What do you like best about Nuclino?
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.
What do you dislike about Nuclino?
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.
