Notes & personal knowledge apps
The unsolved problem is not note-taking. It is leaving.
What people complain about
| Complaint | Share |
|---|---|
| Reliability — crashes, freezes, “doesn’t work” | 16.3% |
| Missing capability | 14.9% |
| Ads & upsell pressure | 7.6% |
| Complexity & onboarding | 5.6% |
| Notifications | 5.5% |
| Slowness | 4.9% |
| Price & value | 4.0% |
| Mobile-vs-desktop gap | 3.6% |
| Integration failures | 3.5% |
Dissatisfaction by app
| App | 1–3★ share | Reviews read |
|---|---|---|
| Evernote: AI Notes & Notebook | 50% | 400 |
| Notion: Notes, Tasks, AI | 42% | 500 |
| Obsidian - Connected Notes | 33% | 336 |
| Todoist: To Do List & Calendar | 27% | 700 |
| Bear - Markdown Notes | 27% | 503 |
| Things 3 | 25% | 682 |
In their words
“4/23/26 update: caused more snooze issues. I still haven't had the 1hr snooze option since 12/24/2022's update, and the rest of the snooze options completely fail, except the 5 minute snooze, which you can use 1-2x max. Now, in Android 16, using my phone's snooze, it doesn't pop up & notify me, just slips in w/other notifications that are random spots. And backup option fails every time. As far as I can see, this newest update also didn't fix these bugs, though I appreciate it updating again.”
Microsoft To Do: Lists & Tasks · 3★ · 488 votes
“Currently has a bug: not properly syncing across devices, particularly order of things; all out of order on other devices (3 phones + laptop, all different). Very frustrating! Other than that, quite good. Simple, pretty, usually does what it should. Key frustration: how long it takes to drag items to reorder. I wish there was a way of dragging multiple items. I also wish lists could have internal subheadings.”
Microsoft To Do: Lists & Tasks · 3★ · 232 votes
“Early on, I loved this, and it was great to share notes with my wife and across multiple devices (android, iOS, PC), and creating notes from email. Search within pictures was great when it wasn't a standard Google feature. I even thought it was worth paying for. But now you get much less for free, it is much slower, and the price is many times what it started at. And some things like the PDF viewer feel clunky (no selection for cut and paste!?!). So I'm annoyed my subscription renewed.”
Evernote - Note Organizer · 2★ · 222 votes
“still waiting for all my notes to be downloaded to my device, still rather slow, some searches don't work at all.”
Evernote - Note Organizer · 2★ · 154 votes
This niche passed every gate: the pain is measurable, it recurs across vendors, and the people complaining are the people paying. We built Carryover against it.
What this study cannot tell you
- About 41% of substantive reviews are not matched by the taxonomy, so every percentage here is a floor, not a true rate. The miss rate is roughly uniform across niches, so comparisons between them still hold.
- App-store reviews over-represent the daily user. Buyers complain on G2, Capterra and in churn calls, and those sources are not represented.
- No recency weighting: a complaint from 2021 counts the same as one from last week, so some cited failures may already be fixed.
- Coverage is uneven between stores; where an app is iOS-only in practice its share is computed from Apple data alone.