During the whole month of December, I was testing intensively the Supernotes. I found the app very beautiful, simple and with a detail that made the difference for me: the fact of being able to create note cards. The sight of all the cards was also something I really liked. Overall, the experience was very good, having been able to use it practically every day except when Christmas started.
Despite that, after a month of experience, I consider it not an app that I will use in my daily life. One of the main reasons for that is the fact that I have felt some resistance in the way of organizing the cards. The need for many clicks and the need for customization made me lose some time, and that is not far from what is necessary, for example, with an application like Obsidian.
Another reason was the fact that I decided that this year I will focus on having all my notes in local files. This makes an app like Super Notes not fit in what I decided to implement in 2025: to implement a personal notes system and a slip box for my Zettelkasten. Anyway, I will follow the evolution of the Supernotes app and I’m very curious about its next steps. Who knows, I may not be able to return.
This sounds interesting. Could you be more specific with the use cases that didn’t work well for you?
Local files is a solution, but may I ask the problem that you’re trying to solve with them? It might be that Supernotes solves that problem, but in a different way.
The need for customization is, in my view, non-existent. Compared to tools like notion, where you are constantly nudged to generate AI banners for every subpage, I feel like Supernotes is a rather quiet place. I consider this a major pro.
Having to invest some time, on the other hand, is inevitable when it comes to productivity, when it is for the right thing, for that matter. Any PKMS knows two functions: To encode and to retrieve information. If you save time on encoding, retrieval will suffer. When you shy away from the decision what it is you captured, and why you did so, two steps that admittedly may consume some time, you may fail to realise your content’s value.
I am aware that this conviction relies on a particular mindset. One that thinks of cards as a reflection of internalised knowledge, rather than a mere collection of information. And of course there are other ways to go about the matter of knowledge management.
Lastly, I think the pain of encoding information, something I felt intensly when I started using Supernotes, can be mitigated if you have a sound organization scheme. I completely agree that this is something where Supernotes – being rather flexible, non-opiniated – requires its users to invest some effort. I am biased, but still, I think that the effort would be worth it.
Coming from Obsidian, I had a similar experience as OP. But I persisted! And it payed off. The note format makes my notes so much more visible and extracting insights from them is way easier. My note-flow is now automated to the max extend (mainly my periodic notes system). I too was hesitant to not having my notes local, but in practice, you won’t note (pun intended) any differences. My main gripes for now are the syncing with mobile (doesn’t work most of the time, I have to force quit the mobile app to get updates and have lost some edits made on mobile). And the filtering system, which is clunky and far from intuitive. Still, I see where this is going and it matches my note taking style.
And that’s what it’s about: not every app will fit your personal way of note taking. SuperNotes might of might not fill that gap.
This is my response to my post on the Supernotes community forum.
It has been over a month since I published this post, and I have stopped using Supernotes. I’m taking this opportunity to come back and reply to the comments made here.
Another reason I’m returning is to check in on what’s happening in this community, which I enjoyed being a part of while using the app, and to see what has been done in the application during this time.
I also feel a bit nostalgic about using it because of its beauty and simplicity.
I also want to share a bit of my experience using local Markdown files and, at the same time, why there is still a possibility that I might return to Supernotes.
Now I think I can answer this better since I found something about myself that I didn’t know at the time. I really like to use my keyboard and less and less my mouse. Supernotes has a very good implementation of keyboard shortcuts that I didn’t know at the time, and using my mouse was a pain since doing some actions requires a lot of clicks.
Probably I would need more time to learn all shortcuts and do actions faster.
Either way, on the iPhone it still requires a lot of touches, for example compared to an app like Craft
Here I have three answers:
I want to have more control over my data.
In the future, as a developer, I would like to be able to access my notes in the terminal (with Neovim).
In the future, I would like my notes to become software-agnostic.
I will not quote all your text here, but my response is for all. Just to understand the level of simplicity I want to reach, I started to use (only for my Zettelkasten folder) the app The Archive. This is agnostic software that only uses markdown and local files.
Notion was never an option for me.
Obsidian was, but I think with its focus on plugins, and it has a poor editor. It started to fade away from my ideal app to use. For example, The Archive now has plugins, but only to manipulate text and files (not interface), and to retrieve data, you should only use search. Even wikilinks do not work like in every app, where clicking on the wikilink will open the note. Rather, it will use the text inside the [[ ]] to search (this is one of the reasons it is agnostic). And as you said, this implies that the user must find his way to encode and retrieve information.
I mentioned this only to indicate that this is not the problem for me. The issue was more with the way I need to interact with the software and the rules regarding clicks that I need to follow.
Really cool to know that.
Only if you have the goals I mention above to @JamesT like be able to use your terminal to read your notes.
I felt the same. But syncing with local files has other issues and challenges too!
I feel that I’m constantly trying to find the right app, not because of the app, but because I want to be helped by the app to find the best workflow and visualization of my notes.
I start to realize that probably I won’t find it and I need to adapt or create my own way of doing things. This makes me start thinking more about using only local files with Markdown and forcing me to simplify things, but eventually, I found other issues too.
In short, it seems that I probably won’t find the perfect app either, and will eventually need to follow my intuition rather than just logic. And I want to say that I really had a good time with Supernotes.
That makes sense, and I agree that markdown based tools do have a better story around tool agnosticism than Supernotes.
However, I still find myself choosing Supernotes because its Outline tree and multiple note parents are indispensable for how I structure and navigate my notes. Plus, the JSON export feature gives me enough confidence that I won’t lose any of my notes, even if the Supernotes app does disappear one day.