Nested Tags vs Folders for Organising Notes

Every notes app eventually asks you to pick a side. The choice is presented as a philosophy and it is really about one property.

The actual difference

A note lives in one folder. A note can carry many tags.

That is it. Everything else follows.

A note about pricing for a client project belongs in the client folder, and the pricing folder, and the 2026 folder. It cannot be in three places, so you pick one and accept that you will look in the wrong one later.

With tags, it carries all three and appears in all three lists.

Where folders still win

Folders are not a legacy idea, and three things make them genuinely better.

They are visible outside the app. Finder, a terminal, any other editor, your backup. A tag written into frontmatter is invisible in the file browser.

They scope things naturally. A project folder that gets archived takes its notes with it in one move.

They are unambiguous. There is exactly one answer to where a note is, which matters when you are looking rather than searching.

Where tags win

Anything that is a genuine cross-cut. Topic, status, person, source.

Anything with more than one true home.

Anything temporary. A #review tag is easy to add and easy to clear. A review folder becomes permanent furniture.

Nested tags

The middle ground, and the reason Bear's model is worth copying:

project/website
project/mobile-app
client/acme
client/acme/invoices

You get hierarchy and grouping, filter by project/ to see everything, and a note can still carry several. This is why TypeFire supports nested tags alongside folders rather than picking a camp.

The setup that survives

1. Folders for structure with an obvious single home. Projects, clients, areas of responsibility.
2. Tags for everything cross-cutting. Topic, status, person.
3. One inbox at the root, unsorted, for capture.
4. File on retrieval, not on capture.

That fourth point matters most. Choosing a folder at capture time is a decision at exactly the wrong moment, and it is a major reason capture stops. See why your capture inbox never gets processed.

A warning about depth

Both systems fail the same way: too many levels.

Folders four deep mean you cannot remember where anything is. Tags with fifty values mean you cannot remember which one you used, so half your notes carry #writing and half carry #writing-ideas and neither list is complete.

Keep both shallow. Two levels of folders, and few enough tags that you can hold the list in your head. Search covers the rest, and it covers it better than a taxonomy you cannot recall.