Reflect is a networked note-taking app built around daily notes and bidirectional backlinks, designed to serve as both a daily journal and a personal knowledge graph. It was founded in 2021 by Alex MacCaw, who previously built 📝Clearbit, and launched publicly in April 2022. The original app, now called Reflect Classic, is a subscription product at $10 per month billed annually, runs on web, Mac, and iOS, and end-to-end encrypts note contents so the company cannot read them.
Reflect came out of the 📝Networked Thought wave that 📝Roam Research popularized, and positions itself as a faster, more opinionated alternative to 📝Obsidian for people who want structure without configuration. A small team built it as a deliberately lean "lifestyle company," adding GPT-4 prompts, voice transcription, and a Chrome web clipper over time; its official guide, Reflect Academy, collects real-world usage examples. In July 2026 the team released Reflect Open, an MIT-licensed, local-first rewrite that stores every note as a plain 📝Markdown file, syncs through iCloud or Git, and connects to the user's own AI provider keys. Reflect Classic remains available and maintained.
Reflect was my daily journal from April 2022 to mid-2025, more than eight hundred entries backlinked to the people, companies, and ideas in my life. I migrated that whole graph into 📝MythOS, where it now lives as my daily memos.
Key Features
- Daily notes — Every day opens to a fresh note, making the journal the default entry point for meetings, thoughts, and tasks.
- Backlinks — Bidirectional links connect notes to people, companies, and ideas, building a graph that resurfaces related context.
- End-to-end encryption — Reflect Classic encrypts note contents client-side, keeping them unreadable to the company even in a breach.
- AI assistant — Saved custom prompts, chat with cited answers across notes, and voice-memo transcription.
- Local Markdown files — Reflect Open keeps notes as plain files in a user-chosen folder, with a CLI and 📝MCP access for agents.