Pros and Cons of Reflect Notes App

As I’ve gone back to using the Reflect Notes app, I’ve found myself using it more often than any other notes app. I spend less time to organize things, more time on taking notes, connect them and be done with it.

Much comes down to the very flow friction philosophy meeting many of my most wanted features. To get a bit more clarity, I’ve put together a list of the pros and cons I see in using this great app as my daily driver.

I was surprised how much more useful backlinks became again with Reflect’s handy feature to easily create or decline (!) unlinked mentions. I always thought, just having existing backlinks show up is sufficient, but it clearly isn’t.

Advantages of Reflect:

• Available offline (now including assets!)

• End-to-end encrypted

• Powerful search functions (fuzzy, semantic, filtering)

  • OCR announced to come soon, making it even more useful

• Daily notes with calendar integration

• Very good voice transcription

• Fast performance

• Intuitive linking

• Intuitive Keyboard use (highlighting, indentation, line bubbling, task toggling, search, select text and hit brackets to add backlink)

• Readwise integration

• Browser highlighting extension

• Display of unlinked references

• Quickly add suggested backlinks

• Ability to discard suggested backlinks!

• Alias function!

• Easy publishing of individual notes with secret URL

• Sensible integration of AI

  • Good system prompts + custom prompts

  • Chat with search results

• Simple, but really useful tasks feature

• Confidence in product longevity (no VC / hypergrowth)

Disadvantages of Reflect:

• Limited formatting options

  • No tables (Feature Request)

  • No collapsible headings (only within indented lists) (Feature Request)

• Missing features on iOS

  • ❗ In-note search (Feature Request)

  • Suggested backlinks

  • Calendar events

• ❗ Markdown Export hardly usable

  

  • assets not included in export bundle, only firebase links

  • no metadata (e.g. as frontmatter)

  • File names with hashes effectively break all internal links

• No cards/grid view for visual browsing

• Flat hierarchy can be confusing for complex documents

Last updated: 9/23/2024