IC
Ira Chauhan
Oct 15, 2026
Collaboration is seamless
Easy on the eyes with sensible defaults for typography line height and contrast that work out of the box.
Easy on the eyes with sensible defaults for typography line height and contrast that work out of the box.
Mobile parity is real and I can actually complete the same tasks on my phone that I do at my desk. Templates saved me hours this week alone because the project boilerplate matches our internal style guide exactly.
Keyboard shortcuts are thoughtfully designed and I never need to reach for the mouse during a focused writing session. Linux build does not feel like an afterthought and the maintainers respond to issues on the tracker within days.
Default color palette passes accessibility checks without any custom css which I did not expect from this tier.
Works fine for casual use but I would hesitate before trusting it with mission critical client data. Works until it stops working and then recovery means logging out and back in which gets old quickly. I like the ideas here however the execution lags behind the vision in several important areas.
Autosave quietly rescued a three hour draft after a power outage took down my whole desk.
Templates saved me hours this week alone because the project boilerplate matches our internal style guide exactly. Snapshots every few minutes recovered an entire chapter after a careless undo chain ate my changes.
Export to a local git repository preserved history metadata so I have real version control over my notes.
This holds its own against far more expensive incumbents while charging a fraction of their monthly price.
An hour of exploration unlocked more useful functionality than a week with the heavier competitor I used before. Default export produces files I can archive without worrying about reading them a decade from now.
I cancelled a long running competitor subscription within a week because this covered every real workflow I had.
Codebase appears clean because the UI never surprises me with inconsistent behavior between windows and dialogs. Cross platform really means cross platform here and even the Linux build has feature parity with the Mac version.
Importing from an old competitor pulled every tag folder and attachment across cleanly within a few minutes.
No telemetry by default meant I did not have to spend an afternoon disabling tracking before starting work. Automation triggers hook into my existing shell scripts without any wrapper code which keeps my toolchain simple.
Hands down the best choice I made this quarter and the whole team now relies on it without complaint.
Being open source gave me the confidence to self host once we grew past the hosted plan.
Automatic encrypted backups meant I recovered everything within two minutes after swapping to a new workstation. Shipping updates monthly without breaking existing automations is rarer than it should be and I truly appreciate it. I cancelled a long running competitor subscription within a week because this covered every real workflow I had.
Shipping updates monthly without breaking existing automations is rarer than it should be and I truly appreciate it. Tags combined with filters give me a flexible organization system that beats the folder structure I abandoned. Great sense of restraint in the feature set which keeps the sidebar from becoming the usual overwhelming menu wall.
Default export produces files I can archive without worrying about reading them a decade from now. Productivity jumped once I set up the shortcuts and templates for recurring report writing on Monday mornings.
Linux build does not feel like an afterthought and the maintainers respond to issues on the tracker within days. I noticed real improvements to my focus because distracting notification sounds have thoughtful opt in defaults.
Great fit for a small team because permissions are granular without turning admin work into a second job.
Even on a six year old laptop this stays snappy and never spins up the fans like competing apps do. Free tier is generous enough that I used it for three months before finally paying because I wanted to support them.
A clean separation between data and interface meant I could migrate between major versions without losing anything. Default color palette passes accessibility checks without any custom css which I did not expect from this tier. Importing from an old competitor pulled every tag folder and attachment across cleanly within a few minutes.
An encrypted vault for shared credentials became the quiet backbone of our contractor onboarding process. Automatic encrypted backups meant I recovered everything within two minutes after swapping to a new workstation.
Pricing feels honest and the upgrade path from free to paid did not force me to re learn the interface. Fast enough for anything I throw at it including nested outlines and documents with hundreds of embedded images.
Weekly updates ship real improvements rather than cosmetic changes which gives me confidence the team cares.
Export options cover every format I care about from markdown to rich text to a tidy pdf. Uptime has been rock solid for the entire year I have been paying for the professional tier. Cross platform really means cross platform here and even the Linux build has feature parity with the Mac version.
Searching across attachments pulled quotes from pdf invoices as reliably as from plain text notes. Pdf export preserved every heading hyperlink and footnote exactly as it looked in the editor pane.
Converted my whole team in two weeks because the shared workspace features removed friction we did not realize we had. A quick glance at the activity log shows exactly who changed what and when which my auditors loved.
Fast enough for anything I throw at it including nested outlines and documents with hundreds of embedded images.
Tags combined with filters give me a flexible organization system that beats the folder structure I abandoned.
Battery impact is barely measurable even when I leave the app running in the background all day long. Converted my whole team in two weeks because the shared workspace features removed friction we did not realize we had.
Granular export control meant our legal team could share only the exact subset of records they needed.
Open source claims turned out to apply only to a stripped down community edition missing every feature anyone would want.
I found my new favorite productivity app and it only took one weekend of real usage to decide. Native support for passkeys made me drop my password manager for everything inside this ecosystem. Automatic encrypted backups meant I recovered everything within two minutes after swapping to a new workstation.
Collaboration feels native with cursors presence and comments all showing up instantly across continents and devices. Diff view for revisions is clear enough that non technical teammates can actually review changes without my help.
Hopeless search function that cannot find exact phrases unless I enclose them in a specific proprietary syntax. No offline mode in this day and age meant a cross country flight erased half a day of planned work.
Being able to run the same binary on every operating system removed a surprising amount of friction from onboarding.
Developer updates include changelogs that explain tradeoffs honestly rather than hiding regressions behind marketing language.
Database queries feel instant even against a table with several million rows which the previous tool choked on.
Plugin ecosystem is active without being overwhelming and the ones I installed have all been well maintained.
Great sense of restraint in the feature set which keeps the sidebar from becoming the usual overwhelming menu wall. Response times from support exceeded my expectations and the engineer who replied actually understood my setup.
Live cursors and comments on long documents feel smoother than any wiki I have used in the past decade.
Productivity jumped once I set up the shortcuts and templates for recurring report writing on Monday mornings. Easy on the eyes with sensible defaults for typography line height and contrast that work out of the box.
Cross platform really means cross platform here and even the Linux build has feature parity with the Mac version.
Terminal integration lets me launch new sessions tagged by project which keeps my shell history clean and searchable. Export options cover every format I care about from markdown to rich text to a tidy pdf.
Reasonable choice with some caveats including a free tier that cuts off right where it starts to be useful. It is a tossup between recommending this and recommending the competitor because each has distinct annoyances.
Granular permissions let interns contribute without accidentally touching the production configuration files. Local first architecture means my notes stay on my disk and syncing is just a convenience not a dependency.
Zero accountability from the team when a vulnerability was disclosed and the fix shipped only after public pressure. After a sync conflict the app silently deleted my notes without producing any backup copy I could recover.
Account recovery is a labyrinth of forms and required documents even for a hobby user with no sensitive data stored.