I’ve been trying out SuperNotes as a replacement for my Obsidian setup for a couple of days. I was so close to pulling the trigger on a 4 year subscription, but some lacking details kept me from doing this.
Pro’s (compared to Obsidian):
Nicer UI, I like the card coloring!
Card format and random sorting stimulates discoverability! So much nicer than the standalone notes in Obsidian.
Keyboard navigation is great.
Very responsive support team!
Mobile app actually works. The Obsidian version is very clunky.
Webaccess!
Con’s (compared to Obsidian):
My usecases don’t work great. I keep daily notes, weekly notes, monthly notes, quarterly notes, etc. When aggregating, I need access to notes on a deeper level. In Obsidian I use a split view for this and it works great. There is no such thing in SuperNotes. It tried multiple tabs in the browser version, but it doesn’t work the same.
Linking to other cards is only on card basis. In Obsidian I can link to specific text/paragraphs in notes. Really powerful stuff, especially for aggregating daily notes.
Collections and sorting are confusing. Most of the times I end up in a state where I don’t see the notes I expect to see, and have to return to Home and reset everything to get back.
Child notes that need a title: the concept of child notes is powerful, but requiring a title on them doesn’t work great. I have parent notes for all my direct reports and a child note of things to discuss next time I see them. All those child notes have the same name. To distinguish between them, I have to include their names in the child notes.
Importing: I tried to import a month’s worth of daily notes, but the import system gets most “targeted dates” wrong, event though all my daily notes have a fixed structure and title. It’s cumbersome to go through all of them and changing those dates.
The pricing: 200+ dollars for a 4 years commitment to a note taking app seems steep. Let alone the non-discounted monthly prices. Especially considering this is run by a two (?) man outfit, so who knows if they will be even around in 4 years.
Locked in eco-system. Event though you can export notes, it’s in a format that is not directly useable, especially links between notes. Also, should SuperNotes stop working right now, you’re left with the last export you ever made.
So I’m staying with my Obsidian setup for now and will keep a watch on development on SuperNotes in the future.
My usecases don’t work great. I keep daily notes, weekly notes, monthly notes, quarterly notes, etc. When aggregating, I need access to notes on a deeper level. In Obsidian I use a split view for this and it works great. There is no such thing in SuperNotes. It tried multiple tabs in the browser version, but it doesn’t work the same.
Have you tried using the pinned notes panel CMD + SHIFT + 0? I find it works extremely well when I want to have multiple notes open at once, and work with all of them.
Linking to other cards is only on card basis. In Obsidian I can link to specific text/paragraphs in notes. Really powerful stuff, especially for aggregating daily notes.
That’s to encourage you to capture one “atomic” idea per note. When you do that, there’s rarely a need to link to a block within a note.
Child notes that need a title: the concept of child notes is powerful, but requiring a title on them doesn’t work great. I have parent notes for all my direct reports and a child note of things to discuss next time I see them. All those child notes have the same name. To distinguish between them, I have to include their names in the child notes.
Supernotes has an extremely powerful search feature, so you’ll discover that even if you have two cards with the same title, as long as you include the parent name in your search—Supernotes will still find the right card. I use this feature every day.
Perhaps even after these discoveries you’ll still decide to stick with Obsidian. That’s completely up to you. Only you know which tool makes you feel best while you’re using it.
I kept lingering around, weighing the pros and cons, and in the end, I found a way to model my system within Supernotes. This was mostly thanks to my self-hosted XBackBone instance for referencing PDFs, images, and more.
There are still some ways to go to migrate my current Obsidian vault to Supernotes. I’m most anxious about the periodic notes (dailies, weeklies, etc.) as I have thousands of them. However, I’m quite proficient in development, so I’ll try my best with the API for this task.
So today I subscribed to the 4-year plan, just to show my commitment. The thing that pushed me over the edge in the end is the card format. I really, really like this format. I’ll accept any shortcomings at this point just for this format.
