Design choices affect not only how apps look, but also how you use them. Capacities is a note-taking application with an opinion, one that says you should do away with folders and instead categorize based on the content or theme of the notes you create -- whether they are about people, projects, or even books you read. Capacities sits somewhere between a note-taking application and a database, and whether you find that setup appealing or confusing determines your success rate with it. Either it clicks quickly or it's needlessly overwhelming. Most people will have an easier time with one of our Editors' Choice winners: OneNote, which has a generous free version and a conventional approach to notes, or Joplin, an open-source alternative that also has a free version and lets you choose where exactly to store your notes.
How Much Does Capacities Cost?
Like most note-taking apps, Capacities has a free version that gives you unlimited notes and up to 5GB of storage for uploaded photos, plus another 100MB per month after you hit your cap. If you don't plan on uploading media, you get plenty of space with the free account. It's in stark contrast to Evernote, which is functionally useless without a pricey subscription because you can only have a total of 50 notes. OneNote's free version gives you access to most features while also giving you more storage space (15GB), though it's shared with the rest of Microsoft Office.
Capacities paid plans cost $11.99 per month or $119.88 per year, a high price. Paying gives you unlimited media uploads, though each file can be no more than 100MB. You also get AI features and access to the API, among other perks. True enthusiasts can pay a bit more, $14.99 per month or $149.88 per year, to get beta features.
Notion, the application most similar to Capacities, charges just about the same: $12 per month or $120 per year. Obsidian is cheaper at $50 per year -- and even after adding the $48-per-year sync feature that most people will need, it still costs less than Capacities and Notion.
If you use Microsoft OneNote, you might pay for Microsoft 365, which starts at $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year for 1TB of storage and access to other Office apps, including Word and Excel. Comparatively, that's one of the best deals around. Then you have the open-source Joplin, which you can use entirely for free and sync using any cloud storage, or optionally pay 28.69 euros (about $32) per year for syncing.
Which Platforms Does Capacities Run On?
Capacities is available as a web app. You can also download desktop applications for Windows and macOS, and mobile apps for iPhone and Android. A Linux version is planned but not yet available, and apps for tablets are in beta.
Capacities' desktop and mobile apps work offline, meaning you can browse and even add notes while away from your internet connection. There are limits, however, as attached files and images are not available.
Getting Started
To start using Capacities, you need only sign up for an account on the website -- no payment info is required. After registering, you go through an extensive onboarding slideshow that outlines the philosophy behind the app and asks for details such as your name.
When a piece of software lays out a manifesto before you can use it, that's not a great sign. It shows either a lack of trust in the app's ability to be self explanatory or the users' ability to figure it out. The onboarding continues after the slideshow with a pinned note titled, "A studio for you Mind," which again outlines the philosophy. It's a lot.
With Capacities, however, all this preamble is necessary because the app organizes information in a way unlike any other note-taking app on the market. Get ready to spend some time learning.
A Different Approach to Making and Organizing Notes
The idea in Capacities is to create notes, also called pages, for important things in your life. Similar types of pages are classified together as some kind of object. For example, when you read a book, you create a Book page for it -- Book being the object type. And you don't just make a Book page from a blank note. Rather, you use a Book template, with fields for the author, your personal rating of the book, and (finally) your notes about the book. You might also create a People page for the author, which you can link to from the author field in the Book page.
Capacities does not use folders. That part isn't entirely without precedent, as Gmail dropped folders in email in favor of labels more than two decades ago. What Capacities is trying to do is change the way you think about organizing notes. Perhaps it's useful to some, but it's extremely limiting if you want to jot down creative ideas or thoughts before they disappear from your mind without getting caught up in what kind of object it should be or whether it warrants being in a template. Often the true value of a note-taking app is to write down a thought quickly without interruption. Capacities doesn't lend itself well to that.
In almost every other note-taking app, the left panel is where you find notebooks or folders. Instead, that's where Capacities puts all the object types you create. The default set includes Books, Projects, Weblinks, among others. You can also create a new object for any type of note you regularly create, say, Recipes, Diary Entries, Pet Vet Visits. In any other note-taking app, you'd probably put notes of a similar type into one folder or use a common tag on them. Capacities does have tags, so at least there is another way to group, classify, and search for notes you make.
Working With Templates
Capacities has a variety of templates for different objects, though you can also make your own. While testing Capacities, I made an object called Spells because I'm a Dungeons & Dragons nerd and wanted to catalog all the spells my level 8 half-orc bard can cast in the game. It took a bit of work, granted, but I built a template that included relevant information such as level, casting time, and range alongside the text of the spell itself.
Understanding objects isn't too complicated on its own, but there are a few more organization principles to learn. One is that you can link to pages and embed pages within one another. For example, you could reference the note for a book you read while working on a particular project. Obsidian and Notion are somewhat similar to Capacities in that regard, though Obsidian is more free-form about it.
Another organizational principle is time. You get a Daily note for each day, which you can use for planning. A calendar view lets you see multiple Daily notes at a time, as well as all pages created on any given day and any page that references a particular day. In this way, the calendar view becomes almost like a dashboard.
If you can believe it, I'm oversimplifying so far. I could spend way more time explaining the details of how Capacities encourages you to organize information. Taken together, these ideas make Capacities more like a personal database where you can leave notes than a note-taking app.
A huge difference between this arrangement and what you get from a more traditional note-taking app is the amount of flexibility you have. In a note-taking app, you get to decide how to write notes, categorize them, arrange them, and tag them. In Capacities, you have to stick to its methodology.
Limited Imports, Decent Exports
Something to look out for in any note-taking app is commitment -- you don't want your notes to be dependent on or stuck in one service forever. The developers who made Capacities know this and have some great backup options. For example, you can request a download of your notes and get them as a ZIP batch of files in Markdown language, complete with media if that's what you request.
Importing your notes from another app to Capacities is trickier, if not impossible. There are no tools for importing notes en masse from rival applications like Notion or Evernote, and you can only import five Markdown files at a time. Documentation suggests that more import options are coming, but that doesn't help you now.
Browser Extension and Other Features
Capacities has a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. The extension adds links as objects. It is worth noting that this tool only captures and records the URL, title, and cover image. You can't clip the contents of an entire page, which OneNote, Evernote, and several other apps can do.
Capacities is really good at importing pasted content, however. I pasted in all sorts of formats -- plain text, text copies from websites, and even text in Markdown -- and the app formatted everything nicely.
You can forward emails into your Capacities account, which involves a little setup in the Settings, but not all emails are guaranteed to come through, according to the app's documentation. That lack of reliability could be a show-stopper for some.
Paid Capacities users have access to an AI assistant powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT 4, primarily accessed in a side panel. Crucially, however, the AI can only have access to one of your notes at a time, meaning you can't ask it questions based on all the knowledge and ideas you've put into the app. Notion's AI is just the opposite, with the ability to use all your notes to inform it, one reason Notion is one of the better AI-powered note-taking apps. Capacities also limits how much you can interact with the AI per day -- what is that limit? Capacities doesn't say, nor does it explain how this "AI budget" is calculated in the first place. The only way to get unlimited AI use is to bring your own OpenAI API key and connect it to the app.
What's Missing?
Capacities is missing a few things that you get from many other note-taking apps. There's no scanning or OCR for documents, for example, and there's no ability to sketch on a tablet or phone -- OneNote and Evernote have all those features.
You can't collaborate with others. There's no geolocation tagging, meaning you can't automatically add a tag to notes that say where you were when you made them, a feature that business travelers, in particular, tend to find useful. And although you can attach an audio file, you can't record one in the app (you can in OneNote).
Verdict: Not for Everyone
If you view the world of notes the same way Capacities does, you might like this app. When put head-to-head-to-head with Obsidian and Notion, the two apps most similar to Capacities, Obsidian comes out on top for me. If Capacities' organizational principles feel like a foreign language, don't even bother with it. Two options that are much better are OneNote, which is free and full of features, and Joplin, which is an excellent open-source alternative. Both are more traditional note-taking apps, and both are Editors' Choice winners.
