There isn’t much to dislike about NotebookLM. It does exactly what it promises, which is improving your research and learning experience through its context-aware AI. But not every app is going to check all of our boxes, so there’s always going to be an alternative that fills those gaps. I wanted to see if there was anything else that could handle long-form documents and research, especially ones that aren’t tied to Google. Many of the PKM and productivity tools I use already have some type of AI assistant, but none of them measure up to NotebookLM. This is how I came across Gistr.

I’ve used Gistr as a NotebookLM replacement, and it took me a bit by surprise. The AI summarizing and retrieval abilities are there, but I especially like how it handles YouTube videos. Plus, there are a couple of other quirks that, for some, might make it a more suitable option than NotebookLM.

What is Gistr?

It gives you the gist

Gistr is an AI note-taking tool that is designed to speed up the learning process by analyzing your content, responding to your prompts, and pulling and summarizing key highlights. It works with documents and web links, but it especially shines when it comes to YouTube videos, even more so than NotebookLM. The note-taking features are also more comprehensive than NotebookLM’s. It has an easy-to-navigate organization system that lets you manage all that content without getting overwhelmed.

Gistr is still a relatively new tool, so we can probably expect it to expand or refine its feature set down the road - I actually got the dark mode update just as I started prepping for this article. And it's also worth getting this browser extension that lets you quickly add sources to Gistr without leaving the page.

Gistr has great organization

It’s structured like a PKM tool

When getting started with Gistr, you’ll be directed to your home dashboard. It’s a very clean and minimal setup, which is very important to me as I don’t like clutter in my digital tools. There are a couple of spaces here to help organize your content:

• Recent - Everything you’ve interacted with recently.
• Threads - All of your individual note-taking and chat spaces.
• Collections - Where you can sort those threads.
• Sources - A hub of all your sources in Gistr.

You can organize these right in your dashboard, and you can access them from the popover on the left as well. In this left panel, you’ll also find something called Feed. I overlooked this the first time I tried Gistr, but it’s basically a space where users publicly share their threads and the insights they got, and you can save and share them, too. My guess is that Gistr is aiming for a lightweight social media type of feed, but built around learning. Overall, Gistr gives us a bit more than NotebookLM’s notebooks in terms of structure, but still keeps it simple.

The YouTube support is superior

It’s actually better than NotebookLM

NotebookLM is decent at analyzing YouTube transcripts - I actually built a knowledge base in it using just YouTube videos for learning. However, analyzing YouTube videos is what Gistr was pretty much built for - it excels at it. Not necessarily because the AI is more powerful than NotebookLM, but because of all the extra features that help you manage your YouTube sources specifically.

Videos are playable directly in the split-screen view. One of my favorite little features here is Free Mode, which undocks the YouTube player and lets you drag it anywhere on the screen. But some of the more powerful features include the way Gistr handles transcripts. It’s much easier to follow than NotebookLM’s because it breaks everything down into digestible paragraphs. You can also click and drag directly on the transcript to create highlights, which will populate on the other side of the split screen in the notes editor.

Furthermore, and this is probably Gistr’s best feature overall, there’s a tool called Moments. These let you select part of the video or transcript, then add that clip to your notes. You can interact with these clips just like any other content block. It’s one of the most efficient tools for quickly extracting key points from YouTube videos.

Gistr also has better note-taking features

It feels like more of a notes app than NotebookLM

NotebookLM does lack quite a bit in the note-taking department. It has the one Notes feature with a handful of formatting options. Gistr’s note-taking features are, again, more like what you’d expect to find in a PKM tool. It even utilizes the slash command for your rich text headers, code, image inserts, and so on. It’s also block-based, similar to apps like Notion or Logseq, so each note is its own, draggable block.

It’s in this note-taking area where you will find your YouTube video highlights and Moments. In addition to text notes and video content, you can add sources to reference as you’re chatting with the AI for summaries, insights, and so on. I haven’t received the NotebookLM chat history update yet, so at the time of writing, Gistr also wins in that department - it keeps all of your chats just as you’ve left them. Every prompt and response is also a note block, and they’re editable.

As for the AI interactive experience itself, the crown still goes to NotebookLM, especially since it has Custom mode now, so you can completely personalize how it speaks to you.

Gistr is right on NotebookLM’s tail

Gistr does make for a reliable NotebookLM alternative. But the way I see it is that it’s a different type of app altogether. It’s more like a bit of NotebookLM and Notion combined to create something new and unique. If your workflow relies heavily on YouTube learning and notes management, Gistr might actually be a better fit than NotebookLM.