MarginNote 3 Ratings and Reviews

A great app that could still get better

I’ve used 3 versions of MarginNote over the years, both on my iPads and Macs. A lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. Each time a new version comes out, I wonder if I want to spend the money and research what else is out there. Maybe I find something interesting and try it, or maybe I don’t, but I always come back. There’s just nothing else that does what MN does.

A lot of the other reviews cover why I look elsewhere from time to time... the app can be inexplicably weird or counter-intuitive or just a little bit off sometimes. I can often get it to do what I need, but not without frustration. Often times, where it fails are in standard UX practices that almost every other app follows, but MN chooses to ignore those and do things its own way.

I’m not a student, so I’m not making flash cards or anything like that, but I do a lot of research. I really like the ability to add multiple documents to one project. I have one with at least a couple of dozen PDFs and epubs, not small ones either, and MN doesn’t complain. There are occasional sync issues, but I’ve gotten good at backing up and—knock on wood—haven’t lost anything yet. I think if you’re only using it one system, that won’t be a factor.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your support and encouragement. To us, having ambitious goals and the means to reach them is truly inspiring. We are excited about all the opportunities we have, opportunities to make a difference in this great group. And now, it is up to us. We must make it happen.

The best out there

Ok, so this isn’t a perfect system but it’s incredibly useful. Navigation could use work when using the mindmap area. It’s still a little clunky and I only accidentally figured out if you hold the left click down it will turn into a hand and you can move it around. Would be great if there was a shortcut key (there may be?), but the developer deserves 5 stars for a stellarly useful and functional app. For the most part, it works wonderfully. I would love to incorporate OCR into the selection areas. There are a number of texts I’ve used that text selection doesn’t work (particularly titles) and I have to select it as an image, but then I can’t search for it later because it’s an image. I’ve resorted to just typing it out as a header, but then to create your own header and assign it to a section of a document isn’t simple (nor obvious how to do … I haven’t figured it out yet). But for it’s functionality it’s great and the developer keeps improving things. Finding the right video to watch for a tutorial is time consuming. Would recommend they improve that.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your suggestion.

Expensive; not functional without multiple purchases; no customer support.

MarginNote app is one of the highest priced note-taking apps on the market, yet it restricts use to a single device. If you try to use it on a second device (as one does with these types of apps), it prompts you to pay another $50.
Despite the features it boasts, it is absolutely not worth purchasing because cannot utilize said features effectively on an iPad/tablet alone (not appropriate for making use of mapping and flashcards, uploading docs/PDFs, etc); nor can you use it effectively on laptop/desktop alone (no point to a reader interface with Apple Pencil there). The purchase should be synced, but it’s not. This should have been made transparent prior to purchase. I would not have started with MarginNote had I known it would require me to spend at least $100 to properly use. No other note taking apps I’ve used has required multiple purchases like this.

Additionally, I have contacted the developer multiple times about this issue to see if there was a chance I was missing something, and they have refused to respond. Given the fact that you are probably considering this app for work that is valuable to you, I would keep in mind that you could find yourself left with no technical support should something go wrong with it.

Developer Response ,

Hello, is it convenient for you to log on to our forum and describe in detail the situation you encountered? This will enable us to help you better.

Hands down the best reader ever

There is only one competitor app to be MarginNote's alternative and that's the Liquid Text. While their UI is much prettier and cleaner. They have just a really poor mind map experience. What I like about MarginNote in contrast with LiquidText is just how much more organized it is. In LiquidText almost any accidental touch on the mindmap ruins it. Also it's a web of what you put where ever you wish to. In MarginNote however, you have an app that organizes the mindmap into a chart with direct branches that you do not decide how to be put. It organizes the look and keeps it which is just so amazing. It just makes me more and more relaxed to be in the app vs LiquidText. And also in the LiquidText you cannot have book-free studies to just have bookmarks.

But the research tool is horribly made. There is no link to the OS dictionary. Or any good offline dictionary. The UI seems horrible and has so many problems. It is just the worst part of any app I've seen. Hope that gets fixed someday.

And as far as the price comes, I think it's much cheaper than LiquidText which is awesome.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your support and encouragement. To us, having ambitious goals and the means to reach them is truly inspiring. We are excited about all the opportunities we have, opportunities to make a difference in this great group. And now, it is up to us. We must make it happen.

My go-to app now for research, organizing content, summaries

I had used another app ‘fluid’ for reading research articles, underlining and extracting text for summary and study until they crippled this in the free version and increased price for the paid. This app is far beyond that with a superb design for reading, study, organizing spaces, excellent pdf to text extraction and linear or mind mapping ways to relate to the text extractions and your notes both within and between documents. There is a learning curve for use but much is accessible playing around as well. I will be watching videos to learn better use. I have a lot of PDFs stored in Evernote and this app can access and load from within the app. I have used on my my iPhone when my iPad was not available and it’s workable but it is much more useful on a bigger screen. I like it so much that purchased the paid version and might even cough up the larger additional fee for the MacBook version. One of the few apps that is worth the purchase price and more. Excellent!

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your comments, we will do better.

Indispensable to my research

I first started using this app two years ago when I started graduate school. Since then, I have become fluent in how to use it, although much of my learning was through trial and error, because support and tutorials for MN3 barely exist. The best source for tutorials I could find was a YouTuber who goes my “The Paperless Student,” and I am indebted to her for helping me grasp how this app works. This app is POWERFUL for managing your digital documents—books, papers, brochures—annotating them in the ways you need, and organizing these notes coherently for research papers. Overall, the app isn’t hard to learn, but it would be a tremendous help if there was an in-depth video tutorial that covered some of the more esoteric features that I still haven’t explored. I feel like this app has many more features I am not aware of or don’t know how to apply to my work, and I would appreciate understanding how to use them in case they could be beneficial to my research. Overall, this app is one of my best purchases to date for getting through my graduate MFT program.

Developer Response ,

Hello, we have received your suggestion. Thank you for your support of marginote

Excellent concept, but it has some deficiencies

Excellent concept If the app were to work a little more, the tool would be perfect. Unfortunately, it has some deficiencies that, although they could be corrected, can easily cloud the performance of the app and cause a lot of inconvenience to the user. For example, synchronization between devices, iPhone and iPad, is quite problematic. Most of the time it does not synchronize properly, but days after use, and even weeks. Sometimes synchronization never occurs. There are other important faults. TAGS There is no way to create new Tags for the documents (not the notes) in MarginNote 3. ORDER OF THE NOTES. This feature sometimes works, sometimes not, especially, sorting by page order. MOVE. Something as basic as moving a file from one folder to another is torture. Most of the time it is not possible. IMPORT A WEB PAGE This is another torture. Sometimes you can, sometimes not. In short, the developer should work harder.

Absolute great tool! Newly refined and even better...

Not often I take time to write a review, but often times dev’s get hit with issues that are minor (meaning they do not take into account ones full scope of the product). One issue affects a person, and therefore the whole product is junk - No.

This product is refined and beautifully thought out. It absolutely helps me to absorb all the reading that must be done. It does this in a VERY enjoyable way. The overall beauty of this software is around ingesting large amounts of reading and pulling out the viable information in order to move on to the next reading. Top notch, worth the cost!

NOW, let it be known that manuals and help is far from available. You have to do a lot of experiential experimentation to get to know this software. I have day by day been finding new features that are exciting, because days prior I would be thinking to myself I need this or that feature... then it appeared. Hahaha, an experience indeed.

Better than the others

I’ve tried most annotation research software. The thing that I prefer with MarginNote are it’s ability to handle absolutely huge volumes of notes and documents. It has an efficiency in its mind mapping that isn’t present in other tools. It isn’t really a mind map that it creates but a hierarchical and visual organization and this suits research well.

With the latest update it has pen support and with the new child mind maps the scale of research possibilities is nearly endless.

I miss the free form of traditional mind mapping but I realize that with large texts a free form mind map gets crowded very quickly. MarginNote keeps things organized very well.

A couple of things that I would like that MarginNote is a bit weak with are: better referencing to the source document on export of notes. Even if I had to fill out that source info manually for each document I’d be happy. Bonus if it could export the citation in any of the usual formats.

The links are hard to see and to keep track of. It’d be nice to be able to color them and make them thicker.

Finally I’d like a way to link my own notes to a document location rather than having to make an excerpt to do that.

These are minor issues and I use the app obsessively as it is.

The company seems responsive on their forums and almost every feature request is listened to even if we have to wait for it.

Progress, or lack of it

This is an evolved version of the software with nicer GUI, better user experience, and new organization and editing tools. The desktop version is not released yet so it remains to be seen if the sync issues are fixed with the new release. I wanted to give a few pointers for migrating data from version 2, as the software provides no details. You need to backup version 2 notebooks (see under settings) and save the backup file on iCloud. Then go to finder and open the file in MarginNote version 3. It will delete anything already there and import the notebooks including tags, but the attached files will be missing. So you must copy these files manually from the MarginNote directory on iCloud to the new MarginNote 3 directory that you will find created there. Done.

Update Dec 2021
The app has not changed much and there are sync issues with the osx counterpart. I migrated to LiquidText which is much more intuitive and has persistent development effort. There are standards for UI functionality that MarginNote is yet to figure out.