For the longest time, all of my notes were spread across Notion, OneNote, and Google Docs. Each tool solves a specific problem and is powerful in its own way. But using them together can create quite a bloated setup, not to mention, none of my data is actually my own. This is what’s been pushing me to more privacy-focused and local-first tools for taking notes.

I’ve tried a lot of productivity and note-taking apps this past year and came across some gems that stay true to their philosophy of privacy and ownership. But there were still quite a lot of options to sift through before I settled on a system that works for me - here’s what I ended up with…

Why not Notion, OneNote, or Google Docs?

There are better options

The issue with Notion, OneNote, and Docs isn’t that they’re bad tools - they’re pretty good at what they do. It’s more so that they’re built around the idea of storing your notes on a server that isn’t yours, and your work becomes secondary to syncing and account infrastructure. I wanted tools that gave me a little more ownership and less overhead with the constant logging in and syncing.

Notion’s biggest weakness, for me, is that it’s not the most user-friendly tool. Larger workspaces slow down the app and become a mess to navigate. Also, every interaction depends on a live connection to its backend; even small pages trigger network calls. Plus, offline use is still quite limited.

OneNote has its own issues - it stores your data in opaque formats and offers very little transparency or portability, so migrating files without any friction is almost impossible. Google Docs is probably the fastest and most stable tool of them all, but it’s optimized for collaboration, not personal knowledge systems.

Once I started prioritizing offline use, local access, plain files, and predictable performance, these tools stopped making sense for my core notes.

What I use for quick notes

I keep it simple

For quick notes, I stick to good ol’ Windows Notepad. It’s the backbone of my plain text note stack, and I use it for writing and editing in Markdown too. The thing I love about Notepad is that as long as you remain logged out, Microsoft doesn’t collect or sync your data. So while it’s not exactly a tool with a privacy-focused philosophy, it lets me get my notes into my local storage without reading or collecting them.

It’s a super clean and minimal interface, which is a major factor in whether I will actually incorporate a tool into my daily flow. Notepad has a few formatting options, which is all I need for quick notes like lists, ideas, progress tracking, and so on. And it lets me export in .txt or .md to a local folder, which I can then choose to sync later on.

What I use for organizing and expanding my notes

One of the best local-first tools there is

To manage my notes, knowledge, and other text-based sources, I use Obsidian. It is the tool for local-first note-taking and project management. If you’re unfamiliar with Obsidian, it has this thing called a “vault” which contains every document you create in the app and is automatically synced to a local folder of your choice.

You can drag other text documents into the vault and fetch them directly in Obsidian, which is exactly what I do with my Windoes Notepad notes - I export them straight into my vault. This is how I get my quick notes into a more full-featured notes management app. However, Obsidian also has extensive note-taking features; you can create lists, format with headers, add clickable links, and so on. It's perfect for fleshing out my articles or novel drafts.

Because Obsidian is local by default, it fits naturally into a local text stack without needing accounts, constant sync, or background services. It’s also fully functional offline. Basically, all of my notes live in my Obsidian vault in open formats like Markdown, and I can easily use them across other apps and sync them to another device if I want to.

If you don’t like Obsidian, I recommend checking out AFFiNE or AnyType - both are also local-first PKM-style apps that give you extensive note-taking features.

Syncing my notes

So I don’t have to rely on the cloud

One of my top tools for getting files from my PC to my Chromebook is Syncthing. It’s a free, open-source, peer-to-peer file syncing tool that syncs folders directly between your devices without using cloud storage. It connects your machines directly and syncs changes automatically as soon as both ends are online. It uses end-to-end encryption and only works between devices you explicitly approve.

Another tool I use is Snapdrop. It’s a browser-based peer-to-peer file sharing tool and works with plain text, Markdown, and PDF files. This is how I get my notes from my PC to my iPhone and vice versa.

There’s no need for heavy, proprietary tools

The most important part of this setup is for me to have a little more control of where my notes live, and also to have a more lightweight system that’s easier to navigate and use across tools. While I still use other note-taking apps, even if just to test them out, Notepad and Obsidian are all I really need to make notes and build knowledge systems, with Syncthing and Snapdrop coming in super handy for syncing everything across my devices.