Capacities is a personal knowledge management app for Mac that organises thinking around typed objects — books, people, projects, events, concepts — rather than the folder-and-file hierarchy that has dominated note-taking software for decades.
What is Capacities?
Capacities is a note-taking and knowledge-management application built on a single heretical idea: your thoughts already have types, and your tool should respect that. Instead of pouring everything into generic, undifferentiated notes, you create structured objects. A Book object carries an author, a reading status, a rating. A Person carries a role and a birthday. A Project carries a deadline. Every object links to every other object, and when you open a Book page you instantly see every journal entry, idea, and note that has ever mentioned it — assembled automatically, with no manual filing required.
The daily capture screen — Capacities calls it the Daily Log — works as a frictionless inbox. You write continuously throughout the day, inline-mention a person or a project, and the backlinks materialise on their own. After six weeks of daily use I've built a connection graph that feels more like genuine memory than anything I've assembled in Craft, Obsidian, or Notion. The moment a research rabbit-hole and a half-remembered conversation from three weeks ago surface on the same object page, the tool proves its worth.
What does Capacities do best?
Capacities excels at converting loose, daily writing into a queryable knowledge graph without burdening you with manual organisation. Object types are the decisive advantage: define a Book type once and every book you log inherits the same schema, browsable as a gallery or a table. This is structurally different from tagging in Bear or front-matter in Obsidian — the structure is native to the object model, not retrofitted.
- Typed objects with custom properties — schema follows the entity everywhere it appears
- Bi-directional links — every inline mention creates a backlink; no wiring required
- Daily Log — zero-friction capture that feeds the graph automatically
- Gallery and table views — browse Books, People, or Projects as structured collections
- Web Clipper — save web pages as typed objects, not raw bookmarks
- Graph view — visualise the full network of linked objects
The block-based editor is capable enough that I rarely reach for a separate writing app. Markdown shortcuts work, images and files embed cleanly, and the typography is comfortable for long sessions. It is not Ulysses, but it does not need to be.
How much does Capacities cost?
Capacities is free to download and the core tier — object graph, daily logs, unlimited pages — is genuinely usable without a subscription. A Pro plan unlocks additional object types, extended features, and priority support; current pricing lives on the Capacities website and has stayed competitive against Craft Pro and Notion's paid tiers. For a solo knowledge worker, the free tier alone justifies the install.
Who should use Capacities?
Capacities is built for writers, researchers, and knowledge workers who have already felt the ceiling of tag-and-folder tools but are not prepared to hand-wire a graph database inside Obsidian's plugin ecosystem. If you track books, people, interviews, or research threads and want connections to emerge from your daily writing rather than a Sunday-afternoon reorganisation marathon, this is your app.
It is not the right pick for teams who need real-time collaborative editing — Notion dominates that space — nor for developers who want everything in version-controlled plain-text Markdown files. Solo thinkers and researchers thrive here; shared workspaces and fine-grained permissions hit a ceiling.
What are the best Capacities alternatives?
The closest rivals are Obsidian and Craft. Obsidian is free, stores data in local Markdown, and offers hundreds of community plugins — but its object model requires serious plugin-wrangling to approach what Capacities delivers out of the box. Craft is the most polished Mac-native writing environment available, with tight system integration and excellent Apple Silicon performance, yet it is fundamentally a document editor rather than a knowledge graph. Notion covers the structured-database angle thoroughly but runs sluggishly on macOS and was designed for team workflows, not personal PKM. Roam Research pioneered bi-directional linking but has aged visually and charges a premium. For pure daily journaling, Day One is the clear winner. Capacities sits in a confident middle ground: structured enough for researchers, fluid enough for writers, and fast enough that it never feels like working against the tool.
