Here’s a tantalizing little paradox to chew over: One of the most interesting up-and-coming productivity apps is also one of the most immediately familiar-feeling—on the surface, at least.
The app is called Capacities. At this point, most of its recognition revolves around the fact that it was recently featured as a top productivity pick by tech journalist Casey Newton in his Platformer newsletter.
But while Capacities may be flying mostly under the radar right now, it’s developing a relatively small but fiercely devoted base of people who are both ready for something different and eager to avoid the chore of adapting to an entirely new note-taking paradigm.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s why its new-yet-familiar approach is striking such a chord.
An inevitable comparison
Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: When you first open up Capacities, you’re going to think: “Huh. This looks a lot like Notion.”
If you’ve spent any amount of time with Notion, the comparison is impossible to avoid. Capacities’ look and feel and even its underlying philosophy is undeniably similar to the block-based, open-canvas framework popularized by Notion—a multipurpose productivity behemoth that, ironically enough, has recently been fending off even bigger tech giants like Google and Microsoft and working to stake its claim in the competitive productivity service landscape.
But for all the assets Notion offers and all the dedicated users that company now claims, the comparatively tiny team behind Capacities saw the need for something more—for a service that started with that same core concept but then took off in directions Notion isn’t pursuing.
“We think Notion did a lot of things well,” says Capacities cofounder Michael von Hohnhorst. “Where we differ is in the way we organize content and information.”
Capacities is the brainchild of von Hohnhorst and his college buddy Steffen Bleher, both of whom exude ample youthful energy at the ripe old age of 28. The pair started the service when they met studying electrical engineering at a German university and realized they weren’t entirely thrilled with any of the tools they had for collecting and organizing the endless-seeming streams of info in their lives. That’s when they started laying the groundwork for what would become Capacities, on their own and without any external investments. That’s still how they operate today, though they do now have two full-time employees and a couple of contractors working virtually alongside them.
Like Notion, Capacities can be a little difficult to describe. Is it a note-taking app? (Yes, in a sense.) Is it a planner and professional organizer? (Sometimes, if you want.) Is it an alternative to an office suite—a place where you can dive deep into documents and multimedia idea assembly? (That, too, potentially.)
Ultimately, it’s all of those things—and then some. At the simplest possible level, it’s a place to put important info, organize it, and then be able to find it again later. Beyond that, the specifics are mostly up to you.
One thing Capacities is adamant about, though, is the fact that you shouldn’t be wasting your time actively thinking about organization.
In fact, Capacities strives to break you of the habit of actively organizing your information at all. Instead of the traditional (and, yes, Notion-like) system of maintaining a carefully created hierarchy of categories and subpages, Capacities encourages you to think of every item you input as an object—one with its own natural, frictionless connections to other objects you create.
“You think more about the links and connections between your content,” von Hohnhorst explains. “We removed a lot of the organizational friction—like where do I put something, what database do I edit to, or what hierarchy is my folder structure.”
It’s a slightly lofty concept to wrap your head around, but once you get into the app and start trying it out for yourself, it makes a surprising amount of sense.
Basically, for anything you want to add into Capacities, you pick from a list of possible object types—a page, a person, a project, a link, an image, a PDF, an audio recording, or a file, for instance—and then you just type or paste whatever’s on your mind into the resulting space. You can even create your own custom object type, if you have a specific need the existing options don’t address.
When other objects come up organically, you simply mention them—using either the @ symbol or double-brackets ([[]])—to reference them in a connected way that makes it easy to find and then open them as needed.
To be fair, Notion—and other services in this space, such as Obsidian—do something very similar, all the way down to specific commands for creating such connections. But with Capacities, that process is positioned as the core part of the organizational system and the main way you use the service, without all the other complexity around it.
“We tried to build a tool that works more out of the box,” von Hohnhorst says. “You don’t have to spend more time installing plugins and setting up databases than actually taking notes.”
To that end, Capacities also handles most of the post-input processing for you. For instance, the service automatically creates a special “Backlinks” section at the bottom of every object that includes links to every other object referenced within it. It’s designed to reinforce that goal of devoting less time and energy to worrying about the organization and more to focusing on your actual material—with Capacities surfacing the connections and bringing up pertinent past info as you go.
“That’s how you think in your brain,” von Hohnhorst says. “We’ve found this a very intuitive way and frictionless way to organize content.”
That may be the foundation of what Capacities aspires to achieve. But in practice, there’s much more to the surface beyond that simple-seeming outer layer.
Owning your organization
For all the talk about Capacities eliminating the need for organization, the app—which is available on the web as well as in native Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android forms, with an iPad version in early-access availability—actually does offer some fairly intricate systems for keeping your info in order, if you want to embrace them.
You can create multiple spaces to store your objects, for instance—maybe one for personal notes and one for work projects—and those spaces remain completely isolated from each other, without any cross-linking or connections.
You can also manually apply tags onto objects for an additional layer of organization and discovery. And you can switch over to a chronological calendar view to see all of your objects based on when you created them, for another way to organize and interpret whatever info you’re adding into the mix.
Interestingly, those still-slightly-manual mechanisms highlight an area where AI could soon play a meaningful role. Right now, Capacities integrates AI in all the usual ways—via an open-ended assistant-like chatbot that can answer questions about your material, write new content on your behalf, and so on.
But in the future, von Hohnhorst sees AI starting to actively surface related content from your existing material as you write—popping up and analyzing text from past objects alongside your active working area, in other words, much in the way a startup I profiled a couple years ago called Heyday sought to do. (Heyday just announced its acquisition by a virtual coaching platform called BetterUp this month.)
“You can work on some feature and remove some friction and make something 5 or 10% faster, but AI has the potential to make people 10 times more productive,” von Hohnhorst says.
Perhaps not surprisingly, von Hohnhorst is already seeing such possibilities divide the current Capacities camp—with one group of early adopters adamant that the service shouldn’t incorporate AI in any way and another that’s gung ho about the technology’s still-rough promise. With that in mind, Capacities keeps all AI features off by default and treats them as opt-in-only additions, and von Hohnhorst expects that same approach to be maintained moving forward.
As for that userbase, right now, Capacities boasts roughly 120,000 registered users—with most being on the service’s generous free plan and a subset in the “single-digit thousands” opting for a $10-a-month premium path that includes the aforementioned AI assistant along with limit-free media uploads and a smattering of other extras. (That pricing, notably, is very much in line with Notion’s model—though Notion requires an extra $10-a-month add-on for full access to its AI assistant.)
Speaking of pricing, that’s one more place where Capacities plans to chart a different path than most of its productivity app contemporaries: The service is set on serving individuals—not teams—and intends to maintain that focus moving forward, even as it grows over time.
“A lot of these [services] monetize in the B2B space and kind of—they don’t care that much anymore about the individual users,” von Hohnhorst says. “We believe in the individual and organizing your brain, which is unique in the way it fits to you.”
For now, that focus seems to be serving Capacities well. And in a world with endless-seeming perspectives about the perfect path to productivity, maybe there’s room for both a giant like Notion and a more narrowly focused player like Capacities to thrive.
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