Notate.so

Notate handles text on regular pages, content inside PDFs, and moments inside videos, all with the same click. You pick colors and styles to sort meaning at a glance. The video support adds timestamp anchors, so clicking a highlight later drops you back to that second of the clip rather than the top of the page. It just works. That's the whole pitch.

Connect your workspace once and every highlight flows into Notion without manual paste. No copy-paste, no tidying up later. The setup offers page or database templates, so Notate builds the structure for you instead of dumping loose text. Once things are in Notion, its AI can search and summarize the whole collection, which is where a scattered reading habit turns into something usable.

For Obsidian users, highlights land in your vault as clean markdown files. Local-first, plain text, no lock-in. Folders can be organized by collection, date, or source, and wikilinks and tags are generated automatically. That last part matters if you use graph view or canvas, since your notes connect themselves instead of sitting as orphans.

Open an AI chat on any single highlight to ask what it means in context, or chat with the whole page at once. Local files work too, so you aren't forced to paste text into ChatGPT for every question. That's the selling point. The answers are grounded in the page you're reading rather than the model's general knowledge.

You can capture any part of a page as an image, which is the practical way to save charts, diagrams, and visuals that don't survive as text. Everything you save can be organized into collections, tagged, and filtered later. Unlimited notes on the free plan means scratch thoughts don't cost you anything. Why not just use bookmarks? Because a bookmark saves a URL; this saves the sentence you actually needed.

Auto-scrollback returns you to your highlights whenever you reopen a page, which quietly fixes the "where was that line again" problem. Handy. Email reminders send scheduled digests of your saved highlights so older captures resurface. It's a small feature that keeps a growing library from becoming write-only.