Best Commonplace Book App: 6 Apps for Quotes and Your Own Notes

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You're writing a short talk, and you remember a line about patience. You copied it from a book on investing two years ago, or maybe it was a psychology lecture on YouTube. You know you kept it. It might be in a notebook, in your phone's notes, in a Kindle highlight, or in a screenshot. Twenty minutes later you give up and write the talk without it. We've done this more than once.

A commonplace book is meant to stop exactly that. This page is about which app makes a good one.

Last updated: November 9, 2026. Facts about the other apps come from their official sites, checked on November 9, 2026, with links. We make Linko, so read this as a list written by one of the options, and check anything that matters to you.

The short answer

A good commonplace book app saves a passage in seconds, keeps each quote with its source and your own thought next to it, helps you find it by theme or half-remembered words, and brings it back after you've forgotten it.

• You learn from books, articles and videos, and want each quote kept with one line of your own and brought back, without filing: Linko.
• You want to design your own system, with files you own: Obsidian.
• You like building a quote database with your own fields and views: Notion.
• You want something already on your iPhone and Mac: Apple Notes.
• Your commonplace book is closer to a journal: Day One.
• You mostly highlight on a Kindle or in read-later apps: Readwise.

What a commonplace book is

A commonplace book is a notebook of passages you want to keep, copied out and gathered by theme, not by book or by date. The name comes from the Latin locus communis, a "common place": a general heading like friendship or money, where you stored lines and examples to use later. In De Copia (1512), a textbook for students, Erasmus showed how to gather passages under headings like these (Wikipedia), and John Locke later published a method for indexing one.

People kept them for a practical reason: to have the right line ready for a letter, a speech or a decision.

What a good commonplace book app needs

Paper handles some of these well. An app should do all five.

1. Quick capture. Saving a passage should take seconds, from a book, a web page or a video. On paper, you copy it out by hand or it doesn't get kept.
2. The source stays attached. You should know which book, article or video a line came from, and get back to it.
3. Your words next to theirs. The quote is half the entry. The other half is one line on why it mattered to you.
4. One entry, several themes. A line about patience from an investing book belongs under money and under patience. On paper it lives on one page, under whichever heading you picked that day.
5. It finds connections and comes back. Two lines copied a year apart may say the same thing in different words, and on paper nothing tells you. In our own notebooks, most pages were never opened again. A good app shows related entries and brings old ones in front of you.

The apps below differ mostly on the last three.

The apps

Linko

Best for: people who learn from books, articles and videos, save a lot and rarely look back, and want each quote kept with one line of their own.

Linko is a notes app for what you read and watch. Add a book by title or author, or save an article or a video from your phone's share menu or the browser extension. Each one gets its own page, and your notes about it gather there (books and reading).

On an article, or in its Key points, select a passage and choose Note this. Linko quotes it in a new note, and you add your own line under it (what Linko adds to a resource). With the browser extension, you can also save a passage from any web page as a note. For a paper book, type the line in yourself, or record a voice note and Linko writes it down.

You don't pick a heading. Linko files notes into the topics that fit, and into the tags you've set to Auto-organize. Your tags can nest, and one note can sit under several at once, so that investing-book line can be under money and under patience (tags and topics).

For example, say the investing line is about how patient investors make their money by waiting, and you wrote under it: "Same as learning: the gains show up late." A month later you note a line from the psychology lecture about delayed rewards. Related notes on the new note can show the investing line beside it, though you never filed either one (related notes and search). Daily review brings back a few of your notes each day, often as a question Linko makes from the note, and you can choose which note types and tags it draws from (Daily review).

Tradeoffs: no desktop app (on a computer, use the web), and the browser extension doesn't run in Safari or Firefox yet. It can't turn a photo of a book page into text. Linko can't import from other apps today. It's built around notes, not long documents you lay out yourself.

Obsidian

Best for: people who want to build and own their system.

Obsidian "stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files," on your device. You link notes to each other, see backlinks, and explore a graph of how they connect (obsidian.md). Its Web Clipper lets you highlight passages on a page and save them to your vault, in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge and more. The Random note core plugin "opens a random note within your vault," a simple way to bump into old entries (Random note). Apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

Tradeoff: the structure is yours to design and keep up: folders, tags, links, templates, plugins. Many people love that. If you'd rather not run a system, it can become one more thing to maintain. More in Linko vs Obsidian.

Notion

Best for: people who like a quote database with their own fields, such as book, author, theme and date, and enjoy browsing it.

Notion brings "docs, wikis, projects, and databases together in one place," and you can "organize hundreds or thousands of items in one place" (notion.com). Its Web Clipper saves pages from the web into Notion, and its AI answers questions with citations. Apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android.

Tradeoff: you design the database and its views. Notion's pages don't describe anything that brings old entries back on its own, so you'd build a view for it or remember to look.

Apple Notes

Best for: people on iPhone, iPad and Mac who want to start today with what they have.

Add tags by typing #, and Smart Folders gather notes by tag. Link one note to another by typing >>. Highlight text in Safari into a Quick Note, and next time you visit the site, a Quick Note thumbnail takes you back. You can scan a book page, and search finds handwritten text, text in scanned documents, and objects in images (Quick Notes, Search notes).

Tradeoffs: no Android app; on Windows, only iCloud.com in a browser. Apart from the Quick Note thumbnail, Apple's guide doesn't describe anything that brings old notes back to you, so finding a note depends on the words or tags you remember.

Day One

Best for: people whose commonplace book is part journal: what they read, mixed with what happened that day.

Day One calls itself "your journal for life" (dayoneapp.com). You can keep separate journals, add tags and templates, and save websites with its Safari and Chrome extensions. On This Day shows what you wrote on this date in past years. Entries are protected with end-to-end encryption, and you can export them (features). Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android, and the web in beta.

Tradeoff: it's organized by date, so On This Day brings a quote about patience back on its anniversary rather than when patience is on your mind.

Readwise

Best for: heavy highlighters who read on a Kindle, in Apple Books or in read-later apps.

Readwise syncs highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper and more, and brings them back in a daily email and in its app, using spaced repetition. You can tag highlights, add notes, and send them on to Notion or Obsidian. For paper books, you can snap a photo of a page to save a highlight (readwise.io).

Tradeoff: the author's sentence is the center of each entry. Your notes ride along with the highlight, and what comes back is mostly the highlight. More in A Readwise alternative for your own notes.

Side by side

Details as of November 9, 2026, from each app's official site.

How to keep a commonplace book in Linko

1. Add what you're reading. Search for the book by title or author in Add resource, or save the article or video you're on.
2. Keep the line. Select a passage and choose Note this, or type it in from a paper book.
3. Add one line of your own. Why it stopped you, or where you'd use it. One sentence is enough.
4. Let it come back. From the day after your first note, Daily review brings back a few notes each day, often as a question Linko made from the note, or asking whether you remember it.

There's nothing to file. If you want a "Quotes" tag, make one and turn on Auto-organize, and Linko adds new notes that fit.

Back to that talk. If those two lines had been in Linko, you could ask: "What have I saved about patience?" Ask Linko answers from your notes, and Cited lists the notes it used, such as the investing line and the lecture line; open each one to see what you wrote.

When another app fits better

• You want full control over files, folders and plugins: Obsidian.
• You want a quote database with your own fields: Notion.
• You only use Apple devices and want nothing new to install: Apple Notes.
• You want a journal first and a commonplace book second: Day One.
• Your quotes live in Kindle highlights and you want them synced today: Readwise.

Linko is the wrong pick if you need a desktop app, a Safari or Firefox extension, or long pages you lay out yourself. It's also the wrong pick if you only want to collect quotes and never write a line of your own: Linko is built around that line.

If a commonplace book you don't have to file sounds right, start on the web with the next passage that stops you, and add one line about why.

FAQ

What is a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a notebook of passages you want to keep, copied out and gathered by theme rather than by book or date. People have kept them for centuries to have the right line ready for a letter, a talk or a decision. Today many people keep one in an app.

What is the best app for a commonplace book?

Start with one question: will you write a line of your own next to each quote? If yes, and you learn from many kinds of sources, Linko keeps that line with the quote and brings it back in Daily review. If you'd rather build the system yourself, Obsidian or Notion. If you mostly collect Kindle highlights, Readwise.

Can I use Obsidian or Notion as a commonplace book?

Yes. In Obsidian, clip passages with its Web Clipper, link notes and use Random note to see old ones. In Notion, build a database with fields for the quote, source and theme. In both, you design the structure and decide when to look back.

How do I organize a commonplace book?

On paper, by headings and an index. In an app, use a few broad tags and let search do the rest. In Linko you don't have to organize first: it files notes into topics, and into tags you set to Auto-organize when they fit, and one note can sit in several at once.

How is a commonplace book different from a journal?

A journal records what happened to you, by date. A commonplace book collects what you read and heard, by theme, with your thoughts on it. Day One can hold both; Linko is built for the second.

How do I save quotes from books I read?

For an ebook, highlight in your reader and copy the line into your commonplace book with one line of your own. For a paper book, type it in; Readwise and Apple Notes can also work from a photo of the page. In Linko, add the book by title; the notes you write about it, typed or recorded as voice notes, gather on its page.

More on this: How to remember what you read and watch, Linko vs Obsidian, and Linko compared with other apps.