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18th Dec, 2023
For visual thinkers, the mission is to keep things creative and free-flowing. There's a handful of note-taking apps that can help you do this.
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Visual note-taking applications haven't been around that long, but they've certainly begun to dominate the market as a way to note-take for those who love seeing their ideas, notes, and visuals expressed in front of them.
Amazingly, here on Tool Finder, we found a huge influx of new visual note-taking applications that have started to become a common replacement for more common, traditional note-taking apps and they are a hit amongst visual thinkers.
Visual thinkers love these types of note-taking applications because they ooze ease of use, provide relationship connection between notes, and most importantly allow them to see what notes, ideas, and thoughts they've had in front of them against a stream or list of notes that have to be opened up to provide context.
Note-taking apps that are designed for visual learners and thinkers.
Visual note-taking apps help those visual thinkers to create notes, visualize ideas, express thoughts, and project all of these into a whiteboard or canvas-like notes layout.
How do they differ from traditional note-taking software? Many common note-taking apps like Evernote are driven by more list-based notes that cannot be expressed on a whiteboard. The main key difference is this layout, visual note apps allow you to move notes around a canvas whereas traditional note apps don't.
Another key difference could be, depending on the software, the ability to connect notes, take daily notes, and bring visuals into the canvas - these abilities are more frequent in tools that are more advanced visual note-taking apps, we'll list these below.
Here are some of the most typical features to find in a visual notes app:
A survey by Scrintal, one of the visual notes apps themselves, presented that 68% of people preferred a better design than a comprehensive feature set. This focus on design has driven the rise of visual note-taking applications in the market.
Here's our full explorations into each visual notes app for your consideration:
Obsidian has a whiteboard-like feature for notes and visuals called Canvas.
A few months ago, Obsidian was just your amazing neighborhood notes app. Since they added Obsidian Canvas, a visual whiteboard-like feature that allows you to add notes, bring them together, and connect them up in one place, it has transformed what we think Obsidian is capable of. Canvas by Obsidian helps to bring images, links, files, and notes from your ever-growing Obsidian library into a place to connect and visualize them.
Strangely enough, with Obsidian being free it has become one of the best visual notes apps around with local, offline support and a mindful approach to note security. Many people have bought into Obsidian and Obsidian Canvas has been an experience that has upgraded their more traditional note-taking system to a visual playground.
One of the things many people like about Obsidian Canvas is using visual images and files and being able to bring them into any canvas area you create.
Here's our extensive Obsidian review to see whether all the features match you.
Heptabase allows you to connect notes up and whiteboard management of all your ideas.
Maybe it is the movie The Arrival that constantly makes us think about a giant squid when we look at this visual notes app, but Heptabase is a new to the scene as a place to bring your notes and ideas into one location. Heptabase has been gaining lots of attention for those who want to research notes and connect them up with lots of users coming from apps like Milanote that want to connect notes, organize topics in boards (folders) and collate them visually.
So lots of learning and research users, but also project planning types coming to use Heptabase as it does have a way to express notes in a Kanban-like view with boards.
Napkin wants to capture ideas and bring them back to life & connect with others.
A really interesting concept Napkin wants to bring your ideas, connect them up, clip good ideas from Chrome or iOS and Napkin will curate a list of ideas for you. A new process and system that many people are really enjoying for the way it allows you to better bring perspective to older ideas or even ideas at the forefront of your mind.
Napkin is probably the most systems led tool on this list and has a growing community of people who want to distill ideas, expand them and continue to capture them. Something we haven't seen in the visual notes app market yet.
Whiteboards help you express and bring to life your Logseq notes.
Logseq whiteboards adds to Logseq's traditional PKM experience with notes, flashcards, calendar and graph view - this expands the range of optionality. Whiteboards wants to be your visual canvas for managing notes and bringing them into one location.
You can sketch, add PDFs, YouTube videos and more - which makes Logseq's whiteboard great for managing anything visual with not many limitations when it comes to media.
Scrintal wants to be a hybrid notes app that combines canvas with the note-connections. They constantly say that Scrintal is if Miro and Obsidian had a baby, but they did recently and that was Obsidian Canvas - so Scrintal continues to evolve as a notes app, but with a lot of people interested with over 65,000 people on the waitlist for the tool.
With Scrintal, you'll be forced into the pricing plans, which is currently (at the time of review) a early access plan that costs just over $4 but this is naturally early days for pricing. In comparison, Scrintal is most like Heptabase in feature-set.
There's a new course for learning Scrintal produced by Bianca Periari that is worth checking out. We'd recommend checking out to learn PKM and more inside Scrintal.
Not really on our original list, MyMind has visual capture for notes and a way to see them all inside of their MyMind apps, but not the same canvas feel. It still is determined as a visual notes app because, it has the hallmarks, but not the visual thinking and connection concept. MyMind is 100% still worth the consideration. If you want a unique, opinionated way to take notes by capturing them, finding them using AI & a stunning experience, MyMind has all that. MyMind is the much more structured version of the apps above.
Milanote provides tasks, boards and a way to take notes in one place.
Many people like Milanote because it provides a better way to collaborate with others, manage projects and most important take notes that are very visual. A lot of people find they use it for their management of notes and life. Being able to create boards, make lists in columns, bring in visuals and files makes it more than just a place for note-taking.
Whilst it is used by many small design teams, and even the likes of freelancers that are visual thinkers to better collaborate and bring ideas and projects to life, many use it for personal management of their notes.
Google Keep is like the digital version of post-it notes for your phone.
This makes Google Keep, whilst not being as fully fledged as tools like Heptabase, it will provide you with a great way to capture images, quick reminders, color-coded post-it notes and much more. What is more visual than post-it notes and Google Keep tucks away best on your phone as a much lighter note-taking application with a visual nature.
Create notes, add colours, tag them, search for them using image-AI search and capture images and files too. Connect with Google Docs and lots more allowing Google Keep to be a fantastic lightweight visual note-taking application.
Miro is a great visual notes app for teams to collect ideas and express progress.
Whilst Miro is much more a team note-taking application it can still be used by solo users, much like Milanote can be and it unlocks a much more collaborative base to create shapes, build ideas and visuals, upload files and even build entire templates like roadmaps, flowcharts and much more. For solo users, they'll find Miro is a great canvas like layout that helps them get their thinking down and allows for collaboration, if needed.
ClickUp, again, is a tool for teams.
There's two features that allow you to take your notes to the next level, ClickUp Docs for creating notes and then there's ClickUp Whiteboards that will allow you to bring together your notes, tasks and documents in one location. This is a fan favourite for those who use ClickUp for work and many people use this as a breakout space for ideation and bringing plans together in one location.
Don't rule out ClickUp as a good visual notes app for managing your notes outside teamwork.
In the rapidly evolving world of visual note-taking, selecting the right app to cater to your specific needs can be a challenging task. To assist you in this endeavor, we've distilled the plethora of options into four key categories, each with its standout candidate.
In choosing the right visual note-taking app, consider how these tools align with your specific needs, whether it be managing personal knowledge, conducting in-depth research, collaborating with a team, or nurturing creative projects.
Each of these apps brings a unique set of features and strengths to the table, tailored to different user requirements.
Here are some of the benefits to using visual notes apps to think about:
Combine tasks, calendar, meeting booking links & task consolidation into one.
Bring tasks from ClickUp, Notion, Gmail, Todoist & more in Akiflow for organizing in one.
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