Craft is one of the most beautifully designed productivity apps on Apple platforms. The team at Luki Labs clearly cares about aesthetics, and it shows in every interaction. Documents look gorgeous. The block-based editor is smooth. Sharing and collaboration features are well-thought-out. If you primarily create documents and want them to look professional with minimal effort, Craft delivers.
We respect what Craft has built. They’ve proven that block-based editing on iOS can be elegant and that Apple-first apps can compete with cross-platform tools on functionality while exceeding them on design.
So why would anyone look beyond Craft?
Craft’s strength is document creation and sharing. It takes the block-based approach popularized by Notion and wraps it in Apple-native design quality.
Craft is primarily a document editor. It’s designed for creating structured, shareable documents. This focus is its strength, but it also defines its boundaries.
Craft doesn’t support voice recordings as blocks within your documents. If you want to capture a voice memo alongside your notes - recording a thought during a walk, capturing a meeting snippet next to your agenda - you need a separate app. The recording lives somewhere else, disconnected from the document it relates to.
Craft can save links and basic link previews, but it doesn’t save the full content of web pages for offline reading. If you research by collecting articles - saving them to read later or archiving them in case the source disappears - you’ll need another tool for that.
Craft organizes content in spaces and folders containing documents. It’s clean and logical, but it’s fundamentally a document hierarchy. You can’t nest notes inside notes in the way that creates truly hierarchical knowledge structures - where a project note contains sub-notes that each contain their own sub-notes, all navigable from one place.
Craft has checkboxes - you can create to-do items within documents. But there’s no task management beyond checkmarks. No project-level task tracking, no way to view all your tasks across documents, no completion tracking. If your workflow mixes task management with note-taking, you’ll still need a separate app for tasks.
Craft invests heavily in collaboration and sharing features. This is valuable for teams, but solo users are paying for (and navigating around) features they don’t need. The app’s architecture reflects its team orientation.
If you’re leaving Craft because it doesn’t handle voice or web content, your alternative needs to support multiple content types as first-class blocks: text, images, voice recordings, web pages, tasks, and files. All within the same note, all rearrangeable.
If you’ve been using Craft, you’ve experienced the benefits of blocks over traditional documents. Don’t go back. Whatever you switch to should maintain block-based editing - the ability to move, rearrange, and transform individual content pieces.
Craft set a high bar for how an iOS app should look and feel. Your alternative should be native - built specifically for iPhone and iPad with smooth animations, responsive gestures, and fast performance. Web apps wrapped in a mobile shell won’t match what you’re used to.
Consider whether you need deeper organizational structures than Craft’s space-and-folder model. Nested notes (notes inside notes), tags, and color coding can provide more flexible organization for complex projects.
This might sound obvious, but if you chose Craft partly for its aesthetics, your next app needs to clear a design bar too. Ugly or cluttered apps will frustrate you, especially after getting used to Craft’s polish.
Unit Notes shares Craft’s block-based philosophy but takes it in a different direction. Where Craft optimizes for beautiful documents and sharing, Unit optimizes for diverse content capture and personal knowledge organization.
In Unit, a single note can contain text blocks, to-do items, voice recordings, images, saved web pages, and file attachments. Everything is a block you can drag, rearrange, copy, or nest. And notes themselves can be nested inside other notes, creating hierarchical structures that go as deep as you need.
The web clipping is a meaningful difference. Unit saves full web pages for offline reading inside your notes - not just links. You can read saved articles without internet, and the content persists even if the original site goes down.
The voice recording capability lets you capture audio directly inside a note, positioned alongside the text and tasks it relates to. No switching to a separate app, no disconnected recordings.
The honest tradeoffs: Unit’s visual design is clean but doesn’t match Craft’s polish. Craft’s sharing and publishing features are far ahead - Unit is built for personal use, not collaboration. Craft has AI features; Unit doesn’t. And Craft works on Mac and iPad with full feature parity; Unit is iOS-focused.
If you create documents for sharing with others and value visual presentation, Craft is the better tool. If you capture diverse content types for personal knowledge management and want everything in one hierarchical canvas with native iOS speed, that’s Unit’s strength.
Notion offers maximum flexibility with databases, wikis, and collaborative workspaces. It’s more powerful than Craft for structured data but less polished on iOS (web-based, slower, weaker offline support).
Bear is an elegant Markdown editor. If your Craft usage was primarily text, Bear offers a faster, more focused writing experience. It lacks blocks and rich content types but excels at pure text.
Apple Notes is free and native. Less capable than Craft in every way, but fast, reliable, and handles basic notes well. Worth considering if your needs are simpler than you think.
Obsidian is a local-first knowledge management tool based on Markdown files. Powerful for linking ideas across notes and building a personal wiki. Desktop-first experience, with a mobile app that continues to improve.
Stay with Craft if:
Consider Notion if:
Consider Unit Notes if:
Consider Bear if:
Both Craft and Unit use blocks. The difference is what those blocks are for. Craft builds beautiful documents for sharing. Unit builds personal knowledge structures from diverse content types. They’re solving different problems with similar architectures.
For a deeper dive into block-based approaches, see Notion vs Unit Notes: Same Philosophy, Different Tradeoffs.
