RemNote (long) review: futuristic note-taking?

RemNote offers a cloud-based note-taking tool with a focus on learning. It allows users to create notecards within notes to help recall terms. The basic form of data is called “Rems”, which are just bullets within a larger bulleted list (note).

Pricing Model

RemNote runs on a subscription service that costs $8 a month for unlimited storage and collaboration. It also unlocks “automation power-ups” which are basically just more features that sort your data.

For a super user, I could see a justification for paying for the Pro version, but as a note-taking editor, there’s not a huge need for PDFs and collaboration.

Funding

RemNote raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst.

Now into the app…

UI

RemNote has a very conventional UI which does not work against it. In fact, I really love their UI for the reason that it doesn’t overextend itself and it’s hard to complain about anything.

Even after spamming a bunch of random components, the interface is still not an eyesore.

UX

Positives

I really love the flashcards and I think for a student, this experience is perfect.

Imports are clutch as I am constantly using different note-taking tools and it’s nice to be able to migrate.

And unlike Obsidian, their plugin and extensions library is way easier to use.

Feel free to check out my review of Obsidian here:

Negatives

The number of features is amazing and almost all of them are honestly very useful. But, as a first-time user, this is just overwhelming. It’s also impossible to remember every single feature and its shortcut name. I could see someone becoming really good at using it, but to me, it kind of feels like a grind to just learn how to use all the features.

I don’t love that everything is a bulleted list, but I don’t hate it. I’m a fan of paragraphs so this makes me take notes a bit differently.

The interactive tour is cool for a second, but I’m lazy and I just don’t want to go on a quest. I kind of wish I can just click through the tour because this checklist feels like homework.

While RemNote brings a lot of creativity to note-taking, I feel like the majority of these features are difficult to break into and once you do learn how to make use of them, it’s a bit of a task to incorporate them every time.

The idea of having portals to retain data between notes is awesome, but sometimes I feel like that one girl who had the prettiest notes but did horribly on the test.

Is it worth it?

Similar to my review of Obsidian, these note-taking apps are pretty good without paying. Maybe I’m cheap, or maybe I’m too lazy to use the 238 features that RemNote offers.

All jokes aside, RemNote’s engineering team knocked it out of the park. It took me a couple of hours just to dive through all the features and based on their roadmap, they aren’t stopping.

If your job hinges on deeply nested and linked data, I would say that RemNote is the best option for collaborative note-taking and any research work. RemNote themselves have said:

As always, if it’s free, you have to try it. And in this case, it’s a steal.