and templates for recurring report writing on Monday mornings. Automatic encrypted backups meant I recovered everything within two minutes after swapping to a new workstation.
Easy on the eyes with sensible defaults for typography line height and contrast that work out of the box. No telemetry by default meant I did not have to spend an afternoon disabling tracking before starting work.
Promised cross device sync is marketed heavily yet works for text only while images and files stay stranded on their original devices.
Templates saved me hours this week alone because the project boilerplate matches our internal style guide exactly.
Uptime has been rock solid for the entire year I have been paying for the professional tier. Shortcut customization reached a level where I rebuilt my entire muscle memory from a decade of Vim habits.
No way to delete my data from their servers after cancellation despite a privacy policy that claims otherwise. Keyboard shortcuts conflict with system wide bindings and cannot be remapped without editing an undocumented json file.
Updates land often which is good but sometimes they introduce new regressions that take weeks to see fixes. Fine as a note sink but the search ranking surfaces old irrelevant matches before recent ones which frustrates me.
Default export produces files I can archive without worrying about reading them a decade from now.
Native support for passkeys made me drop my password manager for everything inside this ecosystem. Integrations with my calendar and task manager were painless and triggered automatically without any extra configuration.
Pricing feels honest and the upgrade path from free to paid did not force me to re learn the interface.
VPN speeds held up during an entire video call across three continents without a single dropped frame. Automations save my evenings since recurring reports now generate and ship themselves while I actually eat dinner.
Tags combined with filters give me a flexible organization system that beats the folder structure I abandoned.
Markdown support is complete including footnotes tables and code fences with syntax highlighting that actually matches my editor. At this price point I expected cut corners but every feature feels considered and tested in real workflows.
I like the ideas here however the execution lags behind the vision in several important areas. A solid underlying engine is wrapped in a user experience that feels designed by three different teams.
Keyboard driven palettes gave me the muscle memory of a terminal with the discoverability of a modern app. Response times from support exceeded my expectations and the engineer who replied actually understood my setup. Clear release notes include migration steps for every breaking change which saved us during the last major upgrade.
Live cursors and comments on long documents feel smoother than any wiki I have used in the past decade.
Memory leaks force me to restart the application at least twice a day during normal note taking workflows. After the latest redesign the simplest tasks now require three clicks that used to need one single keystroke.
Impressive onboarding did not drag on and left me with a working project rather than a tour of settings. Perfect for daily workflow in a way that very few tools achieve without demanding significant customization first.
Autosave quietly rescued a three hour draft after a power outage took down my whole desk.
Terrible mobile editor loses my cursor position every time the keyboard dismisses which has caused countless lost edits. Promised cross device sync is marketed heavily yet works for text only while images and files stay stranded on their original devices.
Codebase appears clean because the UI never surprises me with inconsistent behavior between windows and dialogs.
Offline mode genuinely works and I kept getting things done on a long flight with no internet connection at all.
Shipping updates monthly without breaking existing automations is rarer than it should be and I truly appreciate it. Live cursors and comments on long documents feel smoother than any wiki I have used in the past decade.