I am new to the ecosystem and currently evaluating between SuperNotes and Reflect as a place to move all of my knowledge base into. I am hoping you can answer a question for me. Currently I see SuperNotes win out in a lot of places but lose in two.
Search. This is probably the biggest for me. The Search seems a lot more limited in a few ways:
a. it’s visually much much tinier. here are two apps next to each other. As you can see it’s not even comparable as Reflect has a full-size search modal with significant note preview that allows to quickly find the note you want. I consider myself a power-user so Search function is my number one priority.
b. they have the ability to scope the search directly with filters, backlinks, dates, etc. I am not able to see any of that to directly filter in the fuzzy search? Do you have this option?
AI. There is an abundance of AI functionality integrated into the app. Does Supernotes have any options here to optimize workflows, auto-generate backlinks, summaries, etc?
I have narrowed my choice to these two apps and am curious if these improvements are on your roadmap, before I make my final choice and commit to an app as my one note-location! I prefer the look and fell of SupeNotes, but these are far too critical for me to overlook.
First off welcome to the Supernotes Community! Great to have you here.
So there’s two ways to find cards on Supernotes. The Universal Search (the method you’ve shared) is intentionally meant to be small, unobtrusive and very fast for you to find the things you are looking for. It also works great on mobile, so do download it and give it a spin (if you haven’t already). We’ve done a lot of work adjusting on our search algorithm over the last few years, so you should be able to find what you’re looking for within the first few results.
Filters, is the other way to find and discover cards. This allows you to combine multiple keywords, tags, colors etc. to narrow down the view you’re already in. The advantage of Supernotes here is that while filtering you can see all your cards at once and they are fully interactable / editable. Here’s an example where I’m in Broadsheet View with seamless mode on, filtering by the keyword ‘function’:
We’ve experimented a lot with Artificial Intelligence over the past few years, and many of the features we’ve released recently have been built with AI in mind. This is important as we’ve seen too many apps rush in and ‘tack on’ a GPT-enabled feature in the hope that they will attract more customers, without initially improving the core user experience – many things can be solved by having a great UI / UX rather than having an AI Chatbot.
We are planning a deeper AI integration, that will help you achieve tasks you couldn’t / wouldn’t do manually. However it will be opt-in and privacy-first – we will show you exactly what data is shared. There’s no ETA on this, but it might be ready very soon! And in case you use Telegram, there’s actually an opt-in auto-title option in our new integration that uses OpenAI.
I hope this helps! Both Reflect and Supernotes sounds they would work great for your use case. I would go with the note-taking app that makes you feel most happy to use daily – don’t worry about comparing feature-sets too much. Often more minimalist apps help you stay more productive than the apps with all the bells and whistles. Note-taking is personal so it makes sense to use the one that feels most personal to you as well
I can definitely understand not wanting to jump into the AI water too quickly and instead build something sustainable. I am more than willing to wait on that front!
I think the search limitations is where I currently struggle with SuperNotes. As you mention, it works great on mobile, but it almost feels like the desktop app is being held back in favor of optimizing for mobile first. Mobile is great, but I spend 95%+ of my time on desktop and thats where it feels super limited due to a small UI and lack of dynamic filters with the fuzzy search. I gave the SuperNotes filters a spin and while they are a nice addition, it’s not quite the fuzzy workflow! Do you think these two improvements (Search UI and filtered search) would make their way into the app anytime soon or is that unlikely?
It sounds silly, but I am tired of changing note applications and while the Reflect search has blown me away, the rest of the app hasn’t. (I am still leaning into it just for the search alone)
It would be extremely awesome if supernotes hat some way to “Chat with your notes” function.
Right now don’t even have an option to deploy my own RAG for my supernotes notes as they are not synced locally.
I think it would be great to either have a better local sync (even read only) so people can build there own RAG on top of the locally synced notes or you do it for us!
