As someone who has tried dozens of apps over the last few years, I have found most are only shiny on the surface much to my dismay.

While they promise great use cases, the amount of thinking put into their design is abysmal. Most simply create yet another google docs clone with ChatGPT slapped on top, somehow promising to make you 2x productive. They are usually no where close to how our brains actually function and are simply propagating the outdated document based editing.

In this post, I'll break down the best note takers I have found in my 5+ years of scavenging almost every tool in the internet.

Obsidian With Plugins

Obsidian is one of the greatest inspirations for all of us. Along with Roam Research, it was one of the first propagators of graph based note taking. I am not going to lie, being able to flex my graph with thousands of nodes on it is just such a subtle flex.

However, I realized after over a year of using it that there was not much to the graph feature. Sure, it seems to look cool, and it seems to make you feel you are creating interconnected notes. In reality, navigating the graph itself is a pain (not to mention the lag). And on top of that, you have to put in so much manual effort constantly tag each note to one another. Heck, sometimes I forget which note I took before, so how would I even know what to link it to?

Thus, Obsidian was on the right track, but because they chose a document based editor approach, they sealed their fate. Now, the good news is that it has an amazing community of people and they have made some great plugins that add AI to it to make it useful. This makes then notes you take in Obsidian somewhat useful, but again, you cannot expect people to build great foolproof software in their spare time for free. I tried the chat plugin which at least added ChatGPT to my notes, but not only was this going to become super expensive over time (I had to add my own OpenAI key), but it didn't work some times as well. Then, I tried the auto-tagging plugin and faced the same issues. With over thousands of notes, it would look up each one using a basic brute force search and this would defeat the whole point of automatically tagging it.

It was great for thought dumps though and in the occasional times that I did remember my past notes (which I had to do myself... reinforcing the lack of AI), I would have great epiphanies when it

Notion AI

Notion was the first personal knowledge management (pkm) system I tried, and it was an amazing introduction to the world. It certainly beat Apple Notes that's for sure but that anyone could do (so long as there are no bugs).

Initially, I spent a lot of times creating a huge amount of folders and documents... until I started to realize I was spending a few minutes on each note just figuring out where to put it. Sure, I could favorite some documents, but what if I had a book note that could also be a philosophical insight on how I should make life decisions? Why do I have to put it under just one document?

This just did not make sense to me, and while Notion is great for more organizational notes (where you have to document bureaucratic processes... which is another tangent of its own), it's not a great companion for our personal minds.

Mem

Then after Notion and Obsidian, I had a phase where I kept trying new and new tools. I tried Amplenote, Bear, Heptabase, Scrintal, Evernote... but none of them had gotten their core proposition right so all of their features built on top similarly were useless. They took a text-based document approach rather than a similarity based look up of notes.

I needed an AI assistant to manage all my notes and tasks for me, and that's what Mem promised to do. I think it was a great transition, and I could see my productivity increasing in terms of not only putting all my notes to use but also in building upon my knowledge and unlocking insights.

Just one huge problem remained: it was not visual at all. With so many notes coming up in my face, taking a new note became a huge pain. I needed speed and ease. I wanted to be able to see visually what was related and ignore everything else.

Constella

Of course, I am inherently going to be biased here, so I myself implore you to read the following with a skeptical mind.

After using all these tools and giving each founder huge dumps of feedback ( most never even responded back), I knew I seemed to care much more about creating the best tool by looking at the root issues rather than by building something simply appear shiny for purely profit-based endeavors.

The problems I had identified with the above were:

1. I forget old notes and am not able to build on top of them
2. Not able to see similar notes as I type new ones quickly
3. There is no visual representation, just large intimidating text dumps
4. Could not draw connections between notes to create mind-map like connections
5. When I need to think about something important, I could not get all the important notes in a snap

While a lot of people may think I'm crazy, I think a lack of great personal knowledge management leads to so many issues in the world. Leaders make biased decisions, we make problematic career choices, entrepreneurs do not do what's right for the business, and so on. Learning, acting, reflecting, and repeating is so core to life, but right now, we are only focusing on the acting. My hot take is that as we get wiser, we can achieve the same results with much less action because we chose the right path in the first place (I faced this first hand scaling my last companies as we crossed millions of users).

With all this in mind, I decided to build Constella from the ground up with us humans in mind. The same way our neurons work as interconnected nodes in a graph, a single thought is simply a node in our huge knowledge base.

That's why each note you take in Constella becomes a node. The delightful beauty is then when you type a new note in the future, old nodes of the past will appear. You can simply ignore them or you could then see that Plato had said the same thing before... and aha!

These beautiful epiphanies that I had in Obsidian once in a blue moon, what if they were more often? I'd be such a wiser person, and with this wisdom, my life would tremendously improve in all areas. Productivity, health, social relationships, I'd be able to make sense of all of them.

This still wasn't good enough for me, so I also added the ability to drag from one node to another to create connections. This isn't needed for all notes, but for more logic-based inquiries (such as as philosophical ideas or trying to map cause and effect between things in my life), this is super useful.

On top of this, I now want to work on being able to produce with my organized knowledge. Whenever I need to think about something, it is great to be able to look things up. But now what if I am able to automatically act upon these notes?

That's why I made Constella a desktop app (oh, I guess Mem was lacking that too). Not only does it make it easy to access Constella, but it also creates huge future possibilities.

I'm personally really passionate about Constella inherently, and if you try it, I really hope you can see my passion reflected in the product as it grows. And if the other tools above are more right for you, feel free to use them as well! It's all about doing what is best for us and making sure we are not only learning well, but also making the most of those learnings