Arky

Most note apps assume you already know what you want to say. Arky assumes the opposite: you have fragments and no structure, and the canvas is where the structure gets found. In practice we'd reach for it when a project is a pile of PDFs, half-thoughts, and links that need to become one argument. The AI is the part that changed the math. Deep research returns cited answers, AI Skills turn a repeated prompt into a slash command, and in-place editing means you select a paragraph or a table cell and rewrite it without leaving the document. The model picker now runs GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and Claude Opus 5.5, so you can match the model to the job instead of accepting whatever shipped by default. The closest alternative is Obsidian — also Markdown, also local-first, with a plugin library Arky can't match yet. Where Arky wins is the spatial canvas plus native PDF handling: highlight a passage and drag it into the draft, no plugin chain required. Where Obsidian wins is control and extensibility. Watch the two meters. Workspace pricing is friendly at $7 per seat per month, but AI credits are separate, and the free AI tier is 200 credits per month — enough to test, not enough to run deep research daily. Heavy users should budget Plus at $12 for 1,200 credits or Max at $30 for 3,600. Team use is the honest weak spot. Real-time collaboration is still Beta, and PowerPoint export is advertised as coming rather than shipped, so if you need sprint boards, task assignment, or a decade of plugin maturity, this isn't the hub yet. One real-world caveat: canvas tools reward discipline. Without a habit of nesting fragments into shells, the board becomes a wall of sticky notes. Arky's mind map view helps, but it reflects the hierarchy you built, not one it invents for you.