Obsidian Alternative: Noteey's Best Features

Obsidian is a popular tool for personal knowledge management, valued for its flexibility and powerful features like backlinks and graph views. For many, it offers an effective way to organize ideas and manage notes. However, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and some users might find its interface or workflows less suited to their needs.

Noteey provides a simpler and more visual alternative. Its reusable card library and interactive whiteboard provide new ways to organize and connect ideas, offering a more dynamic and creative note-taking experience compared to Obsidian.

In this article, we’ll explore Noteey’s unique features and how they compare to Obsidian. Whether you’re curious about its card system, whiteboard interface, or local file management capabilities, this guide will highlight what makes Noteey a strong option to consider.

Sidebars for Enhanced Workflow

Although Obsidian also features sidebars with basic information like links, tags, and the Table of Contents, Noteey's sidebar system is far more powerful, offering a dual-sidebar setup that significantly enhances workflow efficiency.

Left Sidebar: The left sidebar serves as a central hub for quick navigation between projects, cards, journals, and recently opened content. It allows you to easily switch between different projects, helping you stay organized and jump between different tasks with ease.

Right Sidebar: The right sidebar is another crucial feature that makes multitasking seamless. It provides quick access to the library, journals, and highlights within your visual workspace. While working on the canvas or editing a card, you can simultaneously reference materials or browse your notes without leaving your current workspace. This is ideal for split-screen work, allowing you to pull in additional resources and enrich your projects in real time. Items can be dragged and dropped directly from the sidebar into the canvas, making it easier to integrate new information without disrupting your workflow.

Complete Whiteboard Functionality

Although Obsidian offers a basic whiteboard feature for organizing notes and files, Noteey provides a more flexible approach with its customizable infinite canvas. This canvas allows users to organize and arrange their ideas in a non-linear way, giving more freedom than the simple file arrangement options in Obsidian.

Users can add elements like cards, images, PDFs, videos, and audio files, all in one workspace. Cards can also be linked to other cards or elements, allowing users to create connections between ideas. This ability to connect and organize content makes Noteey a powerful tool for knowledge management, helping users visualize and manage information for tasks like brainstorming, research, and project planning.

Highlighting Functionality

In Noteey, users can highlight content in PDFs and videos, which helps improve the learning and review process. PDF highlights support both text highlights and area highlights, allowing for detailed marking of specific sections or regions within the document. For videos, highlights are linked to precise time stamps, making it easy to reference key moments in the video.

After making highlights in PDFs or videos, users can easily drag individual annotations onto the canvas or cards, creating clickable links for easy referencing and organization. Each annotation is stored as a unique entity in the library, with its own deeplink that can be pasted onto the canvas or card, or opened directly in a browser.

In the annotation's info, users can clearly see which projects and cards reference the annotation, providing a simple way to track its connections. Additionally, different colors can be used to distinguish and manage highlights, improving organization and clarity across projects.

Obsidian Alternative: The Pros and Cons

Pros of Noteey:

Visual Organization:

Noteey makes it easy to organize notes in a visual way. The infinite canvas lets you place text, images, PDFs, and videos wherever you want. You can move things around and arrange them to see how different ideas connect. This is great for users who like to work visually and need a flexible space to organize their thoughts.

On the canvas, you can link elements using arrows, change their colors, and customize their appearance to better organize and connect your ideas. The Homepage serves as a visual control center, allowing you to manage all your content in one place, making it easy to navigate and visualize how everything fits together. This approach offers more flexibility than traditional list or folder-based systems.

Local File Integration:

Noteey lets you add all kinds of files directly to the canvas. You can embed PDFs, images, videos, and audio without leaving the app. This makes it easy to keep everything in one place, so you don’t need to switch between different tools or applications.

By keeping all your content on the canvas, Noteey helps you stay organized and focused. You can interact with different file types, like videos or PDFs, right alongside your notes, making the whole process more efficient.

File import is available in two modes: Link mode and Import mode. In Link mode, the canvas accesses the original file without copying it into the app’s directory, and the file won’t appear in the Library. In Import mode, a copy of the file is stored in the app’s directory, and it will be added to the Library, making it easier to manage and retrieve later. This flexibility allows you to choose how you want to handle your files based on your needs.

Project Export and Sharing:

You can export your projects from Noteey as local files and share them with others. Once exported, others can open the project on their own devices. This makes it easy to collaborate and share your work.

When you share a project, it remains fully functional. The recipient can open and interact with the notes just like you, making sharing and collaboration simple.

Presentation Mode:

Noteey has a unique presentation mode. You can turn your notes into slides with just a few clicks. This makes it easy to share your ideas and projects in a professional format. Whether it's a research project or a creative idea, you can present your work directly from the app.

Unlike Obsidian, Noteey lets you create and share presentations without needing extra software. This feature is perfect for users who need to quickly turn their notes into a presentation and share them with others.

Cons of Noteey:

Noteey is still a new app and is being improved. It has many useful features, but there are areas that need more work. Some users might find it lacking, but updates will likely improve the app over time.

Unlike Obsidian, Noteey doesn’t have a plugin marketplace. Obsidian offers many plugins to extend its functions, while Noteey doesn't allow for much customization yet. This might be a drawback for users who need extra features.

Currently, Noteey is only available on desktop. This limits its use for people who want to take notes on their phone.

Obsidian Alternative Use Cases

Noteey is an excellent alternative to Obsidian for several use cases, particularly for users who need a more visual, multimedia-driven approach to knowledge management:

Visual Knowledge Management

Noteey is perfect for visual knowledge management. Users can organize their ideas, projects, and research visually on the infinite canvas. By placing different elements like cards, images, PDFs, and videos in a flexible layout, users can quickly identify connections between concepts, track the progress of projects, and keep everything organized in one space. This is especially helpful for those managing complex information or working on long-term projects where visualizing data, tasks, and research helps in understanding and decision-making.

Research and Study

Noteey provides a great space for research and study, helping users store, organize, and analyze different types of content. Students, researchers, and professionals can import PDFs, videos, and audio files, and use highlights to mark important points. The visual canvas lets users group related notes together, making it easier to bring information from different sources into one clear view.

Obsidian Alternative: Why Noteey Is the Best Choice

After a detailed comparison, it’s clear that Noteey offers a robust, feature-rich alternative to Obsidian, especially for users looking for a more visual and adaptable approach to knowledge management. With its focus on data ownership, multimedia integration, and presentation features, Noteey is a standout tool for organizing and sharing information.

Noteey is flexible, intuitive, and visual. It uses an infinite canvas where you can freely arrange text, images, PDFs, and videos. It provides a more hands-on, spatial way to organize your notes.

If you're a visual thinker, give Noteey a try and see how it works for you!