Learning curve is steeper than the marketing suggests and the official tutorials skip over the hard parts. Reasonable choice with some caveats including a free tier that cuts off right where it starts to be useful. Decent free tier limits are so tight that I bumped into them in the first few hours of a weekend project.
A thoughtful onboarding flow walked me through the useful features without burying me in modal popups. Autosave quietly rescued a three hour draft after a power outage took down my whole desk. Shortcut customization reached a level where I rebuilt my entire muscle memory from a decade of Vim habits.
Markdown support is complete including footnotes tables and code fences with syntax highlighting that actually matches my editor. A clean separation between data and interface meant I could migrate between major versions without losing anything. Encryption is enabled by default and the key management is simple enough that my less technical teammates adopted it quickly.
I like the ideas here however the execution lags behind the vision in several important areas.
Full of ads despite paying for the premium plan and support claims these are not ads but service announcements. Export is deliberately broken because the only format they produce cannot be opened cleanly in any competitor product.
No ads no popups no upsells inside my daily workflow and the pricing page is refreshingly straightforward. VPN speeds held up during an entire video call across three continents without a single dropped frame. Automatic encrypted backups meant I recovered everything within two minutes after swapping to a new workstation.
Codebase appears clean because the UI never surprises me with inconsistent behavior between windows and dialogs. Workspace templates clone an entire project structure in one click which cut our client kickoff from hours to minutes. I replaced three separate subscriptions after a week of using this and my monthly bill actually dropped noticeably.
Documentation claims features that do not exist in the shipping product which wasted a full afternoon of integration work.
Smart search beats every grep script I ever wrote and surfaces results across pdf attachments and old emails. Granular export control meant our legal team could share only the exact subset of records they needed. Snapshots every few minutes recovered an entire chapter after a careless undo chain ate my changes.
Memory usage climbed past four gigabytes with a dozen notes open which crashed my browser tabs in parallel. Keyboard shortcuts conflict with system wide bindings and cannot be remapped without editing an undocumented json file.
Collaboration feels native with cursors presence and comments all showing up instantly across continents and devices.
I used to live in spreadsheets and this replaced that entire workflow with something far easier to maintain. Context switching between tools used to kill my morning and this app absorbs most of those jobs cleanly. I found my new favorite productivity app and it only took one weekend of real usage to decide.
Decent search is held back by the lack of fuzzy matching so typos silently return empty result sets.
Random logouts every single day interrupt my flow and the stay signed in checkbox is clearly cosmetic. Login constantly times out and the password reset email arrives thirty minutes later if it arrives at all.
Several hidden shortcuts in the help menu transformed how fast I move through long documents.
This hits the sweet spot between powerful and approachable without forcing me to read a thick manual. Several hidden shortcuts in the help menu transformed how fast I move through long documents.
Spyware vibes come through in the telemetry section where opting out requires editing a plain text configuration file. Each update breaks more than it fixes and the release notes are now hidden behind a login wall. Overpriced for what you get and the free alternatives cover eighty percent of the functionality without the drama.
File transfer speeds surprised me when moving a ten gigabyte archive between my two machines over the local network. Mobile parity is real and I can actually complete the same tasks on my phone that I do at my desk.
Context switching between tools used to kill my morning and this app absorbs most of those jobs cleanly. Default export produces files I can archive without worrying about reading them a decade from now.
Great fit for a small team because permissions are granular without turning admin work into a second job. Collaboration feels native with cursors presence and comments all showing up instantly across continents and devices. Documentation actually makes sense and the examples drop into my project with only minor edits.
It is a tossup between recommending this and recommending the competitor because each has distinct annoyances. Feature rich and heavy on resources which makes it a questionable fit for low powered field laptops. Reliable syncing on wifi becomes unpredictable on cellular networks which is strange for a mobile first product.
Automations save my evenings since recurring reports now generate and ship themselves while I actually eat dinner.
Being open source gave me the confidence to self host once we grew past the hosted plan. Mobile sync completed within a few seconds every time which has not been my experience with similar apps.
Cross platform really means cross platform here and even the Linux build has feature parity with the Mac version. Codebase appears clean because the UI never surprises me with inconsistent behavior between windows and dialogs. Automation triggers hook into my existing shell scripts without any wrapper code which keeps my toolchain simple.
VPN speeds held up during an entire video call across three continents without a single dropped frame. Converted my whole team in two weeks because the shared workspace features removed friction we did not realize we had.
I cancelled a long running competitor subscription within a week because this covered every real workflow I had. Terminal integration lets me launch new sessions tagged by project which keeps my shell history clean and searchable. I was skeptical about yet another productivity app but this one earned a permanent spot in my dock.
Database queries feel instant even against a table with several million rows which the previous tool choked on. After switching from a bloated enterprise tool my morning routine finally stopped including a reboot.
Pdf export preserved every heading hyperlink and footnote exactly as it looked in the editor pane. Markdown support is complete including footnotes tables and code fences with syntax highlighting that actually matches my editor.
Autosave quietly rescued a three hour draft after a power outage took down my whole desk.
Mobile app crashes immediately on open after any system update which locks me out of my own notes for days.
Running this reduced average CPU usage on my laptop compared with the Electron based tool I used before. Developer updates include changelogs that explain tradeoffs honestly rather than hiding regressions behind marketing language. Terminal integration lets me launch new sessions tagged by project which keeps my shell history clean and searchable.
Easy on the eyes with sensible defaults for typography line height and contrast that work out of the box. Uptime has been rock solid for the entire year I have been paying for the professional tier.
Fast enough for anything I throw at it including nested outlines and documents with hundreds of embedded images. At this price point I expected cut corners but every feature feels considered and tested in real workflows.
Documentation actually makes sense and the examples drop into my project with only minor edits. Dark theme uses proper contrast ratios so my eyes feel fine after an eight hour editing marathon.
Support never replied to three different tickets opened over two months about a login loop that still happens today. Every integration I rely on broke silently after an api change that was announced only on an internal developer forum.
Pricing feels honest and the upgrade path from free to paid did not force me to re learn the interface.
Open source claims turned out to apply only to a stripped down community edition missing every feature anyone would want. Buggy mess from launch to today and the team seems more focused on marketing videos than actual fixes. A critical security advisory was handled by posting a vague forum thread rather than contacting affected users.
Battery drain was so severe that my phone died by lunch on the first day I installed this.
Linux build does not feel like an afterthought and the maintainers respond to issues on the tracker within days.
Serviceable with gaps around import and export that force me to keep a backup tool installed anyway.
Workable but not elegant describes most of my sessions and the elegance I crave shows up only occasionally.
Hands down the best choice I made this quarter and the whole team now relies on it without complaint.
Productivity jumped once I set up the shortcuts and templates for recurring report writing on Monday mornings. Documentation actually makes sense and the examples drop into my project with only minor edits.
Fine on desktop and awkward on mobile where the touch targets feel too small for actual thumbs. Decent search is held back by the lack of fuzzy matching so typos silently return empty result sets.
An hour of exploration unlocked more useful functionality than a week with the heavier competitor I used before.
Interesting but incomplete at this stage and I would wait a quarter before deploying it across a whole team. Fast under light load however feature light compared with the competitor it is clearly trying to replace.
Promised cross device sync is marketed heavily yet works for text only while images and files stay stranded on their original devices.
Shortcut customization reached a level where I rebuilt my entire muscle memory from a decade of Vim habits.
Billing portal is broken in several browsers and the one that works refuses to accept a European billing address. 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.