Like most people, I used to default to Notion for project management and note-taking. And it’s still a solid option, but more private, flexible, faster, and completely free alternatives exist. So I’ve pretty much moved my entire workflow away from Notion now.
NotebookLM feels like the opposite of Notion. It is fundamentally different, yet still capable of handling a PKM-style setup depending on how you use it. It’s gradually taken over my digital life this year, and most of my work happens in NotebookLM now. However, it’s not perfect and does come with some major annoyances, such as the lack of organization and chat history.
Then I found Gistr several months ago, and didn’t expect much at first. But it really surprised me. It’s truly like a Notion-NotebookLM hybrid in the way it functions, and it fills in the gaps where both of them fall short. The more I use it, the more it starts to replace Notion and NotebookLM for me.
The problem with Notion and NotebookLM
They’re not as seamless as I want them to be
Notion shines particularly when it comes to databases and personalizing your dashboard with widgets. However, one of the biggest issues users, including myself, have with the app is that it starts to lag with larger projects.
Notion can also feel cluttered very fast - I often can’t find my pages because they’re nested somewhere else. Changing just one property can shift an entire table and the rest of the contents on a page, resulting in a disorganized document. And Notion AI is also not up to par with other AI retrieval tools - not that I expect a PKM app to double as an AI assistant, but if you were to use its AI features, don’t expect much.
NotebookLM’s AI capabilities undoubtedly trump Notion’s, which is exactly why I’ve shifted most of my work over to NotebookLM. It’s incredibly good at retrieval and also synthesizing what it retrieves in whatever format and tone you instruct it to. But it doesn’t come without its issues.
It's not a great note-taking tool - you can try your best to set it up as your primary note-taker, but the one flimsy Notes feature probably won’t cut it for serious note-taking. It also doesn’t let you organize your chats, sources, and notebooks. Plus, even though chat history has reportedly started rolling out, I still don’t have it.
A tool that fills in the gaps of both would be the perfect hybrid, and I’ve found this capability in Gistr…
What is Gistr?
The ideal Notion-NotebookLM hybrid
I’ve written about Gistr quite a bit this year because it’s truly a tool that took me by surprise. Gistr is an AI-powered, browser-based, smart note-taking tool. It has real, block-based note-taking features with proper formatting, and they're incredibly lightweight and easy to navigate. It has a context-aware AI that’s almost as powerful as NotebookLM at retrieving and synthesizing content. Plus, unlike NotebookLM, it gives you a handful of organization features.
Gistr also really shines when it comes to YouTube, and is arguably a much better YouTube learning assistant than NotebookLM. Unlike the latter, Gistr doesn’t treat YouTube videos like text documents and gives you video-specific features to navigate and interact with the content.
All of these features combined fill in the gaps of NotebookLM and Notion, and they give you a unique workspace that balances flexibility with structure. The only area where Gistr fumbles is with integrations. The browser extension is a bit clunky, and Gistr also doesn’t integrate with cloud services like Google Drive, which is ultimately what makes it possible to pair NotebookLM and Notion with so many other apps.
How I use Gistr to replace Notion and NotebookLM
One workspace for everything
The first thing I do in Gistr is organize my materials and notebooks with the provided folder system. Gistr lets you organize different chats into threads, and threads can be grouped into collections. This makes it easy to keep a variety of subjects separate. I can also upload sources (PDFs, YouTube videos, and weblinks) without adding them to a specific thread first, which lets me keep a little hub of resources that I can pull into my work whenever I need.
The threads themselves are just as organized and feature-rich - this is the space where you’ll do your note-taking and chat with the AI. I like starting with an outline of the work I’m about to do in my own words; there’s a list feature for this.
Then I start creating highlights. Gistr lets you do this via the split-view function - you drag over the document text or video transcript, and it will automatically populate the page window with that text as a customizable note block. I format and drag them around as well.
Once I have some structure, I start prompting the AI for whatever it is I need to learn that day. Gistr has really smart preloaded questions for you to get quick summaries and insights, but you can also use custom prompts. And the really cool thing is that the responses are editable, so I can format them, cut out parts I don’t need, or drag them around the page.
Unlike Notion, Gistr has a legitimately powerful AI that can retrieve anything in seconds in whichever format you need. And unlike NotebookLM, Gistr is more feature-rich, which makes the note-taking and learning experience more flexible.
The perfect combo of note-taking and AI retrieval
Although Gistr itself is still young and has some kinks to iron out, the tool already replaces what I used both Notion and NotebookLM for. It gives me real note-taking features for structured pages, and the AI assistant is right on NotebookLM’s tail. It’s also incredibly frictionless and lightweight; my pages rarely lag.