I've been fascinated with journaling and personal knowledge management for close to a decade now. I currently use Obsidian, but I've tried a bunch of other note-taking tools in the past. This note summarizes some of the things that I've learned over the years and tools that I've tried using. If you are interested in learning more about how I use [[Obsidian]], I have an entire page dedicated to what I have learned and how I have it configured. # Tools - [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) - Obsidian is an open source program that offers a lot of the functionality of the paid services with some really unique features. It's easily the most customizable and extensible tool, but the trade-off is that you have to get your hands a little bit more dirty and be willing to experiment a little bit. - There is a lot that I love about Obsidian. I've been meaning to switch for a very long time, but the "it just works" nature of Reflect has held me back from doing so for quite a while. But ultimately, the issues that I was dealing with using Reflect, coupled by the huge amount of customization that Obsidian offers, allowed me to make that leap. - One of the things that really helped me make the switch was to start from scratch. I still have a reflex subscription and I'm planning on keeping it for a while. But starting from March 2024, I want to try putting all of my new notes into Obsidian. At some point I may try to go back and import my old notes, but it does feel like a chance to start from scratch and rethink how I organize things. - [Reflect](https://reflect.app/) - I've long been a fan of Reflect and have used their service for a couple of years now. But there have been a couple of issues that have bothered me for a very long time. - Reflect is a very opinionated, hands off type of service. There is much less customization in Reflect, and you are really expected to do things the way they've configured things to be done. We're working on an API, but it's very limited right now, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of sign of extension support being built in the near future. - The upside is that Reflect has an incredible and very powerful user experience from the very beginning with very little customization required. There are great tutorials that are authored by the creators of Reflect that help someone who doesn't have experience with personal and raw management tools to really get up to speed quickly and take advantage of a lot of the power features. You get some very advanced features baked right in. Namely, a great audio recorder with transcriptions, a great web clipper, AI insights. - Reflect stores your data in a custom format that lives in the cloud, but they don't try to hold your data hostage. You can export it at any time in several different formats. They're very focused on encryption and privacy, and I do personally trust their systems. They've chosen this approach, it looks like they've chosen this approach not out of some desire to tie you into their system, but because it allows them to deliver the experience they want to deliver. - The biggest challenge of Reflect is that if you run into limitations with what they offer, there isn't a huge amount that you can do to address them. I've run into issues where the voice recorder just randomly fails and will transcribe half my dictations. I've run into problems where the application just randomly crashes on certain pages and the only solution is to create a new vault and re-import all your documents. I haven't personally experienced this but at the start of 2024, Reflect was really struggling with sync issues that they couldn't easily reproduce or solve and if you run into problems like that, you're just out of luck. - I really want to love Reflect, and I'm sure I'm going to come back to it at some point, but I stopped using it for reasons that I can't fully pinpoint. Over the span of 2023 and the start of 2024, it went from being a tool that I would always have open and that I would love to be inside of, to something that I started to get frustrated by. I don't think it was one particular thing. I think it was the lack of customization, the small but fairly constant bugs and frustrations I was dealing with accessing my data. The maddeningly bad search that didn't seem to be improving anytime soon and that had no alternative solution for, it felt like a bit of a black box where I was putting a lot of things into it, but I wasn't really able to access those things easily. While that's a symptom of me just not having a good organizational system, the complete lack of easy experimentation made it really hard for me to go back and try to improve my organization. - [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/) - Roam is the granddaddy of personal knowledge management tools. They really championed this idea of linked note-taking and were hugely popular at the very beginning, but they've dropped out of favor, largely because of their speed of development.