What's the best cross-platform app for writing?

HANDS DOWN 🙌🏼 THE BEST PRODUCTIVITY, ORGANISATION AND RESOURCE WORKSPACE myself or my team have ever touched 💯

We're huge advocates of Trello, power-users of Slack, data-hungry Google Sheet/Doc fanatics and unloyal downloaders of many productivity, Wiki, task management and organisation apps. With my CTO I often mused the idea of building an all-in-one workspace for internal use that sat as our Pandora's box of goodies ranging from development wiki's, onboarding information and branding resources all the way to task management, meeting notes and even time tracking - lo and behold I stumbled across this gem of an app.

We decided to run Notion for a week in tandem with Trello (for our highly-granular level project management) starting by spending an hour in the evening porting over info to populate a few spreadsheets, wikis etc. I also went ahead and threw personal pages up to trial it on an individual level. 📝Note: if you have a super high turnover of to-do's and an active team you won't find switching over from another app to be a lengthy process. After 6 years of managing a creative agency I reckon I have seen enough task management and organisation apps to last a lifetime, so take my thoughts here with that consideration.

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After a week we drew the following conclusions:

⏱ We worked faster with Notion than we did with Trello, Evernote or even a physical whiteboard.

📦 Today I solely used Notion for the entire workday. This time last week I would have used Trello, Slack (sending meeting notes and memos), Google Sheets, Google Docs, the native OSX notes app and GithubWiki just to get my day ORGANISED!

📚 Managing client editorials, project budgets, to-do lists and even basic memos and planning has been a breeze. It's great as a lightweight CRM too.

🛠 We were more organised than ever before. It's great to have a knowledge base for our products, plans and company sitting right amongst our task management tools.

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We have also been left wanting for nothing (👏🏼 Congrats, Notion team) but dreaming of a few things:

💵 Beefier finance organisation/support. Integrations with Quickbooks, Xero maybe? Make it easier to build budgets and organise our money plans!

🗣 Room to annotate and collaborate on images/PDF's etc.

🔐 Function to lock pages so you can't edit, and the little hover tooltip to edit doesn't show up.

🎨 Integration with design apps - Sketch, UXPin, etc. Many many many creatives will use this app and be left wanting in this area. Think: a creative agency collabs, annotates, refines, develops and more...keep them in Notion.

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The TLDR: Notion 2.0 kicks a** and we'll be using it for a long long time in place of a myriad of other productivity apps and tools. You should too.

I want to move from Evernote (I am a premium subscriber) to Notion, I really do but I don't think Notion wants me to. Whatever I am about to say, I say it with nothing but respect for Notion and in the hopes that it will continue to improve at the same pace.

First, the good - Notion has the best note editing interface I've ever used. A close second might be OneNote (it's a high bar, mind you) and Bear. It combines the simplicity of Evernote or Markdown with the power of OneNote although, it is missing the ability to use handwriting and doesn't support iPad with Pencil just yet. When it does, it will be perfect. I also like that I can save code snippets. Why is this so hard for Evernote?

Notion 2's tables, boards and other updates are huge. While I'm sure the in-built kanban board is not as feature complete as Trello, it should be more than enough for most projects. Same for tables. Airtable has a bunch of really cool advanced features but for most use cases, tables within Notion are just fine. Notion is on the right path and I am sure these features will only improve.

Now for what I don't like - The price is definitely my number one complaint. I will happily pay for Notion when it can do everything that other apps can. Until then, why not let me stay connected to the product with a cheaper paid plan or a better free tier? I pay for Evernote but if I were to consider switching, I can't do so purely because Notion doesn't do a bunch of things that Evernote can (even though it does a lot of things that Evernote doesn't) - Chrome extension to clip articles, emails, images etc., powerful mobile app with business card and document scanning, iPad support etc.

At $8 a month, it is more expensive than G Suite on a per-user basis. Why not give me 100 - 200 free blocks per month? Let me grow to love it. Let me build a workflow around it. Give me some incentive to tell my friends about it. When you have the features I want (I'm sure you're working on it), let me pay for it.

Price aside, I would also like to see how Notion fairs for quick note-taking, It's designed to be a wiki-style product and I get that but I'm sure a LOT of people are using it for personal notes. I use Evernote to save one-line notes - phone numbers, quotes, URLs etc. Notion's wiki-style UX is too heavy duty for that kind of use. It would be really cool if there was a "scratchpad" or "quick notes" feature that was not as heavy duty. For these simpler notes, I don't want to organize them into pages, I just want to save them and may be tag them. Which brings me to another feature I could really use - tags. Why limit users to only folders? Why not allow users to just tag notes?

I could go on but ultimately, I won't be switching to Notion right now, even though I really want to. Cost is too prohibitive but I'm sure I'll be on the hunt for future updates.

A worthy alternative to OneNote (slow start up, freezes and glitches, too bloated), Evernote (can fall down out of wifi area), Bear (Markdown lacks rendered view).

It's open source software. https://github.com/standardnotes

Using Zenkit for a few months now and can't see myself going back to my old tool. The team has done a phenominal job of building an application that addresses the need of power users, light users, and everything in between.

Edited my review to reflect the awesome response time to problem I encountered. Incredible, hard working team and their app reflects the care and dedication they have put into Zenkit. Keep up the great work, Zenkit!

Simplenote is one of those finest note-taking apps you can ask for. Coming from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, it enables seamless ability to publish the notes online. Great app, to sum it up!

Simplenote truly was the most beautiful app of its day. It completely transformed what productivity was for me. There aren't many apps you expect to still be using ten years later.

I searched high and low for a replacement to the Mac OS default Notes app, which is incredibly limited in functionality and insufficient for my needs. I had one twist - I needed to find a note taking app for Mac that did not sync or store notes in the cloud. Bear does just that and it happens to be great. I really enjoy the hashtag categorization system and ability to have multiple tags on a note. It's a twist on Evernote style tags, but with a lighter-weight style of notebook organization and management.

Overall I love Bear. It is beautifully designed. I love the simple interface and the ability to tag notes is amazing. It makes searching for old notes so much easier. This is better than Apple Notes and I love it so much more than Evernote.

I discovered Blurt through Makers, I saw the founder building and improving the tool day to day, following advices and feedback.

Hope one day it will be as big as Medium because he deserved it!

I currently use another app that gives me focus on outlining a project

and priorities but could see testing Blurt and combining a few writing tasks.

Use Paper to manage technical stuff and my team, and love it. Just the right number of features, document crosslinking and image embedding fits my needs exactly, and works for quick notes or longer documents.

Its a great tool for starters, For teams I do not recommend. there are lots of apps that do the same, even google docs is more intelligible when collaborating and working with. But we already have OneNote, Evernote, Word Online, with lots of features way ahead Paper.

There is no alternative for Google Keep which is very dissapointing in terms of app having bunch of minor and one major bug which makes it useless. Any note taking app could make "sticky notes" view and I would switch happily from Keep which is forgotten and abandoned by its developers