Best Notes App Apple Notes vs Notion vs Obsidian vs Notability

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's Chris how do you pick the best note-taking app for yourself it's a question that I asked myself recently as I began looking to kind of get a fresh start start over with my note-taking system be a little bit more purposeful with it so the good news for you is that I've already put a lot of thought and effort into it did all the research and now I'm just gonna share my findings with you kind of give you a cheat sheet now today's video is definitely going to be more informative and less of a demo of the top apps as I see them Apple notes notion obsidian and notability and as we talk about things like their strengths and weaknesses and unique selling points and apple pencil compatibility things like pricing and privacy we're gonna cover all that you're also going to get a nice look at how I do things inside my productivity setup including how a note taking app fits into my system and the role that it plays but I think the most natural place for you to begin thinking about this is what you want a Notes app to do in the first place what do you want to use it for so some people use a Notes app to kind of stash anything and every everything and it's a bit chaotic other people like to use a Notes app for just anything text related could even be writing in their Notes app and then another common usage is as a knowledge management system which is very orderly or you might have heard of people referring to this as building a second brain or creating a digital knowledge Garden goes by many names in any case it's well worth considering how you want your nodes app to fit into your information processing pipeline or the six C's as I like to call it you know whenever you're dealing with information you're going to kind of have three phases your pre-production your production and your post production so in the pre-production phase I like to capture information in the production phase I curate conceptualize and then actually create in the post-production phase I cache it I store it and I also Cascade it meaning I publish it now I'm not sure what works best for you but I like to use very specific tailor-made apps for each of those phases in the pre-production phase I like to use drafts my mind and read wise to capture things in production I start with Muse move it into my node hit Jasper my AI writing assistant which I'll link up down below for you in post-production after I've created something I will store it in a Notes app like notion that's what I'm using right now and then I will publish it Cascade it to social media or the web so that's where note-taking app really fits into my workflow in the post-production phase so right now notion you can see is where I store my knowledge Assets Now however you integrate a Notes app into your workflow you're gonna have to organize the information that goes there so you want to think about this ahead of time I personally to give you an example I'm using the para framework so para stands for projects areas resources and an archive so projects are things with deadlines areas are where I have ongoing responsibilities resources or just things I'm interested in and an archive is of course where I put all the finished in unused things all right so let's talk about Apple notes first one of the benefits of Apple notes is that it's deeply integrated into Apple's ecosystems and that gives you the unparalleled ability to make things like quick notes no matter matter what page or app you might be in then you also have the really cool ability to create smart folders which will let you Auto populate folders based on tags and other traits and you can see I've actually got several set up in my Apple notes right here including one that's for Android notes so I'm going to suck every handwritten note right into that smart folder and find it at the top there's also incredible apple pencil support which includes the ability to search your handwritten notes with OCR capabilities which is great and even to convert your handwriting into tags that will work with the smart folders and what I really love about Apple notes is that it feels balanced for whatever input method you prefer so if you like to type it feels great if you like to use the apple pencil that feels great here as well let's talk about notion next which is in a word comprehensive notion is super customizable and it tries to be kind of a all-in-one do almost anything sort of app so it's not just about documents you can work with databases here you can put a kanban board in and you can also publish select notion pages online so not only is notion for node taking but it's also for task management and project management and here's something that a lot of people love there are tons of both free and paid Integrations that you can use to spice up the notion experience from tools to automation website stuff blog stuff templates CMS the list goes on and then there sidian which is a very minimalistic lightweight app that's very suited to deep thinking now as you can see here this is a plain text knowledge base app that uses markdown for styling but perhaps the biggest draw here is the knowledge graph feature which lets you link your thinking and see how all your thoughts connect and what's super unique about obsidian is that all the files are stored in a local folder on your device or you could store it in iCloud as well but that means it's future proof it's just markdown plain text so if obsidian ever goes out of business you don't have to worry about it you got all your notes right there it's also good to know that there are over 800 plugins for obsidian so you can customize the heck out of it and with the paid add-on you can also publish select notes online as well and that brings us to notability which is a stylus first app no doubt about it and it's for those who prefer to handwrite or sketch most of the time but also like to occasionally type a lot of students like notability so do people who are in meetings that's because there's an option to record audio and sync it so you can replay both your notes on the audio at the same time also if you're really into annotating PDFs if that's where your notes kind of take you notability is a no-brainer there now if all this kind of stuff is really interesting to you and you'd like to learn more about how to be more productive within the Apple ecosystem I am working on a productivity course going to be coming out soon there's a place in the description where you can give me your email and I'll ping you when that's live but a Notes app is really only as good as its continued development so let's talk about some recent updates one place where Apple notes is really innovating is with FaceTime collaboration so if you would like to be making a note with somebody else and see their face at the same time while you're looking at the same thing that's pretty cool Apple also just added the ability to straighten out your handwriting which is kind of cool and in apple pencil toolkit they also added this new fountain pen option which I got to tell you I'm obsessed with I really love the way this thing rides I I would say it's the definition of smooth now something that the team at notion has been working on lately is introducing notion AI you'll get very basic AI integration here so you can have it write things for you outline brainstorm Etc there's no chat GTP style chat feature we can chat with the AI and notion like there is with Jasper Jasper Chad so I would still steer you towards Jasper and integrate it as you see here in my pre-production production and post-production framework I'm using AI at every single point to optimize what it is that I'm working on so notion AI cool it's a wait list right now Jasper chat available right now obsidian recently debuted a really interesting feature called obsidian canvas which is kind of their take on the infinite workspace so it's kind of like Apple's free form which I made a whole video about recently and you should check it out if you haven't seen it yet to get familiar with it I'll link it up but it's missing some key features for me in particular apple pencil support really a bummer hope that comes in the future for notabilities part they recently came out with the notability gallery feature which lets you sort through and search for other people's notes on a variety of topics say chemistry notes for instance and there's also a bunch of templates there and the idea is that anyone can publish anything they want to so if you want to share your work with the notability community you can if you want to get stuff from other notability users and benefit from notes that they've already taken and templates they've made you can do that too now we've got to talk about something really important that few people actually spend time thinking about before they dive in head first into a new app and that's privacy and encryption of these four apps notability has to my knowledge no privacy no encryption if you have important information that you really need to safeguard maybe it's business information you just don't want to get hacked or you're worried about government sleeping whatever it is you want to store that in either Apple notes or obsidian Apple though just came out with the new Advanced Data protection option which is something that Apple users can opt into or opt out of which is going to give you full end-to-end encryption in Apple notes and in several other Apple apps as well now obsidian does have an end-to-end encryption option but by default if you're just storing it on your desktop let's say your obsidian folder or in iCloud it may not be fully encrypted if you use obsidian sync however which does cost a little bit eight dollars a month then you can get that end-to-end encryption which so many people find important notion is kind of weird though because of the search functionality so we're told notion doesn't want to incorporate end-to-end encryption what they do instead is sort of an in-between thing that gives you a lot of encryption but you're not fully encrypted and that's because their encryption is only at rest and in transit all right let's talk about pricing a lot of times I get comments like how could you feature this app that costs money you know well look you do get what you paid for oftentimes now Apple notes is and always will be completely free that is if you don't count the cost of the device that you bought that was really expensive that let you use Apple notes notion is free to get started with but there's also an eight dollar a month upgrade so that upgrade is going to get you unlimited blocks notion uses blocks for information better for teams unlimited file uploads 30-day page history obsidian is also free and basically everything you'd ever want there is free there's no account needed to sign up it's great you still get community support and access to the plugins but if you want that end-to-end encrypted sync that's going to be eight dollars a month and it also gives you priority email support or you can go up to 16 if you want to publish it right now a few other considerations backlinking what is backlinking backlinking means that you've created a note that you can reference from other notes you can link to OneNote from another now obsidian is the master of this with their Knowledge Graph okay notion does do this but you miss out on the knowledge graph Apple notes unfortunately does not have backlinking baked in as a feature and then notability no backlinks but that's not probably a feature that a lot of people been clamoring for there although backlinks in Muse which I don't use for note taking I use it for kind of conceptualizing things just came there backlink cards and that's really cool let's talk about the apple pencil or stylus usage within notes for a lot of people on the iPad that's really important okay if you want to use the apple pencil you're going to want to steer towards either Apple notes or notability obviously notability like I said is stylus first and it's thinking with the option to add on text I feel like Apple notes is like 50 50 right you're going to feel at home whether you mostly type or whether you mostly handwrite or if you do a mix obsidian is not the app for you if you're into handwriting anything or sketching because it's just text based they do have that canvas feature but no apple pencil support yet if that comes it could be killer and then I would just say think about are you using a lot of media you know are you throwing in a bunch of screenshots and stuff for me without getting into my whole system I put that kind of stuff in into my mind because it's chaotic it's unorganized I don't have to think about it and when I search for it it's just there but if you want that in your notes app then probably Apple notes or notion would be the way to go you get databases with notion you can actually build like a fully functioning web app if you use notion and publish it online using a front-end like super I'll link that up for you as well and you know you can put images and stuff inside of notability and kind of write on that okay and obsidian you're just going to want to steer clear you can put stuff in the canvas feature but it's just not all the way there yet very briefly let me just mention some great alternatives to the apps that I've talked about so you can kind of get a survey at least of what else is out there there is a really great simple markdown focused app whose killer feature might be that it has an Apple Watch app there's also agenda which is definitely unique in that it's a date focused approach to note taking if you're looking for a beautifully designed note-taking app that's still kind of like run-of-the-mill par for the course in terms of features check out noted which is an apple design Award winner but this is a super Sleek interface and it also has audio recording for simultaneous audio notes as well I have to mention craft here it's a must I know people are going to freak out that I didn't include it as one of the big four but craft is basically notion with a more beautiful interface you know that's the main distinguisher one thing I like about it is that it has AI built in already but you know what it's really lacking is all of Notions Integrations and yeah you can hack stuff together with zapier or IFTTT or something but you know it's a hassle for most people the last one I want to mention is called logsec l-o-g-s-e-q and this is basically obsidian but with the feel of an outliner so if you've ever used like work flowy you know you might know what I'm talking about but it adds some cool stuff here you got to Do's audio recording you can integrate YouTube and Twitter stuff blog sec I feel like it's sort of like the Hipster obsidian so let's do a quick overview if you're looking for simple go with Apple notes if you're looking for comprehensive I would say take a shortcut to notion if you're really into text-based minimalistic notes hit obsidian and finally if stylist first handwritten stuff is your thing go with notability hopefully you found this very comprehensive guide useful and you've been steered in a good direction don't forget to sign up for updates on my productivity course I'm so excited for this thing it's going to be mind-blowing I literally think it will be life-changing for so many people we got a newsletter and it's so useful you know if you want app and accessory discovery on autopilot you have to sign up for that comes out once a week on Fridays other than that I will catch you in the next video laterhey it's Chris how do you pick the best note-taking app for yourself it's a question that I asked myself recently as I began looking to kind of get a fresh start start over with my note-taking system be a little bit more purposeful with it so the good news for you is that I've already put a lot of thought and effort into it did all the research and now I'm just gonna share my findings with you kind of give you a cheat sheet now today's video is definitely going to be more informative and less of a demo of the top apps as I see them Apple notes notion obsidian and notability and as we talk about things like their strengths and weaknesses and unique selling points and apple pencil compatibility things like pricing and privacy we're gonna cover all that you're also going to get a nice look at how I do things inside my productivity setup including how a note taking app fits into my system and the role that it plays but I think the most natural place for you to begin thinking about this is what you want a Notes app to do in the first place what do you want to use it for so some people use a Notes app to kind of stash anything and every everything and it's a bit chaotic other people like to use a Notes app for just anything text related could even be writing in their Notes app and then another common usage is as a knowledge management system which is very orderly or you might have heard of people referring to this as building a second brain or creating a digital knowledge Garden goes by many names in any case it's well worth considering how you want your nodes app to fit into your information processing pipeline or the six C's as I like to call it you know whenever you're dealing with information you're going to kind of have three phases your pre-production your production and your post production so in the pre-production phase I like to capture information in the production phase I curate conceptualize and then actually create in the post-production phase I cache it I store it and I also Cascade it meaning I publish it now I'm not sure what works best for you but I like to use very specific tailor-made apps for each of those phases in the pre-production phase I like to use drafts my mind and read wise to capture things in production I start with Muse move it into my node hit Jasper my AI writing assistant which I'll link up down below for you in post-production after I've created something I will store it in a Notes app like notion that's what I'm using right now and then I will publish it Cascade it to social media or the web so that's where note-taking app really fits into my workflow in the post-production phase so right now notion you can see is where I store my knowledge Assets Now however you integrate a Notes app into your workflow you're gonna have to organize the information that goes there so you want to think about this ahead of time I personally to give you an example I'm using the para framework so para stands for projects areas resources and an archive so projects are things with deadlines areas are where I have ongoing responsibilities resources or just things I'm interested in and an archive is of course where I put all the finished in unused things all right so let's talk about Apple notes first one of the benefits of Apple notes is that it's deeply integrated into Apple's ecosystems and that gives you the unparalleled ability to make things like quick notes no matter matter what page or app you might be in then you also have the really cool ability to create smart folders which will let you Auto populate folders based on tags and other traits and you can see I've actually got several set up in my Apple notes right here including one that's for Android notes so I'm going to suck every handwritten note right into that smart folder and find it at the top there's also incredible apple pencil support which includes the ability to search your handwritten notes with OCR capabilities which is great and even to convert your handwriting into tags that will work with the smart folders and what I really love about Apple notes is that it feels balanced for whatever input method you prefer so if you like to type it feels great if you like to use the apple pencil that feels great here as well let's talk about notion next which is in a word comprehensive notion is super customizable and it tries to be kind of a all-in-one do almost anything sort of app so it's not just about documents you can work with databases here you can put a kanban board in and you can also publish select notion pages online so not only is notion for node taking but it's also for task management and project management and here's something that a lot of people love there are tons of both free and paid Integrations that you can use to spice up the notion experience from tools to automation website stuff blog stuff templates CMS the list goes on and then there sidian which is a very minimalistic lightweight app that's very suited to deep thinking now as you can see here this is a plain text knowledge base app that uses markdown for styling but perhaps the biggest draw here is the knowledge graph feature which lets you link your thinking and see how all your thoughts connect and what's super unique about obsidian is that all the files are stored in a local folder on your device or you could store it in iCloud as well but that means it's future proof it's just markdown plain text so if obsidian ever goes out of business you don't have to worry about it you got all your notes right there it's also good to know that there are over 800 plugins for obsidian so you can customize the heck out of it and with the paid add-on you can also publish select notes online as well and that brings us to notability which is a stylus first app no doubt about it and it's for those who prefer to handwrite or sketch most of the time but also like to occasionally type a lot of students like notability so do people who are in meetings that's because there's an option to record audio and sync it so you can replay both your notes on the audio at the same time also if you're really into annotating PDFs if that's where your notes kind of take you notability is a no-brainer there now if all this kind of stuff is really interesting to you and you'd like to learn more about how to be more productive within the Apple ecosystem I am working on a productivity course going to be coming out soon there's a place in the description where you can give me your email and I'll ping you when that's live but a Notes app is really only as good as its continued development so let's talk about some recent updates one place where Apple notes is really innovating is with FaceTime collaboration so if you would like to be making a note with somebody else and see their face at the same time while you're looking at the same thing that's pretty cool Apple also just added the ability to straighten out your handwriting which is kind of cool and in apple pencil toolkit they also added this new fountain pen option which I got to tell you I'm obsessed with I really love the way this thing rides I I would say it's the definition of smooth now something that the team at notion has been working on lately is introducing notion AI you'll get very basic AI integration here so you can have it write things for you outline brainstorm Etc there's no chat GTP style chat feature we can chat with the AI and notion like there is with Jasper Jasper Chad so I would still steer you towards Jasper and integrate it as you see here in my pre-production production and post-production framework I'm using AI at every single point to optimize what it is that I'm working on so notion AI cool it's a wait list right now Jasper chat available right now obsidian recently debuted a really interesting feature called obsidian canvas which is kind of their take on the infinite workspace so it's kind of like Apple's free form which I made a whole video about recently and you should check it out if you haven't seen it yet to get familiar with it I'll link it up but it's missing some key features for me in particular apple pencil support really a bummer hope that comes in the future for notabilities part they recently came out with the notability gallery feature which lets you sort through and search for other people's notes on a variety of topics say chemistry notes for instance and there's also a bunch of templates there and the idea is that anyone can publish anything they want to so if you want to share your work with the notability community you can if you want to get stuff from other notability users and benefit from notes that they've already taken and templates they've made you can do that too now we've got to talk about something really important that few people actually spend time thinking about before they dive in head first into a new app and that's privacy and encryption of these four apps notability has to my knowledge no privacy no encryption if you have important information that you really need to safeguard maybe it's business information you just don't want to get hacked or you're worried about government sleeping whatever it is you want to store that in either Apple notes or obsidian Apple though just came out with the new Advanced Data protection option which is something that Apple users can opt into or opt out of which is going to give you full end-to-end encryption in Apple notes and in several other Apple apps as well now obsidian does have an end-to-end encryption option but by default if you're just storing it on your desktop let's say your obsidian folder or in iCloud it may not be fully encrypted if you use obsidian sync however which does cost a little bit eight dollars a month then you can get that end-to-end encryption which so many people find important notion is kind of weird though because of the search functionality so we're told notion doesn't want to incorporate end-to-end encryption what they do instead is sort of an in-between thing that gives you a lot of encryption but you're not fully encrypted and that's because their encryption is only at rest and in transit all right let's talk about pricing a lot of times I get comments like how could you feature this app that costs money you know well look you do get what you paid for oftentimes now Apple notes is and always will be completely free that is if you don't count the cost of the device that you bought that was really expensive that let you use Apple notes notion is free to get started with but there's also an eight dollar a month upgrade so that upgrade is going to get you unlimited blocks notion uses blocks for information better for teams unlimited file uploads 30-day page history obsidian is also free and basically everything you'd ever want there is free there's no account needed to sign up it's great you still get community support and access to the plugins but if you want that end-to-end encrypted sync that's going to be eight dollars a month and it also gives you priority email support or you can go up to 16 if you want to publish it right now a few other considerations backlinking what is backlinking backlinking means that you've created a note that you can reference from other notes you can link to OneNote from another now obsidian is the master of this with their Knowledge Graph okay notion does do this but you miss out on the knowledge graph Apple notes unfortunately does not have backlinking baked in as a feature and then notability no backlinks but that's not probably a feature that a lot of people been clamoring for there although backlinks in Muse which I don't use for note taking I use it for kind of conceptualizing things just came there backlink cards and that's really cool let's talk about the apple pencil or stylus usage within notes for a lot of people on the iPad that's really important okay if you want to use the apple pencil you're going to want to steer towards either Apple notes or notability obviously notability like I said is stylus first and it's thinking with the option to add on text I feel like Apple notes is like 50 50 right you're going to feel at home whether you mostly type or whether you mostly handwrite or if you do a mix obsidian is not the app for you if you're into handwriting anything or sketching because it's just text based they do have that canvas feature but no apple pencil support yet if that comes it could be killer and then I would just say think about are you using a lot of media you know are you throwing in a bunch of screenshots and stuff for me without getting into my whole system I put that kind of stuff in into my mind because it's chaotic it's unorganized I don't have to think about it and when I search for it it's just there but if you want that in your notes app then probably Apple notes or notion would be the way to go you get databases with notion you can actually build like a fully functioning web app if you use notion and publish it online using a front-end like super I'll link that up for you as well and you know you can put images and stuff inside of notability and kind of write on that okay and obsidian you're just going to want to steer clear you can put stuff in the canvas feature but it's just not all the way there yet very briefly let me just mention some great alternatives to the apps that I've talked about so you can kind of get a survey at least of what else is out there there is a really great simple markdown focused app whose killer feature might be that it has an Apple Watch app there's also agenda which is definitely unique in that it's a date focused approach to note taking if you're looking for a beautifully designed note-taking app that's still kind of like run-of-the-mill par for the course in terms of features check out noted which is an apple design Award winner but this is a super Sleek interface and it also has audio recording for simultaneous audio notes as well I have to mention craft here it's a must I know people are going to freak out that I didn't include it as one of the big four but craft is basically notion with a more beautiful interface you know that's the main distinguisher one thing I like about it is that it has AI built in already but you know what it's really lacking is all of Notions Integrations and yeah you can hack stuff together with zapier or IFTTT or something but you know it's a hassle for most people the last one I want to mention is called logsec l-o-g-s-e-q and this is basically obsidian but with the feel of an outliner so if you've ever used like work flowy you know you might know what I'm talking about but it adds some cool stuff here you got to Do's audio recording you can integrate YouTube and Twitter stuff blog sec I feel like it's sort of like the Hipster obsidian so let's do a quick overview if you're looking for simple go with Apple notes if you're looking for comprehensive I would say take a shortcut to notion if you're really into text-based minimalistic notes hit obsidian and finally if stylist first handwritten stuff is your thing go with notability hopefully you found this very comprehensive guide useful and you've been steered in a good direction don't forget to sign up for updates on my productivity course I'm so excited for this thing it's going to be mind-blowing I literally think it will be life-changing for so many people we got a newsletter and it's so useful you know if you want app and accessory discovery on autopilot you have to sign up for that comes out once a week on Fridays other than that I will catch you in the next video later\n"