Which Visual Notes App Should I Get?

In the rapidly evolving world of visual note-taking, selecting the right app to suit your specific needs can be challenging. We've distilled the options into four key categories to assist you in this endeavor, each with its standout candidate.

Best for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Obsidian excels in the realm of PKM due to its robust features that cater to deep, interconnected thinking. The app’s Canvas feature is particularly noteworthy, allowing users to visually map out and connect ideas on a digital whiteboard.
This functionality is ideal for those who crave a structured yet flexible environment to manage their knowledge. With local storage, offline support, and heightened security for note privacy, Obsidian is not just a PKM tool but a sanctuary for your thoughts and ideas.

Best for Research & Visual Learners

Heptabase stands out for its unique approach to handling complex research tasks. It's designed to facilitate deep, networked thinking, making it an ideal tool for researchers and academics. The app’s ability to create interconnected notes and organize them on virtual whiteboards aids in synthesizing and visualizing complex information.
This makes Heptabase a powerful ally for anyone engaged in intensive research work, where connecting disparate ideas and concepts is key.

Best for Team Visual Note-Taking

Miro is a frontrunner in collaborative visual note-taking, particularly for team settings. Its interactive whiteboards foster a shared space for brainstorming, project planning, and idea visualization.
Miro's strength lies in its capacity to bring team members together in a dynamic, real-time collaborative environment, making it an excellent choice for teams seeking a shared space to cultivate and organize collective ideas and strategies.

Best for Creatives & Designers

Milanote is a haven for creatives seeking a visually driven, flexible platform to manage projects and ideas. Its free-roaming canvas supports a wide range of content types, from simple notes to complex visual boards.
This makes it a perfect tool for designers, artists, and other creative professionals who require a visually intuitive and aesthetically pleasing environment to organize their creative processes and project elements.

In choosing the right visual note-taking app, consider how these tools align with your specific needs, whether it be managing personal knowledge, conducting in-depth research, collaborating with a team, or nurturing creative projects.

Each of these apps brings a unique set of features and strengths to the table, tailored to different user requirements.

Benefits of Visual Note-Taking Apps

Here are some of the benefits to using visual notes apps to think about:

Perfect for Visual Thinkers: This system-based notes app is a great lifestyle suitor for those who have always been creative and work with seeing rather than reading or recalling. Visual thinkers and designed-based individuals will love these, and it'll help them feel at home with their notes apps, increasing ideas to success.
Signs of Progress: Whenever you look back at old notes, you tend to see yourself progressing. Maybe it is the work you're doing or the approach to work. With the Visual Notes app, you can see how your thought process has upgraded each time.

Common Features in Visual Note-Taking Apps

Here are some of the most typical features to find in a visual notes app:

Canvas: A whiteboard-like space to bring all your notes into one space. Perfect for visual thinkers, this surface helps to drag notes around and place them in the position you want as you add images, notes, and files in one location.
Linking Notes: Connecting notes has become a popular activity of PKM apps (in which many of the visual notes apps are) and linking notes extends to the canvas in visual notes apps allowing you to bring ideas together & link them in your space visually.
Existing Notes: Pool from your existing notes typically means you can bring ideas you've had, notes you've made on research, or any note you've taken and pool them into the canvas making it much more of an opportunity to source past notes.

A survey by Scrintal, one of the visual note-taking apps, revealed that 68% of people preferred a better design over a comprehensive feature set. This focus on design has driven the rise of visual note-taking applications in the market.

What makes visual note apps different from regular note apps?

How do they differ from traditional note-taking software? Many common note-taking apps like Evernote are driven by more list-based notes that cannot be expressed on a whiteboard. The main key difference is this layout, visual note apps allow you to move notes around a canvas whereas traditional note apps don't.

Another key difference could be, depending on the software, the ability to connect notes, take daily notes, and bring visuals into the canvas - these abilities are more frequent in tools that are more advanced visual note-taking apps; we'll list these below.

Best Note-Taking Apps for Visual Thinkers in 2025: For Canvas Based Notes

Best Note-Taking Apps for Visual Thinkers in 2025: For Canvas Based Notes