Every few months, someone migrates their entire note-taking system to a new app and calls it a productivity upgrade. It rarely is. The app was never the bottleneck — the habit of doing something with a note after writing it was.
The actual failure mode
Notes don't fail because the app was wrong. They fail because they get written once and never opened again. A note that sits untouched for six months isn't a knowledge base, it's a landfill with search built in. Switching from Notion to Obsidian to whatever comes next doesn't fix that — it just gives the landfill a new location.
What actually changes outcomes
Three things, roughly in order of how much they matter:
A weekly five-minute pass. Not a full review system, just a skim of what you wrote that week and a decision: keep, delete, or turn into an action. Most notes fail this test, and that's fine — that's the point of the pass.
One place, not four. The productivity-app industry wants you juggling a notes app, a task app, a calendar, and a wiki. Every extra tool is another place information can go to die unread. Fewer tools you actually open beats more tools you configured once.
Write for future-you, not present-you. A note that made total sense while you were mid-thought is often useless three weeks later with no context. Ten extra seconds writing one line of "why this matters" saves ten minutes of confusion later.
So which app should you use
Whichever one you'll actually open again. That's the whole answer. The feature comparison charts are mostly a way to avoid deciding.