Every note app sells you this dream. Everything in one place. Your work, life, and half-read articles you want to get back to are under a sidebar you never have to think about again.

I switched note apps five times this year chasing that. I remember the day the one home idea broke for me.

I searched for a supplier name and got three results. A roadmap, a 200-page research PDF, and a shopping list I wrote on the ride home.

That's when I knew one app for all three means average in all three. Average was not what I wanted, so I split things up. Here is the stack I landed on.

Gemini Notebook takes anything document-heavy

Aka NotebookLM

Anything document-heavy goes into Gemini Notebook. It's the same tool you know as NotebookLM. Google renamed it in July 2026, a month after rebuilding the foundation underneath.

You get a chatbot sitting on top of your sources, happily digesting and pulling connections across them with a one-million-token context window across every plan.

Even the free tier gets 50 sources per notebook, and the 500,000-word ceiling on a single source is the same whether you pay or not.

Google clearly loves this product, because the updates arrive faster than I can keep up with.

Pay Google back for all that generosity with an AI Pro subscription or above, and you get more features like Cinematic Video Overviews, which turn your PDFs into narrated videos. You either hate them or love them. I love them.

Notion for work, and the projects that behave like work

Best for collaboration

My workplace put Notion in front of me, and saying no was not on the table. I made sure everyone knew how I felt about it for a few months.

Then it grew on me, and now I use it for personal projects too, but only highly structured ones. Trip planning, yes. Journaling, absolutely not.

Notion is at its best when information must be shared, filtered, and queried by more than one person.

One database can carry a dozen saved views on top of it, so the same records show up as a board for one person and a timeline for another.

Nobody is reorganizing anything. They are only looking at the slice they need. The last trip I planned lived in Notion as our trip's source of truth, with all the bookings and notes.

Everyone was invited to the page, and from there, I made a filtered view that showed each person what they were responsible for.

Obsidian, and the notes nobody else gets to read

Markdown and everything that grows out of it

I got into Obsidian because a tech YouTuber was pointing AI agents at his vault and letting them write his notes for him. I installed Obsidian to copy the setup. It has been open ever since.

A Markdown file is the lowest common denominator. The beauty of an .md file is that it requires no conversion.

Almost any editor will open it. Agents read it, Google Docs takes it, and so does most other software.

Obsidian also earns its keep through backlinks. Every note knows what points at it, and the graph view draws the whole mess so you can see it.

After a while, you are running a personal wiki. Not to mention the plugin ecosystem pushes it further.

Google Keep for anything that has to be fast and effortless

Don't cut a pie with a chainsaw

Saving a shopping list should take two seconds, and if it takes ten, you stop doing it. Speed beats features for this kind of note.

This capture always happens on my phone, and Google Keep gets the honor of handling it.

Keep is fast, the cards are color-coded, and everything syncs across the rest of my Google apps without fuss.

That is all I need from a disposable inbox. A note goes in raw. Later, it either graduates to Obsidian or Notion, or it dies in Keep.

My information routing system

When a new idea pops into my head, it gets routed. Centralizing your entire life into one app buys you sluggish load times and an interface built to be everything to everyone.

Five migrations taught me one thing. The setup that works is the smallest stack where each kind of information has a home that actually fits. Feature lists have almost nothing to do with it.

| Type of information | Where it goes | What it's for | When to move it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy research | NotebookLM | Ingesting PDFs, extracting data, grounded Q&A | Move finished synthesis to Obsidian or Notion, depending on the task |
| Team projects | Notion | Relational databases, shared wikis, structured plans | Stays put |
| Private knowledge | Obsidian | Connected thinking, local Markdown, mind mapping | Only move to Notion if others need to see it |
| Quick Notes | Keep | Lists, URLs, quick reminders | Delete when done, promote if useful |