xTiles: building a second brain visually (Notion alternative)

xTiles positions itself as a visual “second brain” workspace that blends whiteboard-style note capture with Notion-like structure—without requiring weeks of setup. The core pitch is speed and clarity: users can start organizing on day one using a canvas of draggable tiles, while still getting projects, pages, collections, backlinks, tasks, and calendar views to keep ideas moving toward output.

At the foundation is a three-level organization model. “Spaces” sit at the top and contain “projects.” Inside each project are “pages” (documents/canvases) and “collections” (database-like groupings). Pages function like blank canvases where users can “splatter paint” thoughts, images, and content. The building blocks on those canvases are tiles—resizable note cards that can hold text, tasks, tables, images, and nested notes. Tiles support markdown headings and slash commands for quick inserts such as tasks, images, and quote snippets. Each tile can be styled individually with different layouts, colors, and icons, making the workspace feel more like a visual board than a rigid document editor.

A key differentiator is how xTiles handles relationships between notes. Backlinks let users see where a tile is referenced and jump directly to the linked tile, even on long pages. Content is also described as block-based, enabling rearrangement of lines and ideas without losing context—useful for reorganizing thinking as it evolves.

Productivity features sit alongside the note system. An inbox captures incoming material, including items saved via a browser Web Clipper. The clipper can save full pages (including YouTube videos) or snippets and highlighted text, which land in the inbox as tiles that can be dragged onto canvases. From there, tasks can be created inside notes and then tracked in a unified task sidebar. Tasks can be assigned, given due dates, scheduled onto a calendar, and surfaced through notifications. Search spans across projects, returning results with the specific project and page where matching content lives.

Collections add the database layer. Tiles can be added to collections either by copying (keeping the tile on the page) or by moving (removing it from the page). Collections support multiple views—table, gallery, board, calendar, and timeline—and allow rich properties such as relational data, multi-select fields, dates, checkboxes, numbers, and files. Filters can produce saved views, letting users slice the same stored ideas in different ways.

The “second brain” setup example ties everything together using Thiago Forte’s PARA-style concepts (projects, areas, resources, archive). One project acts as a Wall of ideas (a visual intake and staging area). A “Museum” collection then organizes those tiles into a table with tags and saved filters—such as separating photo-only views from everything else, and creating views by life area (e.g., “life of learning,” “life of creating”). A Canvas page holds active work, like a YouTube script project or a sunflower picture-study project, where selected wall ideas are pulled in, tasks are scheduled, and research notes are clipped and assembled.

The main limitation noted is that tags don’t sync globally across collections, which pushes the workflow toward using a single collection with tags to recreate PARA-style filtering. Even with that constraint, xTiles is framed as strongest for creation: visual capture plus built-in task and calendar tooling aimed at turning stored ideas into finished projects.