my experience with Amplenote: an (almost) 4 month review

photo by Kaitlyn Baker, downloaded at Unsplash

As you might remember, I struggled a lot with my PKM/note-taking system during spring. In the end, I migrated from Evernote to Amplenote (AN) and decluttered a lot of notes on the go, including moving a lot of stuff into my read-it-later app Instapaper. Now, after almost 4 months, I guess it is time for a reflection. Please keep in mind that I have purchased the pro subscription and refer to this concerning the features. If you want to try it out, feel free to use this link. By using this link I get a benefit in the form of a free upgrade to unlimited for a month.

general features

• Overall, the design is simple and functional.
• What I like about AN the most are the fast sync and the OCR. I love these features and use them a lot.
• The OCR works perfectly for screenshots and okay for my not-so-great handwriting. This is fine for me.
• The customer support on Discord is perfect. It is obvious that one team member checks the server every week from Mo-Fr and opens threads for discussing technical issues or sometimes gives a hint of how certain things can be done.
• I needed to get used to the system of nested tags instead of folders. It takes a bit of time, but after about one month of almost daily usage, it hasn´t bothered me anymore.
• I love the daily jot notes as an information inbox for any interesting stuff which comes up through the day. If I forget to bring a notebook with me it is also my on-the-go note-taking or reflection app.
• Sadly AN has the tendency to create the daily jots twice when you want to access the same daily jot from your computer and your smartphone at the same day.
• If you are a paid subscriber you can choose from different color schemes and don´t see any ads.
• The search function works well.
• You can enhance your experience by adding plugins and keyboard shortcuts.
• It tends to get slightly slow when you have picture-heavy notes, but in an acceptable manner.
• Notes which you haven´t used are archived, which means it takes 1–2 additional seconds to open them in the future. As it makes the overall experience fast enough, I don´t bother with that.
• A nice feature is that you can integrate your Google calendar and schedule tasks directly in AN, which syncs perfectly. To my own surprise, I don´t use this feature a lot these days.
• You can crosslink stuff easily. It works comparable to Obsidian by principle, but only whole notes and headings are linkable.
• You can move tasks to a different note with very few clicks.
• You have tons of customization features concerning tasks: you can create deadlines, repeat tasks, add the estimated time, and urgency (Eisenhower matrix), hide tasks until date/time x… It is a to-do app nerds’ paradise.
• You can add pdfs, images, etc.
• It has a basic table feature comparable to Notion, but no databases.

Computer

• I use the web clipper in my browser (Firefox) a lot. It works well enough for my taste. Not as perfect as the Evernote web clipper, but like 90%, which is enough for me.
• Sadly there is no Windows app. I use it in a browser, which takes like 2–3 mins for about 150 notes to be “indexed”/fully searchable in the Firefox browser. This is a bit disappointing every now and then and I hope for a no-login solution with faster indexing in the future.
• There are several view modes you can choose from, like note-only, note + list of all notes, and viewing 2 notes at once. It is a pretty nice experience when you want to work on two notes in parallel or only want to look for notes with a certain tag.

Android App

• You have to keep in mind that AN is primarily designed as a to-do list app. So if you use the “share in AN” function on your phone, you create a to-do which you have to change into a bullet or whatever manually afterward. This might be a bit annoying for people who want to use AN primarily for notes and less for to-dos.
• I enjoy the app for quick captures most of the time.
• A little disadvantage is the fact, that you can´t add multiple photos at once to the same note. It´s not a problem if you use it in the browser, thus I recommend using the browser when you want to add more than 2–3 photos to a note if possible.

Overall, I want to give this app an 8 out of 10. The only things which annoy me every now and then are the double daily jots and the non-existing app for Windows. I got used to it. I enjoy the minimal design and the fast sync.

Sure, they are a small team, so it takes some time until new plugins are released or bug fixes are done. But at the official Discord server, you can see that they care a lot about their community and do what they can with the limited resources they have.

I don´t know if I´ll still be using this app in five years, but for the near future I am totally satisfied and enjoy using the app 95% of the time. Thus I highly encourage you to try it out.