Digital Personal Knowledge Management Tools

These are apps that are designed around managing a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system and notetaking, or often used for those purposes. This list is far from complete, rather I focused on apps that I have personal experience with using and have some thoughts about. I’ve tried a lot of different apps for PKM, as you can see. It’s tempting to always be chasing the next best app, and tinkering with your system is a rabbit hole that can really waste a lot of time. My recommendation is to commit to one app and use it for at least several months before caving to the temptation to try the next best thing.

  • Obsidian is the app I use for PKM and writing in general. It is essentially a fancy Markdown editor that stores its files locally on your machine. The power of Obsidian lies in its customizability and extensibility, with a huge ecosystem of community-developed plugins. Read my full breakdown of Obsidian here.
  • Notion, with its block-based editing and powerful database features, is a very popular choice for managing PKM. Over the years, I’ve grown to dislike Notion for various reasons which I delve into here. See also my comparison between Obsidian Versus Notion for Personal Knowledge Management.
  • LogSeq is an open source outliner app with a ton of cool features. Unfortunately, development is very slow on LogSeq, and I’ve heard too many complaints about bugs from longtime LogSeq users.
  • AnyType is a very cool app in concept. Files are stored locally and synced via a local p2p network. Everything is E2E-encrypted. It provides Notion-like database functionality and collaboration features. Ultimately though, this project is too small and feels too unfinished for me to trust it with my notes.
  • Org Mode for GNU Emacs is the tool of choice for many programmers and others who appreciate its extensibility, power, and simplicity. If I wasn’t using Obsidian I’d probably be using Org. I might end up switching to it eventually anyways, but for now Obsidian checks all the boxes I care about.
  • Joplin is popular notetaking tool for those who like to self-host things. It also offers a premium cloud service to store and sync your notes instead, for a price. I haven’t tried Joplin for many years. Back when I tested it years ago it struck me as being very similar to Evernote.
  • Trillium Notes is another self-hostable tool I tested a long time ago, so I can’t speak to its current state. It supports many of the same features as Obsidian.

There are a bunch more out there too:

  • The beautiful outliner Tana with its unique supertags feature.
  • Mem, which is designed around AI at its core.
  • Capacities for better WYSIWYG support.
  • Bear for simplicity
  • Apple Notes for those in the Apple ecosystem
  • RoamResearch, although Roam seems to be dying a slow death.
  • The privacy-focused Standard Notes
  • The thoughtfully designed Craft.

And who could forget Evernote, which probably was the first app in this space. Don’t use Evernote though. There are much better (and cheaper) options out there these days.