Long time lurker, first time poster.

Been juggling various note-taking, PKM, task management options for a while now and I've really honed in on some definite likes and dislikes.

Currently using bullet.to (free tier) and very happy with it, but really missing a place for "Daily Notes". Having Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly views is great for pespective and preventing overwhelm (something I struggled with in other systems). Experimenting with gitlab.com/ferreum/pto as a mobile option for daily notes, but no web/desktop option. Drafting this post in Keep.

In the past I've used TickTick, manually creating Daily Notes in quarterly notebooks due to the 100 notes per notebook limit. Not as friction free as I wanted, but otherwise has a LOT of great features and I feel is often overlooked in PKM/Productivity discussions.

Before that was todo.txt with daily-notes in vscode and syncthing. Markor on mobile with the daily-notes.md in the quick note slot.

I initially styled my system based on plaintext-productivity.net. I still use that filesystem for my work files and projects.

Other tools I've looked at that fell short somewhere:
- workflowy
- remnote
- logseq
- amplenote
- obsidian
- super productivity
- checkvist
- joplin
- tana
- capacities
- nirvana/everdo
- there's probably others I've left out

Ideally I'm looking for a single solution that has:
- Android App
- Web Version (PWA)
- cloud sync
- either built-in to the app or 3rd party (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive)
- I've done syncthing before, but I'd rather use a cloud option since I'd be using a work PC.
- Global Task List
- Capable of task attributes/notation along the lines of todo.txt.
- priority
- status ala GTD/orgmode also fun but not absolutely necessary
- context/list (@home, @work)
- project/tag (+proj1, +proj2)
- completion date (useful for monthly reports)
- creation date not as important
- threshold/start date
- due date okay if there's only one date assignable
- Task notes/description (a major gripe about todo.txt format)
- I regularly take notes on a task either as part of creation to provide addition detail or as I work on it that should be attached to the task and not somewhere else (e.g. daily notes).
- subtasks not necessary
- markdown format a plus with checkboxes
- Daily Notes / Working Memory
- a dedicated place to free write, daily
- outliner preferred over prose
- ability to manipulate nodes
- inline tags
- markdown support
- meeting notes and the like can also go here as a sub-heading.
- also helpful for monthly reports
- Natural Language Processing a plus
- Checkboxes distinct of Tasks
- Not interested in something that requires extensive customization/plugins/query-building to get what I want.
- Data export

I'm sorry for the awful single level list of bullets.
Looks like the indents didn't make it to the final post.

Check out NotePlan 3 ($99/yr) and Amplenote ($70–$120/yr). Both offer Mac, iOS, web, and Android apps (Amplenote also has a Windows app). Amplenote is cloud-first, whereas NotePlan is local-first and feels closer to a digital bullet journal. NotePlan stores notes as plain Markdown files, with work centered around daily notes. Sync can happen through NotePlan Sync or third-party services like Dropbox or Google Drive (though third-party sync might be being phased out). That approach tends to feel fast, especially if you value direct file access. But if your work PC does not permit access to personal cloud, Amplenote's web app seems more mature than Noteplan's.

Amplenote aims to aggregate tasks from across your notes into a single global view, where items can be sorted and surfaced based on factors like priority and due dates. NotePlan is designed to feel more like a digital paper planner in which you work primarily in daily notes and manually move tasks forward, which gives a strong sense of continuity but requires more hands-on, manual organization.

NotePlan stays close to plain Markdown plus has outlining features like collapsible bullet hierarchies. Amplenote renders Markdown into WYSIWYG-style, a la Typora.

If you enjoy explicit, text-based task systems like todo.txt, NotePlan is a natural choice since you’re directly working with structured text, and it replicates much of the feel of a bullet journal. If you prefer something closer to a traditional task manager Amplenote is better for managing projects/contexts/priorities & want the app to handle management and sync for you.

@satis...
No native Android app is a deal breaker, so no Note Plan. There's a bunch of Mac/iOS only apps I wish were cross-platform, but alas.

As for Amplenote I've tried it a handful of times and there are a few things that irk me. Below is a short (not all inclusive) list off the top of my head.
- If I want to take notes attached to a Task the only way to do that is their "rich footnote" feature, which is cumbersome especially in Mobile.
- No inline tags.
- Checkboxes are impossible.
I love the concept on paper, but the implementation of some key items is awful.

You put forward a very ambitious set of requirements and you may find it helpful to prioritize or trim requirements. Better, perhaps think in terms of using more than one app; most productivity tools aren’t designed to cover quite that wide or particular a range of needs. A lot of people on this site as well as most every productivity/app forum I've seen end up searching for a single tool to meet every need, but in practice most apps are better at a smaller set of functions. You may get closer to your needs with two apps than one.

Worth looking into:

Essential Pim (for Windows, but offers Android sync);
Upnote
Journal It! (has a very high learning curve, but after you overcome it you'll see what a terrific program this is)

Good luck! (and of course what Satis wrote above is spot on!)

Thanks for the replies so far!

@satis...
I'm aware it's ambitious. It feels like the Amplenote developers and I shared the same (or VERY similar) vision, but in practice it falls short.

@Leib
- epim not available for my version of Android (built for an older version).
- upnote... I'd rather just use Capacities as a note taking option.
- journalit!... Holy Overwhelm Batman! Friction free it is not.

I wrote Upnote, but I meant to write Upbase - worth taking a look...

Which Android version do you have? I have epim running on Android 16 with no problems whatsoever.

Mike Sautkulis wrote:

- epim not available for my version of Android (built for an older version).

I believe you, but it won't show it to me in the Play Store. This is a relatively new phenomenon that I and others have encountered.

Message reads: "Looking for ? This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android."

Graham Rhind wrote:

Which Android version do you have? I have epim running on Android 16 with no problems whatsoever.

Mike Sautkulis wrote:
>- epim not available for my version of Android (built for an older version).

Have you looked at Zenkit Hypernotes. I think it meets most of your requirements.

https://zenkit.com/en/hypernotes/

It is a mature product that doesn't get a lot of significant upgrades. It does task management, though not robustly. You can integrate it with Zenkit's other app, To Do, for fuller task management.

https://zenkit.com/en/todo/

I am not endorsing Hypernotes, because I don't use it, but I have admired it and am often tempted to give it a go.

Steve

Mike, just chiming in to say we are mostly on the same page. It's a relief to hear that AmpleNotes just feels a bit awkward to others. That's the one that FEELS like it should be the one, but I can never feel comfortable enough with it to fully commit.

I'm still with RemNote as my main note taker. Though I have to admit ,it doesn't feel as fluid effortless as LogSeq/Roam did. I heavily rely on the database features for project and task management.

My evergreen dilemma is I want "inline" tasks in my notes, and for those tasks to be dash-boarded in a task manager. But I also need a very quick and fluid task manager. These two needs are hard to merge. Amplenote seems to "get it" the most, but the implementation feels weird. My favorite all time note/task fusion is OneNote/Outlook. But that two-way task sync has been limited to desktop, and Microsoft clearly would rather everyone forget it ever existed. Now, I just have two or more separate task managers. The RemNote database one for project task management, and Todoist/ToDo for everything else.

The other reason I like RemNote is that I've found that spaced repetition has been particularly helpful with my adhd. I now consider SR my "note review", since I put way more than just facts in there. One of my bad tendencies is to waver on arbitrary decisions that I keep circling back to. For example, I'm fairly good at staying organized, but there's always things that don't have a clear home. It could live in different places for equally valid reasons. That's the sort of clutter that takes up more of my attention it deserves. Because I often forget what my "final decision" was, but always remember the reasons for the other arbitrary choices.

Now I just make a flash card: "you decided to put X in the Y because of Z", and Remnote lets me put the alternatives under there in bullets, because it's all inline notes. Now, when that card comes up, and my recency bias inevitably answers "ok.... but did we consider".... and I can glance down and see that yes, we've been down this same thought loop before....many times, and still decided X". After about a month, that decision has become a habit and doesn't haunt my life anymore.

SR has also made me realize how dumb I get when I try to externalize everything to a 2nd brain. Forcing more of the right stuff back in my brain has boosted my working memory and executive function.

@nathanb

Thanks for the post.

Looks like we're in pretty much the same boat.

On paper Amplenote should be the one, but every time I give it a chance it just feels wrong.

For tasks as I said my daily driver has been bullet.to, but I may end up giving todoist a whirl one of these days. However, the bujo workflow of constantly having to review and migrate, delegate, drop, etc. feels like it's a good thing for my ADHD.

I did use MS ToDo for a while until I realized I wanted my work and personal lists in one place.

When I first started taking daily notes digitally Logseq felt amazing, but between local first, lackluster Android experience, and the db version in the slow lane it quickly got sidelined. Remnote was the other contender for daily notes, and after reading your post I may give it another whirl. I've lost count of the number of times I've installed/uninstalled it on my phone.

Question...
How do you handle notes specific to a task? Do you use todoist/todo or do you use remnote?

Question...
How do you handle notes specific to a task? Do you use todoist/todo or do you use remnote?

Well...that's the problem, there is no single note method that works for every task, which is why I like the concept of in-line tasks within the notes. That way I don't every have to decide if the task note belongs in my main notes or just as an ephemeral task note.

If it's temporary notes that only help get that particular task done, I just use whatever note function the task manager has. That notes lives inside the task, and it dies when the task dies. If it's a project task, then the task lives inside the project note (remnote). What about small projects? Well....the first approach feels like overkill and the 2nd approach feels inadequate. That's where an Amplenote would shine.

One reason I use todoist over tick tick is because ticktick's note function is actually very good. It's closer to what feels like "long term" notes to me. Todoist does something like comment posts. That feels like post-it notes, so I'm never tempted to dump more notes in there. I know that with ticktick, I'd end up using it more and more as a note-taker, which goes against my quixotic quest to have most my notes in one system.

Have you looked at Superlist yet? It allows you to build fairly sophisticated notes around you tasks. And you can nest notes and tasks indefinitely:

https://www.superlist.com

Superlist is one that's sitting on my phone right now, and I've explored a little.
It's a fantastic option and has a very generous free tier.

But it lacks a "Daily Notes" feature as far as I can tell.
From the Today screen I can't just start typing notes.
In that way it's no different from Tick-Tick in that I'd have to create a new "List" for each day's notes.

Unlike Tick-Tick, and more like Amplenote you can have Tasks within a note.
And like an outliner (and less like Amplenote) you can have inline tags (labels).

However, it gives the appearance of functioning like an outliner, but if you were to drag a heading or top-level bullet the items within remain in place. It also seems as if you can't collapse a heading or top-level bullet. Unless I'm missing something, this formatting is cosmetic only in nature.

Hi Mike,

Ah, the all-in-one approach is one of those things that hovers, just out of reach...

I've been using Obsidian as my go-to here, because of its unbelievable flexibility. On the other hand, I've also found it awkward to use on certain platforms, which is why my most recent solution now consists of two apps: UpNote and TickTick. (No, I haven't abandoned Obsidian, as mentioned below!)

The reason for this is simple: both apps are totally cross-platform (every possible combination is covered, including e.g. Android and Linux). I have a lifetime subscription to UpNote. And I have an early subscription to TickTick, meaning it costs me all of GBP 15 a year. The final reason: both apps are amazingly fast both to load and to synchronise (UpNote in particular is astonishingly quick) – much faster than Obsidian.

One of my other reasons for moving away from Obsidian for managing everything was that I pay for Obsidian Sync, and although it's not hugely expensive, it's not cheap either. And in fact, I've found that I can use other systems to synchronise Obsidian, notably via WebDAV server, but they're not entirely convenient for simple, everyday use. Having said which, Obsidian is still my go-to for managing and manipulating vast quantities of information conveniently, especially since I can back up UpNote directly to an Obsidian folder (UpNote can create backups in straight markdown format, and also export notes in PDF or HTML format).

First, with respect to TickTick: I'm not quite sure where your 100-note limit comes from? Maybe the free version of TickTick? But over the years I've accumulated a lot of notes and tasks in TickTick, and never yet encountered a limit. In my experience, it's the best single solution for task and project management: you can turn TickTick into the equivalent of any of the best-known solutions, including e.g. Todoist. It's also really easy to share TickTick with others.

UpNote is a solution I've rediscovered. Being an inveterate CRIMPer, I was heavily involved in suggesting features to the very amiable developers some years ago (when UpNote first launched), for which I was awarded a lifetime subscription. But then I was distracted and scampered off in other directions... Recently, because I extended my platforms, so needed something that would cover MacOS, iOS, Android and Linux (and Windows as a desirable extra), I essentially rediscovered UpNote, the most recent version of which is truly impressive.

Although it's not a task management app as such, it does, as it were, collect all notes with checklists in them under a "Tasks" filter. But you can also create your own word-based filters, and/or you can use tags (for e.g. GTD-style task management), and/or you can use nested notebooks (which are essentially an alternative form of tags, in the sense that you can assign a note to multiple notebooks). It also has a ridiculously powerful search function that is not only very fast, but also highlights all search hits (unlike so many other note-taking apps). You can also "star" your notes so they appear in a Quick Access section (essentially the same as Favourites). Finally, you can have multiple workspaces, i.e. you can divide your notes into multiple repositories, of which you access one at a time (similar to Obsidian Vaults).

You can also create templates (which is what I use, Mike, when I create my daily journal entries – my template automatically enters the full day and date, plus various sections (e.g. tasks, exercise, daily notes)).

This all sounds complicated – but actually, UpNote is deceptively simple. The editor is powerful but friendly. It supports tables and collapsible sections (= folding outlines). If you want, it can show detailed statistics on each note, as well as links and backlinks (in a sidebar). And yet it remains very fast and accessible, even if you have thousands of notes in it (which I did at one point, before offloading most of them into Obsidian!) It's also markdown-compatible (i.e. you can use markdown if you prefer) and can import notes in a wide variety of formats (Evernote, Simplenote, RTF(D), markdown, HTML and even .docx).

I use the two apps side by side, as it were: so I do my journalling in UpNote, but I also put "quick" tasks in there, i.e. stuff for today I don't want to forget. I use TickTick for managing tasks and projects in a more comprehensive way, notably if I want to do things like Kanban (formerly I used TaskBoard in Obsidian) or to show a timeline view (can also be done using TaskBoard, of course). Yes, of course you can do all these things in Obsidian, but TickTick and UpNote are optimised for speed and convenience, and I've found that on mobile in particular, I can simply work faster and more coherently in these two apps than in other all-in-one environments. I can also dump stuff in either of them when I'm working on mobile, in the knowledge that (a) it will be synced instantaneously and (b) it's easy to transfer from one to the other because both of them support copy-and-paste markdown.

Finally: both of them are proprietary, but then, so is Obsidian. To date, I haven't found an open-source, cross-platform solution that does all the above (except for the late lamented acreom, which was wonderful but is now deceased).

Obviously you're familiar with TickTick, so I'd strongly advise some experimenting with UpNote (free up to 50 notes, available on App Stores of various kinds, or directly from getupnote.com).

Cheers!
Bill

Thanks for the support for TickTick.

It's a really powerful option. I was on the free tier so running up against the 9 list & 99 task/note per list limits (299 & 999 in premium). That on top of my quest for a decent task manager with (daily)notes ultimately drove me to wander.

Upnote I on my phone. But it doesn't have the magical Daily Notes feature, and on first glance doesn't even seem to be date aware.

No, that's true – UpNote isn't date-aware at all. You can use TickTick as your all-in-one, of course – I share TickTick in a small office environment, and we have quite a lot of useful notes in there as well as tasks. Having said that, TickTick's search function, while good, is nowhere near as good as UpNote's. But TickTick is still one of the cheapest task managers if you do decide to subscribe.

Just to play devil's advocate: the reason I've returned to UpNote is because of its speed and convenience across all platforms, but also (ironically) because I do indeed manage my daily notes in it! I always pin my daily note at the top of the tree, after creating it using the template function (my template stamps the current date on the note, and in any case I have my journal sorted in order of creation rather than modification so that my current daily note always appears at the top of my journal). I keep tasks I have to do today in my daily note, but of course I don't always finish them. So I keep them in a checklist inside a "collapsible section", which means that next morning, I simply cut (or copy) the collapsible section from yesterday's daily note into my current one (cut if I haven't done any of the tasks I was supposed to do yesterday, copy if I've done a few but still have a few to do). For daily note management, I prefer UpNote to TickTick.

In addition, I only keep "live" tasks (for today) in my daily note, which means it's the only note that appears under the Tasks filter. Plus I generally pin my daily note so it's at the top of the list (all lists, including filtered ones) by default. I could also "star" it so it appears in the Quick Access area (it's easy to unpin/unstar a note), but that would be overkill!

And despite the lack of date-awareness, UpNote could certainly function efficiently as a GTD management system. I haven't experimented with that (because I also use TickTick), but it might be worth a go.

I did use NotePlan back in the day, but (a) it suddenly became really, really expensive and (b) it's not truly cross-platform. I did love it, though! And Eduard is super-amiable.

Mike Sautkulis wrote:

Thanks for the support for TickTick.
It's a really powerful option. I was on the free tier so running up against the 9 list & 99 task/note per list limits (299 & 999 in premium). That on top of my quest for a decent task manager with (daily)notes ultimately drove me to wander.
Upnote I on my phone. But it doesn't have the magical Daily Notes feature, and on first glance doesn't even seem to be date aware.

First off, thanks for all of the replies, being a sounding board and a place to think out loud as it were.

On a number of similar queries I've come across, I've seen replies along the lines of, "the best option is the one you'll use".

That being said I don't want to move away from bullet.to necessarily, and with the above advice in mind I should try and lean on it a bit more. In truth I'm not using it to it's full potential. I hardly use anything but Tasks and integrated calendars. I don't really use Notes or Events much.

For things that don't qualify as "agenda" items I may end up doing something like what I had been with TickTick, but there may be better options, circling back to "the best option is the one you'll use".

I use various tools for different purposes at the moment.
- Keep for mobile notes I want to refer back to.
- Markor for mobile fleeting notes. Drafting this there in the QuickNote.
- OneNote occasionally for work mobile notes/checklists I may want to share since we use Office 365. This is only a handful of notes/checklists.
- Then there's Desktop (Windows), which is where I'm currently struggling most. To the point where I'm not writing down things I probably should be. Once upon a time I tried to implement this https://plaintext-productivity.net/3-01-drafts-folder-for-plaintext-drafts-and-notes.html and used a few different text editors over time. Most notable were Atom and Brackets, but both have gone the way of the Dodo. Then I was using vscode. I think I may mess around with Zed next time I can sit down with this in mind.

My favorite all time note/task fusion is OneNote/Outlook.

I hope this doesn't come off as a rant. I really don't mean it that way.

OneNote's early days seemed like the one thing Microsoft got right. These days, it doesn't seem to be as healthy. It got frustrating and I abandoned it except for work, where I have to use it.

Searching is the most serious problem, in my experience. For instance, searching in all notebooks for something I know is there may find nothing. If I navigate to the section or section group where the search target exists, then search finds it with either search all notebooks or just the current section or section group.

Navigate away and the search again fails.

The other search problem is with checkbox tags. There's a wonderful feature to search for unchecked tags. That's a great way to find pending tasks embedded in your notes.

Unfortunately, it will sometimes stop finding all the pending tasks until you exit and restart OneNote.

Why Microsoft leaves things like this in their apps for years is a mystery to me.

OneNote is a good example of Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" principle (now defined in Wikipedia, no less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

But I remain astonished at the many perfectly good and friendly PKM/wiki-style solutions that have less than optimal search functions. For me, a good search function requires a number of things. At a bare minimum:

- full-text indexing
- ability to search partial words as well as full ones
- shortlist of hits (ideally with a list of brief contextual extracts showing highlighted hits)
- highlighted hits within a selected document
- facility for moving from one highlighted hit to another within the selected document
- preservation of search results until actually voided/cancelled (so you can move from one doc to another without losing the highlights!)

Also desirable are:

- some form of Boolean logic (I would say "regular expressions", except that technically correct regex is seriously non-user-friendly); at the very least AND, OR, NEAR and ideally also FUZZY

The hugely powerful search engine FoxTrot Pro (unfortunately only available on macOS/iOS) has all of the above in one form or another – but it's not a writing platform. One of the reasons I like UpNote is because it does everything in my first list, and can also search on implicit AND queries (i.e. multiple words) at very high speed. Octarine also meets all the above criteria, and supports regex (macOS, Windows and Linux, and currently in testing on iOS). The lovely (multiplatform) HelixNotes has a good search function, but doesn't highlight.

All these apps essentially work on the library/vault principle, but allow you to select your library/vault/parent folder (as indeed does Typora – actually, Typora has an excellent search function too, although it doesn't do highlighting inside docs; I've just used it to search through an Obsidian library composed of thousands of files, and the search was lightning-fast even though Typora doesn't index anything – possibly some kind of grep function?).

So there are options out there, but so many online solutions don't have these things...