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Obsidian has been my main notes app for ages, and I’ve written about it plenty. The reason has always been the vault, though, not really the app on top of it. A folder of plain markdown files I can open in anything is what makes it so appealing. The UI is fine, not great, not bad, just fine. Canvas and Bases are nice additions that I do reach for sometimes, but if I woke up tomorrow and the whole interface looked different, it wouldn’t really bother me to be honest.
So I haven’t really been looking at other notes apps lately. My setup is mostly the folder these days, with whatever editor happens to be in front of me. Then someone recommended UpNote, and I figured I’d poke at it — turns out it’s a pretty great note-taking app that I’ve been dismissing for no reason.
I expected to have to create an account after downloading UpNote but you can actually use it without one. In this day and age, this is something I’ve come to appreciate since every single tool requires your email now. So you can just start writing right away in UpNote.
Signing in is available if you want to sync across devices, and it runs through Firebase on Google’s end, with encryption in transit and at rest. I’m not using sync myself, so my notes are sitting locally on my machine, which is what I wanted anyway. The account is more of a feature than a requirement, which is refreshing when you’re used to apps that won’t even let you see the editor before you hand over an email.
Skipping the account means notes stay on your device, which is the setup I prefer. UpNote also handles automatic local backups on desktop, daily by default, and keeps them for 50 days, with the option to point the backup folder to Dropbox or Google Drive for additional cloud redundancy on top of the local copies. It’s a different philosophy from Obsidian’s approach of keeping a folder of markdown files in plain view, but the practical outcome is similar: your notes are on your device either way.
Then there’s version history, which builds on the same idea. Every time you edit a note, UpNote saves the older version, and you can pull up the full list from the editor’s top bar to preview and restore any of them. The default cap is 50 versions per note per device, but you can change that in the settings. It’s a free feature too; there is no Premium gate.
Obsidian doesn’t have anything like this natively, so you’re either installing a community plugin like File Recovery, or wiring up git on top of your vault, which a lot of people do, but it’s also a lot of setup for something that should arguably ship with a good notes app.
UpNote’s organizational structure is really well implemented. You’ve got spaces at the top, which are completely separate workspaces, so my article research doesn’t bump into my personal notes or design briefs. Then notebooks sit inside the spaces, and they can nest into other notebooks, and notes go inside those. It’s similar to how Joplin does it.
Quick Access is a pinning system that lets you grab whatever notes you reach for most often, regardless of where they’re actually located in the hierarchy, which is useful when your most-used note is buried four notebooks deep. Tags are also here as a separate organizational tool, written inline using hashtags.
Focus mode hides the sidebars and chrome so you’ve just got the page in front of you — this is always a nice touch in note-taking apps. There’s also a passcode lock option, but that one’s behind the paywall, unfortunately. And the editor itself is rich text, but you can write in markdown, and it converts as you type. Overall, it feels a little more developed than Obsidian’s more raw nature.
Memos doesn’t try to impress you with the latest, complex features, and remains a lean note-taking app.
The markdown situation needs unpacking because it’s not the markdown setup Obsidian users would expect. UpNote takes markdown as shortcut input but renders it to rich text immediately. for example, a hash becomes a heading the moment you type it, and the syntax disappears. So you’re not sitting in raw markdown as you would in Obsidian. Pasting from a markdown source has its own shortcut too, Cmd+Opt+V on Mac or Ctrl+Alt+V on Windows, and the conversion is clean.
As for where the notes themselves live, UpNote stores them in a managed local database, not a folder of .md files you can crack open in any text editor. That feels like a downgrade until you remember the export options. You can pull notes out as markdown anytime, individually or in bulk, and there’s an option to back up directly to markdown files in settings too.
UpNote’s structure makes a lot of sense, the editor is comfortable to write in, and the trade-off around the database is something I can live with given how flexible the export side is. I don’t think it replaces Obsidian for me completely; the vault still has its place for the bigger stuff. But for quick note-taking that doesn’t need to live in portable plain-text files, I think UpNote is the better experience.