Switching
Honest migration guides for fourteen tools: what actually exports, what is worth bringing, and how Mindly organizes it the moment it lands. No importer promises, no wholesale moves, no drama.
The approach
The best switch is not a copy. It is the one chance you get to choose, from years of accumulation, what your library should actually contain.
Every migration guide on this site tells the same truth: Mindly has no bulk importers, and you should not want to move everything anyway. Export from your current tool in its standard format, keep that export as a permanent archive on your own disk, and bring over only the material you still reopen. The archive means nothing is ever lost. The curation means what arrives is all signal.
What makes the move worth it is what happens on arrival. Each item you bring in gets read, tagged by topic, summarized if it is long, and connected to related saves, automatically. OCR makes screenshots and scans searchable, and voice memos are transcribed. The organizing system your old tool expected you to rebuild is the part that no longer exists, and plain-language search replaces remembering where anything was filed.
Fourteen starting points
Each guide covers what exports, what to bring, and what changes once you land.
The classic
The app that taught everyone to save everything, now shedding longtime users after years of price changes. ENEX and HTML exports come out cleanly, and a curated selection goes in.
Migration guideWorkspace
Brilliant for team wikis, heavy for personal saves. Notion exports Markdown and CSV; many people keep it at work and move the personal library somewhere it maintains itself.
Migration guideMarkdown vault
Your vault is already a folder of local Markdown, which makes this the easiest move on the page. Drag in the notes that still matter and skip rebuilding the plugin stack.
Migration guideThe default
Genuinely fine until your library outgrows folders and keyword search. Notes export one at a time or by copy and drag, so this move rewards curating as you go.
Migration guideMicrosoft
The freeform canvas grows into sprawl, and exports are famously awkward. Curate hard: copy the sections you still open, and let the archive stay where it is.
Migration guideNetworked notes
The tool that popularized backlinks exports Markdown and JSON. Bring the pages that still earn a place; the graph gets rebuilt for you on arrival, automatically.
Migration guideOutliner
Local Markdown already, like Obsidian. The journals and blocks come over as text, and the outline discipline stops being a requirement for staying organized.
Migration guideObject notes
Markdown export brings your objects out as plain notes. The typed structure stays behind; the content gets tagged, summarized, and connected without the modeling work.
Migration guideDaily notes
Markdown export carries your daily notes and backlinked pages. What changes is range: links, PDFs, screenshots, and voice land in the same library as the notes.
Migration guideSupertags
JSON export with selective pasting is the honest path. Supertags, fields, and queries do not translate anywhere, but the ideas inside them do.
Migration guideMeeting notes
AI meeting notes are most useful next to everything else you know about the project. Bring the summaries that matter into a library that connects them.
Migration guideResearch
Keep it for interrogating a bounded pile of sources. The conclusions it helps you reach deserve a permanent home that outlives the notebook.
Migration guideRead-it-later
Pocket is gone and queues everywhere run long. Saved articles become searchable, summarized library items instead of a list you feel guilty about.
Migration guideEverything else
Text, files, PDFs, images, links, voice: if your current tool can produce any of these, Mindly can hold them, read them, and organize them. Start free and test it with ten items.
Migration guideCheat sheet
The export options of every tool on this page, in one table. Run the export first, decide what moves second.
| App | What exports | You bring | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote | ENEX or HTML per notebook | Files and text | Desktop app exports; curate by notebook |
| Notion | Markdown and CSV (zip) | Files and text | Databases flatten to CSV; pages become Markdown |
| Obsidian | Nothing to export | The Markdown files themselves | Your vault is already a local folder |
| Apple Notes | Per-note export, copy, drag | Text and attachments | No bulk export; a natural curation filter |
| OneNote | Section files, copy-paste | Text and files | Weakest exporter here; move only keepers |
| Roam Research | Markdown or JSON | Files and text | Choose Markdown for readability |
| Logseq | Nothing to export | The Markdown files themselves | Local folder, same as Obsidian |
| Capacities | Markdown | Files and text | Objects flatten to notes |
| Reflect | Markdown | Files and text | Daily notes come over as dated notes |
| Tana | JSON | Selected text | Paste what matters; structure stays behind |
The playbook
The same afternoon-sized plan, whichever tool you are leaving.
Export from your current tool in whatever standard format it offers, and keep that full export as a permanent archive on your own disk. Whatever else happens, you now own a copy no vendor can touch.
Choose what actually moves. The honest filter: material you have reopened in the past year, plus anything you know a future project needs. For most people that is a fraction of the archive, and the rest stays safely in the export.
Bring it in. Drag files and PDFs into Mindly, paste text, or capture with ⌘M. There is no importer ceremony because there is no importer: files, text, images, links, and voice are all first-class captures.
Let the organizing happen. Each item is read on arrival: tagged by topic, summarized if it is long, run through OCR if it is an image or scan, transcribed if it is audio, and connected to related saves. The structure your old tool expected you to rebuild simply appears.
Point your capture habit at Mindly from day one. The migration matters less than the routine that follows it: one keystroke for everything new, and the library grows organized from here on.
Common questions
No, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Mindly has no bulk importers or format converters. What it has is capture that accepts almost anything: files, text, PDFs, images, links, and voice, added with one shortcut or a drag. Export from your current tool in its standard format, bring in what matters, and the AI reads, tags, summarizes, and connects each item as it lands.
Almost never. A migration is the one moment you get to curate years of accumulation for free. Move the material you still reopen or genuinely expect to need, keep the full export as a local archive, and let the rest stay archived. A smaller library of things you chose beats a complete copy of things you were merely storing.
The structure does not transfer, and for most people that turns out to be the point. Mindly does not use your old hierarchy: the AI reads each item you bring and builds tags, summaries, and connections from the content itself. The organization you spent years maintaining is replaced by one that maintains itself, and plain-language search replaces remembering where things were filed.
Notes and text, links, PDFs, Word documents, images and screenshots, voice memos, and files generally. Text inside images and scanned PDFs becomes searchable through OCR, audio is transcribed, and long documents get summaries, so what you bring over becomes findable rather than just stored.
The honest answer for a curated move is an afternoon: an hour to export and decide what matters, an hour to bring it in, and the AI organizes as items land. People who try to move everything at once tend to stall, which is one more argument for curating. New capture starts working for you on day one either way.
Yes, and many switchers do exactly that during the first month. A common split: the old tool stays for whatever it is genuinely good at, such as Notion for team work, while Mindly becomes the home for personal capture. The deciding moment usually arrives on its own, the first time search finds something in seconds that the old system would have buried.
Export immediately, before anything else, because shutdown export windows close and data past the deadline is usually gone for good. Get the full export onto your own disk, then curate into Mindly at leisure. If you want the longer argument for choosing tools your data outlives, read our guide on the app graveyard at mindly-ai.com/blog/app-graveyard-data-longevity-rules.
Your library lives in a folder on your Mac, and you can export to standard formats whenever you want. The same standard this page applies to other tools applies to Mindly: your data should outlive any app, including this one.
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