A personal knowledge base and a team memory are two different things. Here are the criteria that separate them, and the cases where switching would be a mistake.
The question rarely arises for one person: someone writing for themselves should keep the tool they are fast in. It arises when the note stops being private — a visit report a colleague must find, a procedure three people edit, an observation that has to be attached to a form submission. At that point the subject is no longer editor quality but who may read, who may write, and what survives when the person who kept the notes changes role.
The questions to ask any tool, ours included. The answer given here is Thingsform's.
Notes live in the shared workspace, organised in folders, under the account's permissions. A procedure written by one person stays readable by the team the day that person is on leave — the most ordinary and most frequent reason people look for another tool.
A note attaches directly to a form submission, and files itself alongside the folder's documents. A visit's write-up is therefore found from the visit itself, rather than in a parallel tree someone has to remember to maintain.
It stays in the organisation's account, with everything else. This is usually the deciding point: a remarkable knowledge base stored on one personal machine becomes unreachable overnight, and there is no good way to recover it afterwards.
On servers located in the European Union, with daily backups. For internal notes containing client names or intervention findings, the question arises the moment you move off one person's machine and onto an online service.
The Notes module is included from the Essential plan. The free plan already covers forms, which lets you test the overall logic before paying anything — and check that the note-to-submission link matches the way you actually work.
Often, no. Here are both cases, in the honest order.
Yes, Markdown pastes straight into the editor and keeps its formatting. For a large library, our advice is to bring across what is genuinely shared first — procedures, templates, write-ups — and leave the rest where it is. A bulk import mostly produces noise.
No, and many people keep both: one for personal thinking, the other for what the team must be able to find. The two uses look alike from a distance and separate clearly as soon as you look at who needs access to what.
Yes, and this is the point that most clearly separates the two uses. A note attached to a submission is found from that submission, and the reverse: an intervention's context stops being a separate item someone has to remember to reconcile.
We make no claims about another vendor's features or pricing: they change, and a frozen page would become misleading. What we describe here are the criteria to examine and what Thingsform does. For the other tool, refer to its current terms.
Obsidian is a trademark of its publisher, cited here for reference. This page does not describe its features or pricing, which change over time: refer to its current terms.
The right way to decide
Rebuild your hardest form on the free plan, and have it filled in the field. Half a day is enough, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.