A Tale of Three Note Apps
I’m a little obsessed with finding the ideal note-taking app, even though I know no such app exists. As part of that search, here’s a short comparison of three apps — Evernote, Notion, and Roam — on which I’ve come to depend.
I’m certainly not going to describe each tool in detail; there are many sources of information out there much better than anything I could write here. I want to focus on the differences between them and how they can be, unfortunately, all necessary. Along the way, you’ll find out a little about how I take notes.
The Contenders
Evernote is the classic, the exemplar of all note-taking apps. It’s been around forever (well, since 2000 anyways) and has garnered a huge global following. I myself have used it since 2009. In Evernote, individual notes are arranged in a hierarchy of notebooks and stack of notebooks, and each note can have an arbitrary number of tags. It has a blindingly fast and rich search functionality; individual search queries can be saved to create collections of notes orthogonal to the notebook structure. It has an amazing web clipper, and it syncs across multiple platforms. Evernote is fundamentally a single-user app.
Evernote has the same problems most “old” apps have: a stale, clumsy user interface that’s inconsistent across platforms; slow development; potential privacy issues; and occasional existential crises at the organizational level. Though not surprising, these problems have pushed many of Evernote’s users to look for alternatives.
Notion is much newer (initially released in 2016) and has seen very significant growth recently (e.g., it’s Alexa ranking has gone from about 2500 to nearly 1300 in about the last six months). Its interface is minimalist and clean, yet it packs a wallop in functionality. Based on the idea of “blocks” rather than just text in pages, it supports a wide variety of structures including RDB-like tables, lists, kanban boards, wikis, and galleries; it can embed many different types of web entities in a reasonably intelligent way. You can build an arbitrarily deep hierarchy of pages within pages. It is, quite frankly, a beautiful thing. Notion was designed from the ground up to support collaboration.
Concerns with Notion, as with many new and successful apps, revolve around strategy, longevity, and rate of growth. Its coverage is spotty in areas (e.g., a really weak web clipper). Some of its users are ravenous for ever-more functionality, yet the unconstrained growth that that implies could lead to unsustainable bloat, while others wish it would specialize on only a few use cases, even though the Web is already full of one-trick ponies.
Roam is… something completely different. Still in free beta and very weakly documented, Roam is an outliner on steroids from outer space. It’s an implementation of something called the zettelkasten method of organizing one’s knowledge. It does everything you’d expect an outliner to do; but Roam’s magic is in drastically lowering the “friction” — the overhead keystrokes and mouse-clicks — needed to relate two bits of information. You can make any bit of text into a tag like [[this]] or #this.
The dolly-zoom moment comes when you search for stuff and it reports with surprising speed every [[instance]] of #connections and shows you the context in which they occur. Indeed, Roam forms its "pages" as collections of all references to a tag, plus whatever synthesizing text you may add to it. Basically, it doesn't matter "where" you put a piece of information; the system will organize it for you in ways that will always make sense to you - with virtually no effort on your part. It even provides a graph of your pages as nodes to help you navigate your resulting knowledge map. I cannot overstate how powerful this approach is. Roam is quite frankly breath-taking.
Not that Roam doesn’t have problems. It has no web clipper. There have been incidents of significant data loss, not only due to server problems, but also for what I believe are flaws in their code for synchronizing between instances. Its aesthetics is… lacking. On the other hand, Roam is very new, and very beta — what else did you expect?
The Comparison
I’ll describe each criterion I used, then review how the three apps fair against on a 0–2 scale.
Frictionless information-linking
When I’m taking notes, I rarely know a-priori which words will be the important terms. Sometimes, those terms only come up when I review my notes later. When I find a new term, I want to mark it as such without first having to set up the “infrastructure” to collect information relating to that term. To stop writing or reviewing for the sake of creating infrastructure (usually, setting up a separate note or page specifically for that term) is a significant distraction that really slows down my thinking.
So a good note-taking app must have a way to tag information and link terms to pages or topics that don’t yet exist.
Most wikis can do that, but neither Notion nor Evernote can (as of this writing). Roam is the only app that can do it, and it does it very cleanly.
So both Notion and Evernote score a 0 here; and Roam gets a 2.
Easy linking to pages
Separate from the ability to link to non-existent pages is UI friction when linking to a page. This has to be as friction-free as possible so that I can link as I write. Ideally, I want to be able to link to a page as I write using a minimal number of straight text characters or simple control-character sequences.
Notion supports linking to existing pages with @name-of-page. Evernote is excruciating in this regard, requiring one to manually copy and paste the link onto the target text. Ick. (I mean, even the abhorrent OneNote supports [[Wikilink syntax]]to connect pages!) Roam, as I indicated already, creates pages on the fly based on [[double square brackets]] and #hashtags, as well as shortcuts to apply that syntax to selected text.
Evernote gets a goose-egg; Notion gets a 1; Roam gets another 2.
Web clipping
I mostly work in my browser. I need a reliable and powerful way to clip stuff, preferably directly into the note-taking app rather than via some intermediary like Google Keep or some bookmarking app like Pocket. The clipper must capture images as well as text. Furthermore, I need to be able to leave with the clip some quick note about why I clipped it, because it might be months before I get to review and “process” the clip.
Evernote is the clear winner here; it’s clipper is fast, powerful, virtually universal, and allows me to attach tags and remarks at the time of clipping. Notion can capture a whole web page — sometimes — and though you can alter the title given the page, you can’t add separate remarks or add tags. Roam has no web clipping capability at all.
So Evernote gets 2, Notion gets 1, and Roam gets 0.
Search
Information in my notes is useless if I can’t find it later, so the ability to search for — or even better, to have surfaced for me — relevant information is essential. Here especially, UI friction is anathema to me. Searching is not writing; the more time I have to spend looking something up, the more distracted I’ll become from the task that drove me to look it up.
Evernote has a rich and powerful search engine, but its syntax is complex and it depends too much on users carefully organizing their notes. It works best with many small notes rather than fewer long ones. Evernote presents search results in wildly different ways on different platforms. Notion has a relatively primitive, but fast, search function that’s surprisingly clumsy to use considering how smooth the rest of it is. Neither Notion nor Evernote are good at presenting search results together with whatever you’re working on. Roam has baked-in search via its linking capability; it also has a query system that’s rather powerful but obtuse; but it makes up for it by being able to show search results in a very wide sidebar so that you literally have search results side-by-side with your writing.
On this point, Evernote and Notion get a 1; Roam gets a 2 for putting search results right beside your active work.
Offline Usability
Ideally, I’d like to be able to take notes offline; the real world is not as well networked as it is depicted on TV. This one is a simple binary; either an app has a stellar QoS for offline work, or it may as well have no offline support at all.
The only one of the three apps that reliably handles offline stuff reliably is Evernote. It gets a 2. Notion and Roam get 0.
Content Development and Delivery
Note-taking apps are becoming so powerful they can be used to develop and even deliver content. Nothing complicated, of course; these aren’t CMSs after all. However, there are many situations where simple static pages are perfectly adequate. Almost all of my courseware, for instance, can easily be deployed as static web pages (proviso the embedding of dynamic elements like spreadsheets, videos, etc.). And these apps often have a far lower admin overhead than more powerful CMS-style systems, so you have more time to develop content.
Roam let’s you share pages with individuals and create public “databases”; but its outline-based structure doesn’t make it amenable for use for generic content delivery. Evernote can publish reasonably formatted pages that have been sync’d to its cloud, but due to the limitations of its editor and layout, it’s kind of ugly and difficult to maintain. Notion wins this round: so long as your not a typography nazi, you can easily generate very pleasing and professional looking — albeit relatively simple — “web pages”. You can embed all kinds of things in them, and its templating system helps you ensure consistent look and feel across many pages.
Notion gets a 2 here; Evernote gets a 1; and Roam gets a zero.
Cross-Platform Uniformity
While I tend to prefer MacOS, I can and do use ChromeOS, Android, and other linuxes. I need to know I can work anywhere. So cross-platform support is quite important to me.
Modulo working off-line, which I consider as its own criterion, Notion and Roam both work well (enough) on the platforms I use. Evernote is a hot mess, again because of its ludicrously inconsistent offerings on different platforms.
So Notion and Roam get a 2; Evernote gets 0.
And the Winner Is…
…none of them. Or all of them. Depends on your perspective.
If you count up scores, you’ll see that Evernote got 6 points, Notion got 7, and Roam got 8, out of a possible total of 14 points. That’s a pretty meagre showing all round. But the totals hide important differences in points distribution. In a table:
There’s very little overlap between the areas where I thought each app excelled, and therein lies the rub. And where each app excels correlates with different kinds of work.
Here’s how I see it: Evernote is best for capturing, Roam is best for creating and thinking, and Notion is best for storing and providing.
Evernote’s clipper is quite outstanding and runs on every reasonable platform. Since I work mostly in my browser, odds are very high that anything I need to capture can be captured in Evernote, including making a copy of the web page in question which I can hack up and annotate later, at my leisure.
Given all that researchy goodness collected with Evernote, I can now create notes in Roam, without necessarily worrying about organizing them. I just use #hashtags and [[concept references]] to note possible connections to other notes. That is, I can focus on dumping my ideas very quickly without thinking about organizing the notes.
Then, still in Roam, I can synthesize individual notes into cogent, well-organized outlines, leveraging Roam’s ability to quickly pull up any notes I need in a sidebar based on keywords. I can also easily rearrange them to get the flow right.
Finally, once I have the outline sorted, I can create full content in Notion. Its minimalist layout and appearance unburden me of the ultimately purposeless task of finding just the right font or just the right colour palette, and focus on getting the content right. Given that the content is by this point 95% defined, I don’t need Roam’s organizational flexibility; the tools Notion provides are more than sufficient to create relatively static, yet richly interconnected, content quickly and easily.
This workflow works for me whether I’m developing lecture notes, assignments, research papers, or blog posts. It’s not the worst way to work; since I use each of the three apps in very different ways, the boundary between tools aligns very well with the boundaries of the stages of my workflow.
Still, I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a single platform that can meet all my criteria. Not that I’m some grand arbiter of app functionality; it’s just that my criteria don’t seem like they’re asking for that much. Even better, what I’d really like is a standard way of connecting existing apps to facilitate exchange of information with minimal friction. That way, people can choose whatever apps the need, want, or prefer and still construct a useful workflow out of it.
