Need advice on PKMS
Hi everyone, I'm looking for advice on PKMS and want to run by my thinking with you in case you have related experiences or you have other recommendations. I'm thinking of buying SiYuan as a base level PKMS - just for text, pdf annotation, and ai capabilities.
Main Wish List
- My main needs are PDF annotation - I read a lot of books. I also do a lot of things with other multimedia, including videos and e-books. If anyone offered EPUB, that would be the ultimate flex for me.
- Visual graph / whiteboard / canvas
- Backlinks with visual graphs to see it
- Lifetime (No ongoing costs)
- Easy to sync. I found Obsidian a little too onerous and complicated with that
- Ideally, the ability for me to share a whiteboard or content with my family. I really need to get my kids on some structured routines. Same with my wife. We need to better collaborate.
- Intuitive
- Ideally Notion like functionality, including the ability to track calculations across tables (this is really a minor wish)
Software I've tried / am trying
SiYuan - A little bit different call to understand some of the Chinese aspects.I love the AI integration capabilities and the fact that I can buy all in sync. I'm debating using this for most of my notes, and then when I want to do projects, I pull in notes in Noteey or another tool to do the organization on a whiteboard.
Noteey - Syncing issues / power outages have left me missing notes, and I'm wary of putting everything in it. To be fair, synch is new, and I think part of the issue was I didn't understand how to reset the sync after a power outage. I don't really think there's a problem with the product, although I miss backlinks, It's just that I worry about my own idiocy, hitting the wrong sych button or deleting my own notes. I think it's a fantastic system, but I really feel it's limited to one computer for me.
Affine. I really like Affine, I've installed it on my NAS, but I don't like the fact it doesn't have PDF capabilities. I hear the AI capabilities are not as strong in the whiteboard / graph area.
Upnote - No PDF annotation and no visual graph. Otherwise, I love Upnote. I do wish there were capabilities though, because I have a ton of notes and it'd be useful to be able to summarize them. This is why I'm thinking about SiYuan.
Obsidian - I've tried it in the past, I found it requires a lot of discipline to organize and run it as a system & it has a steep learning curve. Unfortunately that's not me.
Thoughts?