avatarTheo Stowell

Summary

The web content presents a comparative analysis of Obsidian and Capacities, two note-taking applications, from a creator's perspective, highlighting their distinct features and the author's personal experiences with both.

Abstract

The article "Obsidian vs Capacities From a Creator’s Perspective" provides an in-depth comparison of two popular note-taking applications: Obsidian and Capacities. The author, who has extensively used both tools, shares insights into their unique features, personal knowledge management capabilities, and how they cater to different needs. Obsidian, with its long-standing presence in the author's workflow, is praised for its customizability, plugin ecosystem, and integration with other apps, making it ideal for complex project management and university study. On the other hand, Capacities is recognized for its 'Objects' method of organization, simplicity, and built-in views like list, board, and gallery, which the author finds beneficial for personal note-taking and writing without the need for extensive maintenance. The article concludes that while both applications have their strengths, the choice between them depends on the user's specific requirements for productivity and creativity.

Opinions

  • The author has a positive experience with Obsidian, appreciating its customizability and the freedom it offers in organizing notes.
  • Obsidian's plugin integrations with tools like Readwise, Anki, and Zotero are highly valued by the author.
  • The author prefers Obsidian for university work and projects requiring stringent management and app integration.
  • Capacities is favored by the author for its simple and powerful approach to organization, particularly the 'Objects' system, which naturally aligns with their method of categorization.
  • The author switched to Capacities for managing personal knowledge and writing endeavors, emphasizing its ease of use.
  • Capacities' built-in daily note system is particularly praised for interstitial journaling and tracking long-term progress.
  • The author does not declare a clear winner, suggesting that the choice of tool should align with one's goals to create valuable work efficiently.

Obsidian vs Capacities From a Creator’s Perspective

Obsidian vs Capacities — the debate of the modern linked-thinking note-taking applications…

I’ve used both of these tools now, so I think that I’m well-positioned to weigh in with my side of the argument.

This piece is going to cover some comparisons of features, as well as my opinions on each of these note-taking apps, so you can better make a decision on what’s going to help you in your personal knowledge management.

TL; DR — like every notes app comparison, Obsidian’s better for some things, Capacities is better at some others. Read on to find out what each performs better at

Obsidian

This is the longest-serving note-taking application that I use, having installed it for the first time almost a year ago. I’ve loved the time that I’ve spent using Obsidian — it’s carried me through a year of university study, it’s started this Medium account and it’s also been where I managed the projects for my two highest viewed videos on my YouTube channel.

There is very little predetermined file structure in Obsidian — you’re very free to go about organising your work in any way you desire, especially with the powerful customizability of YAML metadata that the app offers.

This is what I enjoyed about working in Obsidian. I didn't fit into any of the file structuring that other apps offered, so I relished the chance to build my own customised system for note organisation. I invested time and effort into building a system, which means I’m less likely to switch away from the app just for some new shiny object.

Obsidian is based on a folder of markdown files on your computer, compared to Capacities’ online-first approach to storing your notes, which means that you can work on your projects offline as well. This isn’t a problem for most people nowadays, but the added benefit of storing your files on your computer is that you own your data — nobody can look at what you’re writing.

The obvious advantage of Obsidian is its plugins. They allow you to do almost anything within the app, which caused it to rise above other offers for me for a whole year.

I’ve made use of Obsidian’s plugin integrations with Readwise, Anki and Zotero throughout this time, but there are also integrations that you can make with Todoist, Git and Pandoc, to name a few.

As well as this, the plugins create features and workflows within the app, with offerings for kanban, task management and outlining. Use of AI in the app is possible as well, with really flexible scripting and macro options.

My app of choice for my university work remains as Obsidian, because of the ability to integrate with other apps that I use to create flashcards and long-form pieces. However, the next app I’m going to discuss has taken over the more personal side of my knowledge management…

Capacities

This new app only came to my attention a couple of months ago. I started to see some of the work of PKM Beth, who loves the app, and I decided to give it a go.

At the time, I was doing a lot of quite complex university work within Obsidian, because I was deep within the academic year, so I didn’t see the appeal of moving things to Capacities.

However, once the university year finished and I decided to focus more on my writing, this changed

I wanted something that didn’t require such stringent management of the system as Obsidian, and Capacities built-in ‘Objects’ method of organisation looked appealing. Talking to 🌿Annette Raffan 🌼 recently, it seems as though this is an attraction of the app to a lot of people.

The notes in Capacities aren’t stored by folder — every note is a certain Object. You can create different Objects within your Capacities space, such as notes, books, articles or tags. They are very similar to what you might call categories, and indeed I used to organise my Obsidian notes using a YAML metadata property called category , so using Objects came naturally to me after the transition.

This creates an effect of giving you the linking-your-thinking power of a Zettelkasten combined with the more orderly power of databases and content views, like what’s provided in Notion as well as Dataview databases in Obsidian.

What gave Objects slightly more versatility than a combination of YAML and Dataview in Obsidian was the fact that you can view the object content in several different ways, such as list, board and gallery.

You can add different templates per Object so that all the relevant fields of information in your notes are included when an object is created as well.

So what do I actually use Capacities for?

It’s mainly my personal note-taking and outlining for these articles, as well as outlining newsletter issues for Fundamentalised. I moved away from the power and flexibility of Obsidian to a simpler offering so that I could focus on actually producing work rather than maintaining a set of plugins just to be able to write words down on a page.

You can divide Objects into Collections, adding another layer of organisation if you want a slightly more complex structure to your information. I use this feature when managing my projects in the app — I divided the tags Object into projects and topics so that there’s a division between tags like ‘productivity’ and tags such as ‘create-medium-guide’.

Capacities also has a built-in daily note system, which I enjoy using for interstitial journaling. When it comes to looking back on the notes that I’ve taken for a long time, it will be a good way to check the progress that I’ve made whilst taking notes in one place.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my review of these two tools. I don’t have a clear winner, so it’s up to whether you want a tool that is infinitely extendable with all the functions you need to produce work (Obsidian), or a tool that is a simple and powerful manifestation of linked thought and Zettelkasten, as well as databases(Capacities).

Make sure you choose the tool that’s truly going to help you create more work that provides value to the world.

Until next time!

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Productivity
Obsidian
Notetaking
Technology
Apps
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