note.md

note.md nails the unified research workflow that many academics dream of. If you are a graduate student or researcher drowning in PDFs and juggling Zotero, Obsidian, and a separate writing app, this is a serious time-saver. The local AI is the standout: semantic search, automatic figure extraction, and evidence scanning all happen on your machine—no data leaves your Mac. For privacy-conscious researchers, that's a huge win. The free tier is generous: you get the full writing workspace, citations, graph view, and all core features. Premium ($8.99/mo or $49.99/yr) adds the AI workflows. Student discounts make it even cheaper. On the downside, note.md is Mac-only via the App Store. No Windows, Linux, or web version. There are also no real-time collaboration features—no shared projects, comments, or team libraries. If you work in a group, you'll need to sync files manually. Compared to alternatives, Zotero remains the best free citation manager with browser integration, and Obsidian offers a more mature plugin ecosystem. But neither combines reading, writing, citations, and local AI in one app. note.md's closest competitor is Papers or ReadCube Papers, but those are more citation-focused and less markdown-native. Where note.md bites: you must be comfortable with markdown. There's no rich text WYSIWYG. Also, the local AI can be slow on older Macs with limited RAM. In practice, we'd reach for note.md when writing a thesis or a large literature review where privacy and local indexing matter more than collaboration or cross-platform access.