Sourdough Tracker vs Notes / Notion / Obsidian

A free-form notes app can absolutely hold sourdough notes - I used Notion for two years before building this. The trade-off is the friction of structure: every entry needs to be hand-formatted, you can't filter feeds vs bakes without templating discipline, and 'show me every bake at 75% hydration' is a manual exercise. Sourdough Tracker trades the flexibility of free text for purpose-built fields - rise %, hydration, outcome rating, ambient temp - so the analysis happens by itself. If your bakes are weekly and you care about patterns, the structured version pays back fast.