Nuclino Pros and Cons

I discovered Nuclino after searching for a wiki/notepad/knowledge base tool storing LLM outputs that I've been capturing both for personal use and for work.

Because LLMs tend to output as markdown, seamless markdown handling was a top requirement.

I initially used Obsidian for this purpose but quickly realised that for the knowledge repository to have any use (ie, for me to read the outputs I was storing) convenient mobile access was a must. Others were clearly intended for use in the business context / as teams and as a passionate but solo user, the features didn't make sense for my use-case.

The the main challenge: it was surprisingly difficult to find a tool that: a) had the kind of seamless markdown handling Obsidian offers and which b) could handle my import of notes. Although 3K doesn't seem like a huge "wiki" to me, it simply overwhelmed a couple of systems I tried. I found it hard to believe that any knowledge management tool could crumble under what seems to me like a fairly modest volume.

Nuclino has presented zero problems in that respect so far - neither in loading times nor in indexing performance. Everything saves pretty much instantly and I haven't had any difficulty in retrieving saved items via search. In other words, it provides the level of performance that I've long been accustomed to with tools like Google Drive.

The import process was straightforward with one exception: it didn't like some of the non-standard markdown syntax which Obsidian adds. So a word of warning to users making the same migration: consider running your notes through standardisation process before importing. I got ChatGPT to write me up a quick Python script and it did the job!

Nuclino had the most fluid markdown handling out of the box of any of the tools I tried and I instantly like that it didn't try to be too "clever". A lot of tools in the knowledge management space try to bring users along on a complicated system. I liked that Nuclino got out of the way and leaved me to do all I wanted it to do: give me a nice and fluid notepad to save outputs, edit them, and read them.

I also like that some thought has been put into the data export feature (I'll come to backups below). I initially thought that the archives didn't contain an index but was happy to stand corrected. You get your files back too. I wish I could say that this was standard, but quite a few SaaS tools forget to liberate large parts of the user's data footprint. It's nice to see that Nuclino offers a data export tool that does what it promises.

It's also good to see that they're adding features (public workspaces were announced today). The UI is minimalist, but not static.

For anyone who appreciates markdown editing and wants a cloud experience that can mirror those in some of the local-only tools, I would say this is a great place to start. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not Nuclino-specific, but the only reason I ever self-host (and avoid SaaS) is because I'm hesitant to fully hand off control of my data, especially when it's either sensitive or business-related.

I was hoping to be able to use the API to extract data, but I couldn't coerce it into doing that. Some of the other tools I looked at had richer APIs which explicitly supported this purpose.

On the plus side, Nuclino does let you export your workspace as a Zip.

So with a bit of scripting, I was able to achieve my objective of having a cloud backup of my data in a roundabout way (I just need to remember to pull down the zip once a week). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is so out of your face and does what it is designed to do without fuss or frustration. The design is wonderful and the implementation just as good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The search does not handle typos. It will show zero results if you mistype. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very intuitive, very is to link pages together and create groups, and there are multiple good interfaces for seamlessly navigating between groups and pages. Creating pages and adding headers, links, bullet points etc., are all very simple, making it very easy to create informative pages. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When you create a collection, it creates a page you can't edit, which only has links to and the names of all the pages in the group, which doesn't look very good as a page. It would be better if that were a page that could be edited to function as that collection's home page. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nuclino is very easy to use, and provides one of the most user friendly interfaces I have experienced. Love the API as well! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Exporting individual pages is great! Exporting a whole project/board into a PDF folder would be amazing! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Karman Space Programme is a student led group with over 50 members, and just as many, or more, individual tasks that need our attention. Nuclino allows us to easily organise our projects individually.

We have created easily accessible groups for each division of our group (software, engineering, partnerships, finance, etc). Users only join the groups that are relevant to themselves, making it easy to keep focused on what they are doing. These groups can also be intuitively edited, meaning that all the members are kept up to date with their progress in each task.

Finally, and most importantly to us, Nuclino is extremely intuitive to use. New users should have no issue with joining groups, editing tasks and contributing to the projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We at Karman Space Programme have had no problems with using Nuclino as our primary tool for organisation and we've only seen our productivity improve since switching to it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In my opinion, the most useful functionality is the mind-map-like diagram of files and folders (we just would improve the connection/relation between documents, like some other second brain apps with graphs have). Also, other features that we enjoy are the bunch of ready-to-use plugins that allowed us to integrate, for example, some OneDrive files while writing about it our docs, and its Markdown formatting setting that is very useful for people who don't want to waste time with WYSIWYG formatting (like Word) and at the same time have the ability to not be very technical like LaTeX (as some team members don't come from engineering/math/physics backgrounds and it's a bit confusing to them type in LaTeX), so this was the perfect way that we put together technical and non technical team members working in the same environment and keeping it all organised while only the right people have access to the right documents with the access rights features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly i dont find any part of nuclino that stands out for bad reasons, its a very solid platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that people can collaborate in real time, and I like the clean, simple layout. It makes it easier for people to use and get familiar with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like it if the kanban board feature could also be used inside of workspaces, at a lower level, rather than just as a workspace. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The intelligent links between knowledge sources helps me focus on strategy development and alignment of goals. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm still learning but at the learning curve isn't overly steep. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We love that Nuclino allows us to get such a more clear picture of how our own project operates. It has allowed us to find many loopholes and issues which we managed to now tackle using the site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish there was a "Presentation mode", we did the bold decision of pitching our project to investor using Nuclino, they loved it, but an actual way of presenting would be even cooler! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.