Notion, Obsidian, AFFiNE, Nex: pick by what you are actually storing

Feature tables are a bad way to choose a notes app. Everything in this category has blocks, nesting, a slash menu, dark mode and an export button, so the table comes out looking like four ticks in every row and tells you nothing. The useful question is different and much shorter: what are you actually storing?

If you are storing structured records: Notion

Applicants, deals, bugs, episodes, recipes with a cook time — anything where the interesting operation is “show me all of them, grouped by this, sorted by that”. Notion’s answer is that a page is a row in a database, and every feature it has flows from there: relations, rollups, filtered views, boards and calendars over the same data.

The cost is schema up front and maintenance forever. That cost is entirely worth paying when the records are the point, and quietly corrosive when they are not — which is how so many workspaces end up as an elaborate system nobody wants to touch containing eleven notes.

If you are storing a personal corpus for the long term: Obsidian

Years of notes, in markdown files, on your disk, that you intend to still have in a decade. Obsidian’s real product is not the editor; it is the guarantee that the files are yours, that they are plain text, and that no company’s roadmap can take them away. The plugin ecosystem is astonishing and the graph is genuinely useful once a corpus is big enough to have shape.

The cost is that everything social is bolted on. Sharing a page, letting someone comment on a paragraph, publishing a document a colleague can read without installing anything — these are add-ons or paid services rather than the centre of the design. That is a coherent position, not a flaw. It is just a different question from the one Nex is answering.

If the canvas is how you think: AFFiNE

Boards, spatial arrangements, diagrams that are the artefact rather than an illustration of one. AFFiNE lets the same content live as a document and as an edgeless canvas, and if that matches how your head works it is the only one of the four that will feel right. It is local-first as well, so it overlaps with the Obsidian answer on the part that matters most to many people.

We wrote about the trade in more detail in Nex vs AFFiNE.

If you are storing documents other people will read: Nex

Specs, notes from a call, a plan, a decision and why it was made, a handbook page. Things with a beginning and an end, that someone else will eventually open, and that occasionally need a diagram in the middle.

Everything Nex does follows from that. Pages nest as deep as you like and are addressed by an id, so renaming and reorganising never breaks a link anyone saved. Comments anchor to a block, so feedback stays next to the sentence it is about. Publishing is one button with the audience decided up front — anyone with the link, named addresses, or a whole domain — and the published page is the same page, live, not a copy that goes stale. Properties are a block you insert when a document needs them, not a schema you define before you can start.

A shorter version

• The records are the point — Notion. Nothing else has its database depth.
• The files being yours is the point — Obsidian. Plain markdown on your disk is a promise nothing else here makes as completely.
• The canvas is the point — AFFiNE. It is the only one that treats spatial and linear as equals.
• The document is the point, and someone else will read it — Nex.

Most people are honestly somewhere between two of these, and the good news is that the exit costs are low in every direction. All four export markdown. Nex will hand you a zip of your whole tree in a couple of clicks, produced in your browser rather than uploaded anywhere. Choosing wrong is recoverable; choosing by feature table is how you end up maintaining a system instead of writing.