Which Note App to Use When None of Them Behave Normally
1. When Apple Notes is perfect until you need to share something
I keep telling myself I’m done with Apple Notes. Then I find myself copying a grocery list three different ways just to post it in Slack. The notes look amazing on my Mac — bold headers, clean nested checklists, everything flows. Then I hit that little share icon, pick a person, and the shared note is suddenly flat text. Zero formatting. Half the checkboxes just become dashes.
A coworker once edited a note I shared with them and their changes never showed up for me — until two weeks later. Turned out they were on iOS 15.3 and I was on 16.1. In a corporate setting, that kind of version mismatch shouldn’t break core collaboration features, but it did — Apple Notes doesn’t handle backward compatibility in multi-user editing. It just silently fails.
Also, the tags implementation — which could have been a killer feature — only half-works. If you drag a note into a folder, it loses its tag searchability in some views on iPad. This feels like a platform that was built for single-player and reluctantly slaps on multiplayer after the fact.
I finally stopped using shared notes after one incident where I marked seven tasks as done during an airport layover. My partner never saw them as checked off. Her iCloud hadn’t synced since she went on hotel Wi-Fi two hours earlier. That kind of latency is invisible until it breaks trust.
2. Notion is great until your cursor disappears mid-thought
This just happened yesterday. I was working on a client proposal template in Notion, full-width page, toggles everywhere, using my MacBook in Safari. Mid-edit, the cursor stopped blinking. I could still select text. I could still type. But that little vertical line — gone. No visual feedback. Save still worked, but I couldn’t tell where I was in the doc without clicking around like a raccoon with a keyboard.
Notion’s editor isn’t native — it’s a browser shell even in the desktop app, so you end up dealing with rendering bugs that are browser-specific. The invisible cursor thing only happened on Safari. No issue on Chrome. I posted about it once and someone replied that enabling “reduced motion” in macOS Accessibility somehow disrupted Notion’s inline rendering speed. Turning that setting off brought the cursor back.
You know what I did? I toggled that setting off just while editing in Notion. That’s the kind of irrational workaround you start accepting when the app otherwise does everything else right. Sync is fast, databases are flexible, and comments make sense. But when something weird breaks — like hitting CMD+Z undoing fifteen minutes of block rearranges but not text edits — it’s pure whack-a-mole.
“I pasted three lines, deleted five, undid once, and somehow lost formatting from another block I hadn’t touched.”
The truth is: in Notion, undo is context-sensitive — and the actual behavior depends on which block had focus before the edit. Try explaining that to your boss after your team wiki randomly reverts to last Tuesday.
3. Obsidian makes sense if you like debugging your own brain
Obsidian’s the one I’ll keep reinstalling until I die. It feels like it almost gets me — local-first, Markdown, backlink galore — but then I open a canvas, drag a few notes in, zoom too far, and now I can’t find the one I need. There’s no global canvas zoom reset unless you manually adjust the scale slider.
Plugins are where Obsidian becomes almost too powerful. Case in point: I installed the Daily Notes and Calendar plugins, loved the workflow. Then I enabled a third plugin called Periodic Notes and suddenly my Daily Notes folder reorganized itself. My pinned note disappeared. Took me 40 minutes to realize Periodic Notes was silently overriding the Daily Notes path config behind the scenes.
# Obsidian settings snippet
"daily": {
"folder": "journal/dailies",
"template": "daily.md"
},
"periodic": {
"daily": {
"folder": "log/days"
}
}
One takes priority depending on install order. That’s not documented anywhere. I ended up opening the JSON in settings manually, comparing paths, fixing them by hand. That worked. Until I updated the plugin and it reverted everything again.
If there’s one thing to learn: always export your core plugin configs and keep a backup in plain text. Treat it like a reproducible environment. Otherwise, you’ll make one small change and forget entirely why your notes no longer open from the hotkey.
4. Google Keep is for capturing things you never want to revisit
I use Keep like a trash drawer. Quick idea? Dump it in. Random todo that I may or may not action? Put it in Keep. But the nightmare starts when you try to clean it up. Drag-reordering across devices is a gamble. Half the time, I try to reorganize my notes on desktop and it syncs the wrong order to mobile. Worse, sometimes the only version syncing is a stale one from hours ago.
Also, there’s no version history. If you accidentally delete the contents of a note — poof, it’s gone. You can undo on desktop for about five seconds. But on mobile? No undo at all. Accidentally swipe-archive a note while scrolling quickly? Good luck finding it again unless you remember a unique keyword.
There’s a permissions-related quirk too: if you share a Keep note with someone, and then they archive it, it archives for everyone. That’s not hinted anywhere in the UI. My collaborator archived our shared brainstorming note on launch logistics and I thought I’d lost it entirely. Took 10 minutes of Slack back-and-forth to find out it was in the “Archived” tab, even though I’d never touched it.
This makes Keep unbelievably dangerous for anything beyond temporary list management. It’s basically a single-player adhoc scratchpad with janky multiplayer added in just to make things confusing. I now use it only for things I’m okay losing.
5. Craft smells like promise but behaves like a changelog draft
Craft documents are stupidly pretty. The block types, the way image galleries look in-line, how you can hover and link quickly across notes — it nails the aesthetic. But weird stuff happens when you sync across macOS and iOS. I had categories on my Mac not match the same categories on iPad. They looked like different folders but had the same name. Turned out to be a casing issue: “Meetings” vs “meetings” are both accepted, but only one syncs correctly.
This got me in real trouble during a workshop prep. I dropped PDFs and notes into the iPad folder, but opening on desktop, it looked empty. The files were in the lowercase-named folder. Craft’s sync engine doesn’t merge folders with the same label but different case — it just splits them in its file system.
Tooltips never warned me. The UI implied harmony.
Another issue: exporting long documents randomly strips page breaks if you export to PDF from mobile. But not from desktop. I exported a 14-page document and only noticed the missing breaks after it had already been reviewed by a stakeholder. I sent a revised version later pretending it was “light formatting,” but it was a full reflow fix from desktop.
Small tip: always export from Mac if formatting matters. Mobile exports are visually friendly for notes, but unpredictable for structure-heavy content.
6. Coda made collaboration feel smarter until we hit a row limit
I built an internal team wiki in Coda once. It was amazing — live-editable tables, synced relations between sections, fast filtering. Our marketing and sales teams loved adding things. Until it started slowing down. Like visibly slowing. Dropdowns lagged. Buttons stopped responding. Our weekly standup doc took 15 seconds to open.
It turns out, after a few hundred rows, performance degraded sharply. Not linearly — it was like a cliff. According to one support reply, large tables with many lookup fields cause the backend to reevaluate relations more aggressively than expected. The workaround? Flatten your lookups. Or split into multiple pages. But then the documentation continuity breaks because you no longer have all your FAQs in one view. It’s a tradeoff they don’t advertise.
Undocumented behavior: row count includes hidden rows even inside collapsed groups. So your doc might say “100 rows visible” but performance is based on the actual 900 hidden ones you forgot existed.
This one realization made me add a habit: I now create a “Debug” page in Coda docs where I use formulas to count rows per section. It’s the only way to anticipate when performance might crater the week before a product launch.
7. OneNote’s sync engine thinks time is a vague suggestion
I want to like OneNote. It supports multiple notebooks, easy formatting, nested pages. But I’ve seen it go hours without syncing a change. Especially if you alternate between mobile and desktop. I once added eight meeting notes on my iPad during a day of visits. Opened my laptop later that night, and only four showed up.
There wasn’t even a sync error. No alert. Just a quiet refusal of reality.
Even worse, if you edit on two devices with bad connectivity, OneNote will create merge pages. Not diffs. Full duplicated note versions with curly bracket timestamps like “Meeting Notes (from other computer 3-47 PM)” that you now have to manually reconcile. It’s like accepting git merge conflicts without ever opting in to git.
And these merge events aren’t reversible. Once they happen, even deleting one version sometimes leaves the merged one hanging around. It’s digital clutter that feels like time-travel debris.
I keep OneNote installed for when clients insist on it. But I never use it for personal work anymore. The sync anxiety is too corrosive.