Five years of trying every “BJJ notebook” setup that came along, and exactly one survived. Most lasted under a month. I’ll give you the punchline up front: the system that worked turned out to be lower-friction than any of the apps, and the apps that won the popularity contests were usually the ones I quit fastest.
The scoreboard
| App | Capture speed | Structure | Search | Why I stopped (or didn’t) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote | Slow | Linear | Strong | Pile of notes; nothing findable by position |
| Notion | Medium | Flexible | Good | Spent more time tweaking the database than reviewing |
| Apple Notes | Fast | None | Weak | Great inbox, terrible long-term home |
| BJJ Tracker | Medium | Position-based | OK | Forced a taxonomy I didn’t agree with |
| Submeta | Fast | Curated | N/A | Excellent for learning, not for my game |
| Grapple Flows | Fast | Flowchart | Strong | Still using it |
The reasons each one failed for me are below. Whether they fail for you depends on how your brain works, which is why I’ve tried to describe the failure mode rather than just the verdict.
Why the general note apps didn’t fit
Notion and Evernote are built for documents, and jiu-jitsu isn’t a document — it’s a decision graph. You can fake a graph with bullets and nested toggles, but the moment you need to answer “what do I do when they switch to the underhook?”, the page becomes a wall of text and you stop opening it.
The kill signal was identical in both apps: I’d open it after class, scroll, fail to find the relevant branch within ten seconds, and close it. After enough rounds of that, I stopped opening it at all.
Notion deserves a slightly longer eulogy. I built a genuinely beautiful database schema — tags for position, opponent grip variant, technique type, whether I’d drilled it, when I’d last revisited it. Building the schema was, in retrospect, the most fun part of using it. The problem was that I spent so many evenings refining the system that the reviewing it was supposed to support never actually happened.
Why the BJJ-specific tools didn’t either
BJJ Tracker is solid for what it does, which is logging hours, submissions, and positions worked. What it’s not built for is “I just had a realization about lasso retention in last night’s round.” The form fields don’t match the shape ideas arrive in. I’d open it after class with something to capture, find no field that fit, and close it again.
Submeta is excellent at being Submeta. But the notes you take inside it are, by design, notes inside someone else’s curriculum. That’s exactly what you want while following their path, and exactly the wrong container for “here’s what works for my body, in my gym, against my partners.”
What I actually do now
Two steps. A voice memo on the drive home — sixty seconds, the one moment that surprised me. Then, that evening if I have the energy, I drop it into Grapple Flows and spend a few minutes editing the flowchart it drafts. On nights I’m too tired, the voice memo alone carries most of the value. The chart is the part that pays back three weeks later, when I go looking for the thing I learned.
Full disclosure: I built Grapple Flows because I wanted this exact loop and nothing on the market did it. That’s a bias worth naming. But the reason I think it’s the right answer isn’t that it’s mine — it’s that every other tool I tried failed on the same two axes. Capture had too much friction, and re-finding things later was too slow.
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Recommendations by where you are
Taking no notes at all? Start with Apple Notes. Build the habit of capturing one thing per class before you worry about the system. Most of the value lives in the habit, not the tool.
Want a curriculum to study against? Submeta, paired with whatever capture tool you’ll actually open. (Here’s how Submeta compares to BJJ Fanatics and self-made notes.)
Want to track volume? BJJ Tracker. Just don’t expect it to do the thinking part.
Already tried two or three of the above and they didn’t stick? Then the issue is probably format, not discipline — I wrote a separate piece on why bullet lists lose the part of the technique you need. That’s the point where flowcharts are worth a look. You can even prototype the idea in Miro or Whimsical first; they’re not built for BJJ, but they’ll tell you whether the format suits your brain before you commit to anything.
The best notebook is the one that’s open by Thursday’s class. No app on this list will save you from being someone who doesn’t open it. Pick the lowest-friction option you’ll actually return to and let the rest of the market go.
