Marbles vs Apple Notes
Marbles vs Apple Notes: capture is solved, finding is not
Apple Notes is a genuinely excellent capture tool with no memory. Marbles is a capture tool that reads what you wrote and files it for you.
The thing Apple Notes gets right
Open it and the keyboard is already up. There is no document to name, no folder to choose, no template to dismiss. That is the whole reason you have four hundred notes in it: the friction is genuinely near zero, so you used it.
Any notes app that is slower than this at the moment of writing has lost before it starts. Marbles copies this part rather than improving on it. The note is written to a local database before you have finished the thought, with no spinner and no wait for a network.
The thing it does not do
Apple Notes remembers where you put a note. It does not remember what the note was about.
That distinction sounds academic until you have three years of notes. Search works if you can recall the exact words you typed, which is exactly the thing you cannot do for a fragment you wrote in a hurry eighteen months ago. Folders work if you maintain them. You know whether you maintain them.
So the pile grows, and the notes at the bottom of it stop existing in any practical sense. They are still there. You will simply never see them again.
What Marbles adds
A few seconds after you save a note, Marbles reads it in the background and works out three things: which people it mentions, which project it belongs to, and which of your other notes are about the same thing. Then it files it, in several places at once if that is what the note deserves, without moving it out of your main list.
What you get back is not a better folder tree. It is a page for each person and each project you write about, assembled out of your own sentences, with every line traceable to the note it came from. And a question box that answers from your notes only, cites which ones, and says it found nothing rather than inventing an answer.
The honest summary
If Apple Notes were losing your notes you would have switched already. It is not losing them. It is keeping every one of them in a pile you cannot search by meaning, and calling that a feature would be a lie in either direction.
Marbles is worth switching to only if the pile is the problem. If your notes fit on one screen, stay where you are.
What Apple Notes is better at
- It is on everything you own. Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, and the web. Marbles is iPhone only and will be for a while.
- It is free, with no subscription and no tier that unlocks the good part.
- Handwriting, Apple Pencil, and document scanning are all first class, and none of them exist in Marbles.
- Shared notes and real time collaboration. Marbles has no sharing at all.
- Locked notes, secured by Face ID. Marbles keeps credentials off the network but does not lock individual notes.
Side by side
| Dimension | Apple Notes | Marbles |
|---|---|---|
| Capture speed | Instant | Instant |
| Works offline | Yes | Capture and search, yes |
| Organizing | You do it, with folders and tags | It happens, without you filing |
| Finding a note | You remember the words you used | Ask in your own words |
| People and projects | No | A page each, written from your notes |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, web | iPhone only, for now |
| Handwriting and scanning | Yes | No |
| Sharing | Yes | No |
| Price | Free | Free to capture and search, subscription to organize |
Which one you want
Stay with Apple Notes if
You write on an iPad as often as a phone, you sketch or scan things, or you share notes with someone. Those are real needs and Marbles does not meet any of them.
Try Marbles if
You capture constantly on your phone, you have hundreds of notes you can no longer navigate, and you have already tried and abandoned folders.