Overview of the Reflect app

Reflect is another player in the busy intersection of AI-enhanced note-taking apps.

The Reflect app has been developed by a small team with a strong track record, including Alex MacCaw, Software engineer and founder of the tremendously successful marketing enrichment tool ClearBit, which was recently acquired by HubSpot. Sam Claassen, head of Growth, can also be found delivering excellent user guides over on the Reflect YouTube channel [Link to YT channel].

Despite tough competition from note-taking juggernauts like Apple Notes, Obsidian, Roam and Notion, Reflect manages to deliver a refreshingly clean, straightforward experience that is complemented by AI — and not distracted by it. There are some minor flaws, notably a less than robust process of handling multimedia and a Map view that feels some distance behind competitors, but these do little to detract from a secure and compelling note-taking app.

The Importance of Digital Note-Taking Apps

A quick word on digital note-taking and why digital note-taking apps are critical in the modern day: my flag is planted very firmly in the ‘paper notes are out of fashion’ camp.

While many roles and lifestyles may be pen-to-paper, I would argue that 90% of modern communication occurs digitally; we often work from laptops; virtually all of us have mobile phones. Taking out a notebook and pen to jot down notes, which you may or may not be able to translate later (I suffer from journalist shorthand/doctor’s scrawl) is cumbersome.

Digital notes eliminate these woes of struggling to find your notebooks and pen.

Taking notes from my phone, laptop or watch is faster, more reliable, more interactive and is more recoverable than paper; I don’t need to flip through pages, find my notebook, translate my scrawl. I just open my app and search — it takes seconds.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should find the digital note taking companion just like we all have a calendar app, or an email app.

Reflect’s User Interface and Design

First impressions

Reflect’s basic interface follows a three-column layout. Your first column provides high-level access to Daily Notes, All Notes, Tasks, a Note ‘Map’, and any Pinned Notes. There’s also a search bar, which can be accessed with CMD+K anywhere in the interface, and an audio transcription app. All very straightforward and lacking the visual overload I experience with Evernote.

The center pane is your editor, and the third pane is relative to what you’re looking at. When looking at your ‘daily notes’, you will see a calendar, note actions, a list of meetings (if you have connected your calendars) and ‘similar notes’ — useful for creating backlinks.

You can hide the sidebars and enter a Focus mode by hitting CMD+Shift+F.

I found the app to be extremely reminiscent of the colour palette of Obsidian, which made it a comfortable home for me. I’m a big fan of the clean look and subtle purple accents. There’s a certain level of focus that you get, which is hard to communicate unless you’ve used the “do everything” apps like Notion.

Ease of navigation in Reflect

I find Reflect to be very straightforward to navigate. In keeping to a very focused selection of features and areas, I don’t find myself overwhelmed by options, and it aligns nicely to a desire I have in apps to focus only on a core set of features and user options.

Most things are easily accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Once I remembered these, I was able to quickly flick between my daily notes, tasks, map and search.

Reflect’s navigation shortcuts

• Daily notes: CMD+Shift+D
• All Notes: CMD+Shift+A
• Tasks: CMD+Shift+T
• Map: CMD+Shift+M

Easy to remember: Command and shift, then D for Daily, A for All notes, T for Tasks and M for Map.

Reflect as an outliner tool

I would say that Reflect almost operates as an outliner tool, and shares a lot of their common features, such as:

• Hierarchical note-taking
• Collapsable lists
• Drag and drop to rearrange notes an sections
• Markdown formatting

Most daily notes will, by default, be structured in unordered lists (bulletpoints), into which you can easily nest information. Most note taking apps enable unordered lists, but Outliners often use this structure as a default.

In contrast, a Standard Note will note use unordered lists by default, but you can create these lists using the common markdown format of - [space] to create one.

Core Features of Reflect

Creating Notes in Reflect

Notes are the core building blocks of Reflect, and are treated as either Daily Notes or a standard Note. Daily Notes are unique notes in that it is essentially a diary entry, tied to a date, whereas Notes are date agnostic.

Appending a Daily Note will be accessible via the Calendar and will be referenced by the date on which you created them.

I’ve written this entire Review within Reflect’s note editor.

Hit CMD+N anywhere in the Reflect app to open a new ‘Note’ to begin typing

Reflect creates a certain sense of focus by featuring no ‘editing’ pane anywhere on the screen; if you want to format text, you either use Markdown or select the text and a conditional menu will pop up.

Reflect, likely by design, does not feature extensive customisation.

• No font selection
• No font colouring
• No text sizing (except changing the global app font size, or adding headings to your copy)

You essentially limited to what you can achieve with markdown, so things like: bold, italic, underline, subscript.

I’m happy to report that opening, editing and writing are fast and snappy whether I’m using my phone, iPad or Mac.

AI-Enhanced Note Taking

Reflect includes an AI companion feature that allows users to dynamically enhance their writing and notes.

This companion can be accessed by selecting any text and typing CMD+J, or by selecting a small star icon from the contextual text-editing menu. This action presents a list of pre-set prompts, or you can simply start typing a custom prompt to run on the selected text. Without text selected, the shortcut brings up the list of prompts again, along with a text input area for adding content.

There’s a large number of prompts to choose from, including:

• Write the next paragraph
• Continue writing this sentence
• List key takeaways
• Simplify and condense my writing
• Generate action items
• Format paragraphs
• Generate counterpoints

These examples represent a wider list, offering both editorial guidance for writing and action-oriented prompts that can transform your meeting notes or transcripts into actionable items and more.

This AI functionality is particularly useful for refining ideas, summarising long notes, or even generating creative suggestions on the go. While still evolving, this feature adds another layer of depth to Reflect, transforming it from a simple note-taking app into a more interactive, assistive tool.

What I really like is how subtle the AI implementation here is: it’s not a big garish button, and could easily be missed by most casual users, but I so far haven’t experienced any usage caps, and it’s just generally a wonderful implementation. When you’ve got your returned AI respose, you can opt to insert below the selected text, copy, replace or rerun the prompt.

In the settings, you can select the AI provider (which is defaulted to Anthrophic), and you can also add your own OpenAI API or Antrophic API key.

Tagging and Categorisation

Reflect takes a different approach to organising notes by completely eliminating folder hierarchies. Instead of manually sorting your notes into specific folders, Reflect speeds up the note-taking process and reduces the mental effort of deciding “where does this note go?”

You can categorise content using hashtags or by referencing other notes through bidirectional linking—essentially creating internal hyperlinks to other pages within your notes. This method is growing on me, but it may take some getting used to if you’re accustomed to traditional folder-based systems, like those found in OneNote, Evernote, or even Apple Notes. For those heavily reliant on folders, this shift might feel like a culture shock.

Bear in mind, Reflect’s tagging system does have its quirks. Unlike apps like Bear, which displays your hashtags and pseudo-folders in the left sidebar, Reflect only lets you view tags by navigating to ‘All Notes’ and then selecting ‘Custom’ from the top-right menu. One minor annoyance: if you delete a note with a hashtag, the tag remains in the menu until you manually remove it. After syncing with the wrong Readwise account, I was left with a cluttered tag list that took considerable effort to clean up.

Linking between notes

We’ve briefly touched on referencing other pages and this is where Reflect shares commonalities with Obsidian, Roam Research and Logseq. These apps are leaning into the concept of bidirectional linking. For any SEO managers reading this, bidirectional linking is just a fancy way of saying internal linking.

Linking your notes has three main benefits:

1. Links can be visualised in a ‘Map’ (seen above): The map is a visual representation of all the notes and their connections. It’s very helpful to find commonalities among notes, and to find orphaned thoughts and ideas with no connection.
2. An ‘incoming backlink’ section at the bottom of every note: Backlinked notes can then be quickly accessed from the bottom of every note.
3. Surfacing unlinked Notes: As your ‘graph’ (your personal Reflect instance) grows, your right sidebar will surface notes that reference the title of the page you’re working on, if they’re not already linked. You can then accept or reject to link create a backlink on those corresponding pages.

You can create a backlink simply by adding two square brackets, followed by the name of the note, like this: `[[Note I want to link to]]

When doing so, a small menu appears with suggestions as you type.

This will be extremely familiar to anyone using the earlier mentioned bidirectional linking apps. It’s not new, but I’m a big fan of this way of organising thoughts as I find it reduces a significant amount of friction deciding ‘where to put that thought’.

Searching in Reflect

Hand-in-hand with organising notes is Reflect’s global search, accessible with CMD+K. It brings up a search window overlay that’s responsive and very quick. You can then apply a set of quick filters to find what you need.

I can then Tab my way through the filters, using the directional arrows to navigate through my search results, and hit enter to open that note. It feels extremely rapid.

Notice the Chat with Results at the end of my search bar? By hitting CMD+J while you have a search open, you can create a chat window where you can ask questions about the results of your search. Answers will include footnotes that jump to the source used in that response. It’s very handy if you need to quickly catch up on any action items or discussions from meetings.

One critical missing feature in the search feature is an ability to ‘save’ a search. I often need to repeat searches, such as for one-to-ones I have with clients.

That being said, I think the search feature is exceptional. Easy, clean, super fast and the ‘Chat with notes’ is a novel use of AI without being intrusive, which is where I had considerable frustrations with Mem.ai

The Reflect Map View

Earlier, we saw the Maps view, which visualises the connections between notes.

This again is not a new feature to the bidirectional apps space, and unfortunately it is the weakest feature of the app. In principle, I love a map (often referred to as a Graph view), as it allows me to see the links between concepts, and makes navigation quite novel and satisfying to me. I love to see how my notes connect, and where I can connect things — Nick Milo is definitely onto something with his staple line of ‘Linking Your Thinking’.

Visually messy connections

For a mature reference, Obsidian uses a customisable ‘forces’ feature, to simulate a gravity between notes. Notes with higher numbers of backlinks are larger, and create a strong pulling force among their child notes. This subtle force creates a visual cohesion. Moreover, you can then drag notes to reposition them should things get a little hectic. Here’s an Obsidian Graph view for reference.

In reflect, it’s a crazy tangled web that is extremely messy and hard to follow if you have a lot of notes. Add to that, the notes are static and so I cannot move them to better visualise the connection between notes.

Now, the astute among you will notice that Obsidian’s graph view has a very logical internal linking structure. And you’d be correct, since I was using it specifically for chronicling my taekwon-do research in this graph, and was able to spend time thinking about how things were logically connected. Whereas the Reflect map below is my ‘live’ graph, that is also synced to Readwise.

But beyond that context, Obsidian and similar tools have a much more mature map that is both interactive and far more customisable. The Filters in Reflect are straightforward:

• Access (public and private)
• Type (daily and regular)
• Content (show unlinked and show blank)

In Obsidian, in addition to editing the way that the graph’s forces operate, I can search and filter with extreme detail, I can show tags, I can show attachments, I can create groups of connections, all of which are extremely helpful and deliver a truly visual database to search.

The Obsidian Graph view goes further and can be displayed within the files you have open, creating essentially a ‘local’ map of the connections with the note you’re in.

These, and more, are all absent in Reflect, making the map view painfully superficial. Take the use case of finding this article, which is linked to several internal Refelct apps: in Obsidian, this is trivially easy and takes seconds.

In Reflect’s Map view, I literally couldn’t find this article — and that’s after disabling the Daily Notes. See below for a Map View with my Daily Notes enabled…

I really wanted to love how the Reflect team added a Map view, but it’s not something that I think is yet fit for purpose.

Managing tasks in Reflect

The task view in Reflect is one of the newer features that has been implemented, and it goes some way to turning Reflect into an almost “Does Everything” app. The tasks can be viewed in the Task View panel, accessible via the sidebar or using the shortcut: CMD+Shift+T. This view, much like the rest of the Reflect interface, is clean and focused, with some nice simple colour-coding for task management.

Tasks can be assigned dates, allowing you to organise them by those that are due today and those that are upcoming.

For some odd reason, task that are added to daily notes are not automatically scheduled to that same day. You’ll need to head into your tasks to assign a date.

One important markup note is that in addition to the typical check-marked Markdown format, Reflect has its own formatting. This changes from a checkbox square to a task circle and can be enabled with a simple rule; you can change this with the keyboard shortcut CMD+Shift+Enter when your cursor is on the same line as your checkbox.

The tasks themselves can be created either in a task view or a note, and it will show you that context on the task view, which is very convenient.

The task view is a relatively new feature that came in early 2024 and has undergone a series of improvements. However, it is not meant to replace other popular task management tools like Todoist, Things 3, or even’s Apple’s Reminders app. Keep that in mind, especially if you require more formatting options like bolding, adding links, or adding horizontal lines to the text, which are not available in Reflect.

If you’re familiar with Markdown, note that you won’t get a note pane or a tag for your tasks in Reflect. It’s quite static in that regard. However, if you want a note tab that you can quickly use and a note that incorporates tasks, Reflect may very well be a choice. Similar to the rest of the application, it feels clean, focused, and clutter-free.

Will it be replacing any of my existing task apps? No. But it’s a useful and somewhat understated feature.

What platforms is Reflect available for?

Unfortunately, the availability of the Reflect app leaves a bit to be desired.

Reflect can be accessed via the web app, enabling access on any device, but a native app is currently only supported on MacOS and mobile IOS. An iPad app is currently in development and is available for users as a Beta via the TestFlight programme; the iPad app does have a number of bugs at the time of writing, and it isn’t easy or straightforward to navigate the app and access features like Focus mode without a keyboard input.

For me, the Mac app is, by far, the best way to access the Reflect app, and the mobile app is close behind.

There is also a browser extension that allows you to capture pages, with highlights, straight to your daily note. If you’ve used Readwise’s web clipper then you will feel right at home. I do find the Readwise plugin to still be more responsive to capture and highlight pages, but it is a great starting point to be further developed.

Syncing Capabilities

Reflect does have an offline mode, and files are available across devices relatively quickly. For reference, I am typing this in the Desktop app, and checked in on the IOS app to find all the content up the ‘Syncing’ headline had synced by the time I checked my phone.

Data Security and Privacy

This talk of syncing brings us neatly on to security and privacy. According to Reflect’s website, the platform is end-to-end encrypted. Under the headline of ‘Hardened Security’, they say: “The contents of your notes are end-to-end encrypted. No one else can read them (not even us).”

End-to-end encryption is not something that I typically consider when choosing my applications, but for those of you who are security-conscious, this is good to see but it’s not a point of differentiation as this form of security is fairly commonplace among most modern digital apps where users store data.

One critical piece, that is common among most note-taking apps, is that your notes are stored in Reflect’s cloud storage, and are not locally saved on your device. For those of who you value locally notes, which can be exported and managed in your file system or edited in other apps, then Obsidian won’t be the service for you.

You can integrate via an API, Zapier or Readwise, but that local storage would be a nice value-add that’s currently missing.

Reflect Performance and Speed

For me, Reflect is quicker than Obsidian, quicker than Notion, and on a par with the native Apple Notes app. It’s very speedy, and also relatively lightweight.

I would note that some users have experienced anomalously high CPU usage while using Reflect, but this is not something that I have seen — but to be in mind that some users have experienced this.

Are third-party connectors available?

Yes, there’s quite a number of ways to connect to Reflect. Here’s a few that I have running:

• Google Calendar Sync
• Office 365 Sync
• Readwise Sync
• Apple Shortcuts
• Raycast
• Zapier

It’s not the most widely adopted, but there’s a good number of high-profile platforms that you should be able to hook up.

How much does Reflect cost?

Reflect is billed at $10 per month, but is billed only annually. There is no monthly option, and users are offered a 14-day free trial.

The Pricing brings Reflect inline with Notion, which is billed at $10 monthly per user when paid annually (or $12 when paid monthly). Obsidian is slightly cheaper, with a free model and a $5 per month Sync feature, and a $10 per month ‘Publish’ feature to share your pages externally.

Reflect does not have the wealth of plugin customisations that Obsidian boasts nor its rich customisation and true ‘workspace’ design; similarly, Notion completely dwarves Reflect when it comes to deep feature sets and rich media integration.

With Reflect, the key point of differentiation seem to be a focused, clean interface that is lightning fast.

Is Reflect worth the money?

If you’re looking for a focused, clean note-taking app with slick calendar integration and an emphasis on Daily Note taking, Reflect ticks most of the boxes — but the price is too me a little too steep when you review the competitors in the space.

You could get almost all of the features of Obsidian, save for Syncing or Publishing, but I’d wager that most users aren’t publishing notes, and many of us have a cloud storage solution and that could be used to sidestep the Obsidian Sync add-on.

Reflect Pros

• Very fast application
• Clean editor for focused note-taking
• Effortless markdown support
• Excellent implementation of Daily Notes for journalling
• Very practical outliner tool
• Robust syncing and cross-device access
• Secure end-to-end encryption
• Very active support community on Discord and extensive YouTube tutorials
• Exceptional if understated AI implementation

Reflect Cons

• Steep upfront annual payment of $120 per year, or $10 per month
• Poorly implemented Maps feature
• No Android or Windows access (except for Web app)
• Underdeveloped iPad app, not easy to access full feature set
• No local file storage

Reflect App Summary

I love Reflect. It’s an app that I use daily for all my personal and professional notes, and where I complete most of my writing — and it’s where I wrote this entire review. It’s a joy to use and the drawbacks that place it a functional notch below its competitors — interface customisation, rich media and plugins — position it as an app with a much clearer focus that, while not as capable, is more straightforward, less cluttered and therefore creates a more intentional use case. I open Notion and I am thoroughly overwhelmed but in Reflect, I’m much more focused and have a lot more clarity.

Another notable feature of Reflect is its AI companion, which allows users to interact with their notes in real-time. The ability to enhance content with AI-generated suggestions is a forward-thinking addition that sets Reflect apart from more traditional note-taking apps. For those looking to get more out of their writing process—whether that’s summarizing, improving clarity, or generating new ideas—the AI integration offers genuine value. That said, like any AI tool, its effectiveness will depend on the user’s needs and preferences, but it’s a feature that has great potential for those open to experimentation.”

The annual payment of $120 after a 14-day free trial is a big drawback, especially when set against competitors with monthly packages, more features and often lower monthly payments (such as Obsidian). I’d welcome a lower tier, or shorter payment cycles to soften the cost, or even a free tier — but I question what features could, in what is a relatively minimal set of capabilities, could be turned off for a free plan. The AI tools and syncing would be the typical shout, as they are often the bolt-ons for other experiences, but the team at Reflect have excelled at weaving these features into a very cohesive experience where these feel intrinsic to the experience.