Why I Decided to Compare Mem and Reflect
It started because I had a really messy morning.
My browser had 37 tabs open (yes I counted), including three different Google Docs with rough thoughts on a new automation I’m testing. Somewhere in the middle of JSON linting and attempting to write code comments that actually make sense, I noticed I had written the same exact idea in both Mem and Reflect — two note-taking apps I’ve been testing for months now.
Except here’s the kicker: they were worded so differently that I didn’t realize I had duplicated the thought until later that week… during a Zapier test. Classic 😅
So I decided to sit down and *actually* compare these two apps — not in the feature-matrix way, but in the floundering-around-while-holding-coffee kind of way. Which one helps me get to the core idea faster? That core moment when the note becomes useful. Or when it saves me from yelling at myself in a mirror.
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What happens when you write an idea in Mem fast
Out of the gate, Mem is *weirdly* fast. Like, it loads before I even finish typing “note” in the URL bar. The interface is minimal and oddly inviting. You just type. There’s no folder to pick, no tag to assign — you’re basically just yelling into a quiet void, and the void says “cool, got it.”
It’s delightful. Until it isn’t.
About a week in, I had 100+ notes and no earthly clue where anything went. Mem says its AI will help you “find it later,” but here’s the twist: it requires you to think *exactly* like the AI at search time. I wrote a note about “Slack channel bots timing out” and the only search that surfaced it later was “timeout slack bot” — “Slack automated reminder crash” gave me nothing.
🥴 That was my first frustration: the good part about typing fast into Mem is also what makes it difficult to *retrieve* anything later if you don’t remember your exact phrasing.
But Mem does have something Reflect doesn’t: the uncanny ability to mimic short-term memory.
If I write a thought in Mem and come back to it within 24 hours, it’s almost always the first result in the “smart” sidebar. It’s like the app assumes, “Hey, you’re probably looking for that thought you had yesterday.” It learns habits, kinda like your messy desk does. So for idea *fragments*, it works well. For organizing meatier articles or automation instructions? It felt like trying to pin spaghetti to a whiteboard.
There was also one random week where Mem refused to sync anything I wrote on mobile. Nothing. I reinstalled the app and then suddenly 20-something stale notes popped back onto desktop. Eep.
If I had to describe Mem with one feeling, it’s this: You’ll type faster, you’ll feel smarter, but you’ll get lost more often than you expect. 😛
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How Reflect lets you think slower to think better
Reflect was way slower to win me over.
At first, it just felt… rigid. Notes go inside folders, links go to pages, and everything has a home whether you like it or not. It’s basically old-school PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) dressed in nicer fonts.
But then I noticed something: I stopped losing track of ideas.
There’s this feature where every time you link a word [[like this]] to another note, the connection becomes bidirectional. That means if I write “GitHub repo automation bug” and link to my “Bugs to fix” note, I’ll *also* see that link back when I visit the “Bugs to fix” page. It sounds small, but it creates this web of thoughts I didn’t realize I needed.
And Reflect’s daily notes? Chef’s kiss. Every morning, a dated note is automatically generated, so I just start typing. “Zapier synced twice again 🙄 Recheck Airtable filters.” End of thought. Come back two days later, and I can *see* exactly when that bug happened.
I started using that to track little daily annoyances:
– Email delays on new signups
– Obsidian shortcut conflicts
– AI-generated blog headers that sounded like ransom notes
– Random audio glitch when toggling webcam in Loom
– Mem not showing latest ideas on mobile
None of those are worth their own “project,” but in Reflect, they live spatially in daily logs + tag connections — so I can find them again *when I work on that system later.*
The downside? You kind of have to know what language *you* use. Ask yourself: do I always write “crash” when I mean crash? Or sometimes “fails” or “breaks” or “doesn’t load”? If your phrasing is inconsistent, even Reflect’s full-text search can come up short.
Also, Reflect doesn’t load instantly like Mem. The editor is slower — not in a laggy way, just more deliberate. You actually *see* the page open. Kinda like a book instead of a napkin.
There’s one super annoying bug, though: if you try to use quick link brackets ([[) and forget to close them while typing fast, Reflect will sometimes eat the whole line, and your cursor resets. I’ve done this 4–5 times now, and every time I forget what I was mid-way writing 😑
It’s the digital equivalent of your ideas getting interrupted by a disappearing whiteboard marker.
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Which one helps you actually develop thoughts
Here’s what it came down to:
– **Mem is best when I’m capturing ephemera.** You know the thoughts that come to you in traffic or half-way through reheating lunch. Open and type. No thinking. No structure. It’s basically a conversational partner that forgets what you said two weeks ago.
– **Reflect is best when I’m committing to a topic.** Not writing the whole thing, just committing to *grow* it. If I’m developing a reference note on GPT prompts that kept triggering hallucinations, Reflect helps me build it brick by brick. When I come back a week later, I see what past-me was trying to say.
I did a weird test to prove this. I wrote a single note in both apps:
> “Why webhooks sometimes send double payloads to Make even after retry logic was added”
Two weeks later, I forced myself to find it in both apps without using exact search terms.
– In Mem, I typed “Make webhook fail.” Nothing. Then “retry problem” — finally came up, but as the fifth result. Not ideal.
– In Reflect, I searched “Make retry webhook” and it popped up instantly, because the note was linked to “Make webhook debugging,” which I’d also visited recently.
The kicker: Reflect rewards interconnected thought. Mem rewards recency and blur.
Depending on what kind of thinker you are — one of those will annoy you more than the other. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Other things I didn’t expect until daily usage
There are some subtle UX things that reliably nudged me.
– **Mem never asks where to put things.** That’s very freeing, until you’re five months in and wonder why your homepage shows only the last ten things you wrote and nothing else.
– **Reflect’s graph view is honestly helpful.** I marked all my Zaps by client name, and now I can see at a glance which clients have the most automations (and most recurring bugs 😬)
– **Mem AI summaries are weirdly inconsistent.** Sometimes helpful, sometimes gibberish. Once it described a note as “A philosophical reflection on automation delays” — it was literally just a bullet list of webhook timeouts 💀
– **Reflect has a desktop app that works even when WiFi stutters.** During a power outage at one of my rental units (long story), I still had access to all my Reflect content. Mem needs live sync pretty much always.
– **Mem’s mobile quick note widget helps capture passing ideas** way more easily than Reflect. I used it for grocery list ideas and random CSS fixes alike.
– **Reflect’s calendar view helps me space out writing sessions.** I didn’t expect that, but seeing that I hadn’t written anything in 3-4 days guilt-tripped me into adding something. So it built a habit.
Mem is good if you want knowledge-blurts. Reflect is good if you want knowledge-systems.
And in some meta way, testing these apps helped me realize what kind of thinker I was becoming. Mem let me breathe. Reflect helped me refine the air.
So I guess I’m using both now. Again. Sigh 🙂