Written honestly, including the cases where the other tool is the right answer. If you are choosing where a year of schoolwork is going to live, you should read someone being specific about the trade-off rather than being told everything else is broken.
Notion, OneNote, Google Docs and Apple Notes are blank pages. Excellent ones — faster to start in, more flexible, better at tables and embeds, and you already know how to use them. But a blank page has no idea what your course contains, and that single fact is the ceiling on everything it can do for you.
Nexley knows the shape of your syllabus, because you paste it in once. Every note is filed against the dot point it answers. That is not a tidier folder — it is what makes the questions below answerable at all:
A folder of documents cannot answer any of those, no matter how neatly it is named.
Notion is more powerful and more general. If you want a personal wiki, a habit tracker and your notes in one workspace, with databases you design yourself, Notion wins and it is not close.
The cost is that Notion is a construction kit: you are the one who has to build the structure, keep it consistent for two years, and remember to update it in week 8 of a bad term. Most students' Notion setups are beautiful in February and abandoned by June. Nexley has one structure, it comes from your syllabus rather than from your discipline, and there is nothing to maintain.
Notion also needs a connection for most of what it does. Nexley is offline-first because a classroom with no signal is the normal case, not the edge case.
OneNote is the closest thing to a real notebook on a tablet, handwriting included, and it is free with a school account. If your handwriting is the whole point and you never want anything computed from your notes, OneNote is a perfectly good place to stop.
Nexley also takes handwriting — pen, highlighter, four colours, ruled or grid paper, written straight onto the note rather than in a box under it — but the writing sits on a note that is filed against a dot point, so it counts towards coverage and can be pulled into revision. In OneNote, a section called "Module 5" is a name. In Nexley, the syllabus point is a thing the app can reason about.
The honest gap: OneNote's ink tools are more mature, and it has decades of polish Nexley does not.
Docs is the best collaborative writing tool here and the right place to draft an essay someone else will comment on. Nexley does not do real-time collaboration and is not trying to.
Where Docs falls down is as a notebook across two years: search is text search, so finding "the thing about energy systems" depends on you having used those words; there is no concept of coverage; and a folder tells you what exists, never what is missing. Nexley's search is the same text search — plus the structure, which is what lets it show you the gap rather than only the hit.
Anki is the serious spaced-repetition tool and its algorithm is better than Nexley's. Quizlet has an enormous library of decks other people made.
Both start with a deck you have to build or find. Nexley's review comes out of the notes you already wrote and the marks you actually lost — the cards are generated from your own material and from the questions you got wrong, so the thing you get tested on is the thing that went wrong in a real paper. If you already run a disciplined Anki habit, keep it; Nexley is not going to beat it at repetition scheduling.
| Nexley | Notion | OneNote | Docs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notes filed to a syllabus dot point | Built in | If you build it | Manual sections | Folders |
| Shows what you have not written | Yes | No | No | No |
| Works with no connection | Yes, by design | Limited | Yes | Limited |
| Handwriting on the page | Yes | No | Yes, best in class | No |
| Marks kept apart by exam conditions | Yes | No | No | No |
| Review built from your own gaps | Yes | No | No | No |
| Real-time collaboration | No | Yes | Yes | Yes, best in class |
| Price | Free | Free tier | Free | Free |
Worth knowing before you move a year of work into it:
If you write essays that other people edit with you, use Docs. If your notes are entirely handwritten and you want nothing computed from them, OneNote is less work. If you already have an Anki habit that is working, do not break it. And if your course has no published syllabus you can paste in, Nexley loses the thing that makes it different.