In my continuous quest for the perfect writing/PKMS (Personal Knowledge Management System) for authors, a new app has come to my attention: Kortex.

(Warning: this is a pretty long post.)

This is so new, they have a wait list of people who would like to give the software a try, although it’s ridiculously easy to by-pass that and get right on (I’ll tell you how later). The app hasn’t officially been released yet.

Kortex bills itself as a “second brain for creators”.

A “second brain” for those who don’t know (if you do, skip this paragraph), is a system for keeping all of your notes, research, links to websites, and anything else which you might need to reference at a later time. There are two benefits of keeping all this information in an app is: 1) so that you can create connections between ideas and pieces of information and; 2) to make information easy to find through either a regular search or tags. Some apps even have AI built into them so you can ask the AI a question you’re sure you’ve got the answer to somewhere within all of your notes.

[In my “second brain” I keep a list of all the characters who have shown up in my books, information on each of my books, and the research I need—both general historical research for my time period and book-specific research.]

Second brain apps are becoming big business as people are discovering that technology can help them organize all the random information they collect. Kortex is one of the latest editions to this marketplace that is quickly becoming a little crowded.

In being designed specifically for “creators,” the developers of Kortex are trying to distinguish themselves from more generalized apps such as Notion, Obsidian, Capacities, and many, many others.

Being a “creator,” ie novelist, I thought I should check this out.

I requested “early access” to the software and was granted it within a few hours (even though they say they’ll give it to you the following day—perhaps they liked the fact that I said I wanted to review their software?). To do this, you have to join their Feed (forum) and request it. Extremely easy!

When you first log in and open up the app (on the web—there isn’t a download, although it is also available as a phone app), you get a page which basically explains how to get started. The most useful part of this is to be told to join their “Feed” where there are helpful videos, ideas and templates shared by other users, a place where you can see what else they’re going to be developing soon and you can request features. There’s even a free course on creating a “second brain with Kortex.”

The main idea that the entire program is built upon is that you have ideas or see things online which you will want at some later date to use to create a piece of writing (newsletter, blog, book) or an informational video.

Right off the bat, as a novelist, I’m wondering how this can be useful to me. I may get some ideas for future books from something I see online, but it’s just as likely that I’ll get one by looking out a window at a balcony (how I got the idea for my Falling series).

The one thing that Kortex provides when you get such an idea—whether it be from something you see online or in real life—is a place to quickly jot down that idea (they call it “Capture“) so that you can keep all your ideas in one place and easily find them later.

One point for Kortex.

There is also a “Library.” This is to keep things you find online. The trick is that, in order to keep something, you need to first download it to your computer as a PDF and then upload it to Kortex. What’s the point of that? If I can download it as a PDF, why not just keep it in a file on my computer in a folder for such things? If I find some piece of information on a website that I’ll need later, I want to be able to copy it, or highlight it and save it, or save the page with highlights and tag it. This “Library” doesn’t seem to allow you to do that at all unless you use Readwise—a paid service that lets you save highlights either from a website or an ebook. If you don’t have Readwise, forget it. At some point in the future, the developers of Kortex plan on recreating Readwise in their software, but it doesn’t exist yet.

[Note: when I sent this post to Kortex for their feedback, they told me that having to subscribe to Readwise in order to use Kortex was a feature, not a draw back. I don’t quite get it, but I don’t use Readwise.]

Let’s take away that point we just gave Kortex. Sorry! Already, it’s failed at what it says it is meant to do unless you subscribe and pay for another service.

Now, I don’t know about you, but as an author, I need to keep track of the scenes I’ve written and the scenes I’m going to write. To do this in Kortex, I created an “Element”—that is a scene card. it looks like this:

The problem is when I tried to paste in that scene card into my document (I’m writing this in Kortex) just now, all I got was a blank box that had the heading at the top. I had to copy and past in all the information you see there. Template? Na-ah. Am I doing something wrong? Perhaps, but goodness only knows what!

Also, the program only has a dark-mode. I like a white background with black text. I find it a lot easier to read. They say they’re coming out with a light-mode, but it’s not there yet.

Minus another point for Kortex for not making it obvious and easy to create a template.

Also, in order to put in the name and link to that character you see in my scene card, I couldn’t just drag and drop the character from another document, I had to put the name of the character in brackets and then start typing the name. It popped up a menu where I could choose the name I wanted. Also, that name has to already be in a document of it’s own. (When I first started fooling with the program, I imported all of my characters from Obsidian and then had to go through and fix all the information and add tags. (Full disclosure, I’ve got over 500 characters; I didn’t do this for all of them it would have taken way too long.))

One other note regarding characters. I couldn’t create an “Element” for my characters because there’s no way to link that into this Scene Card element I’m creating unless you put in a url which opens in a separate tab in my browser, and you also can’t link to another Element in the same document.

Sorry, minus another point for Kortex.

And finally, what’s the one thing all writers need to be able to do?

Yep, write! And then take what they’ve written, edit it, send it to others to edit and read, and then publish it. You can write in Kortex, but then you’re stuck. You can’t export anything you’ve got in the program. If you write something, you’ll have to copy and paste it out and into Word or whatever you choice of writing program is. So… yeah, no. I might as well just write in Word or Scrivener.

Want a timeline of your work? Use Plottr, certainly not Kortex.

Want a to do list? Sure, Kortex can do that, but not a calendar. I’d recommend TickTick or another to-do list app.

So is this a program I plan on continuing to use? Well, I think you can guess what the answer to that is. So sorry developers of Kortex. This app may be great for nonfiction writers, but it’s definitely not for writers fiction. I’m heading back to Plottr where I’ve got my characters, places, notes, timeline, and outline all beautifully organized and easily accessible for the book I’m writing. And I’ve got Obsidian organized as my bible where I’ve got a page for each of my characters (that I can drag and drop into another document if I need to make a book-specific list). Obsidian also, by the way, can be used to keep and organize the notes and highlights you have in your e-reader—there’s a plug-in for that. There’s probably also one for capturing web pages, but since it’s not something I do very often I don’t have it.

To wrap up this disappointing review, unless you are a researcher or writer of nonfiction (who are researchers) and need a place to keep random ideas and a place to organize your Readwise account, this is not a program for you. There are so many more programs that are so much better for creatives, I don’t see the point of Kortex. I have used Notion and am now currently using Obsidian. I liked them both and was (mostly) able to set them up to match the way I work. (There are always things these programs cannot do or would need a great deal of work to get it to do.) I recommend that you first write a list of what you need a PKM system to do and then find the program that can you can set up to do that.