Why xTiles Can Radically Change the Way I Organize My Life as a Creator (2024 Review)
Being a creator is amazing: you get to turn your passions into projects and share them with the world. At Feisworld, we leap into content creation first as podcasters in 2014, YouTubers in 2019, and now full-time working on articles and videos related to tech and AI – including a ton of collaborations with brands we love. It sounds straightforward but in practice, it can also be total chaos. Between brainstorming ideas, managing deadlines, and juggling different clients and projects, staying organized can feel impossible.
In the past 5 years, we have embraced and worked with more than a hundred tools willing to simplify our team’s workflow with partial success. Today, we use a combination of Notion, Miro, Dropbox, Trello, Google Docs, Slack, and WhatsApp to run our business. Yes, it’s a lot. The truth is we couldn’t get rid of more, and we still need to send links and cross-references to be able to find our assets, track progress, and communicate internally and externally.
That’s where xTiles comes in. Although it is still under (rapid) development, the paradigm and implementation behind xTiles are different. In this post, we put it to the test to see its potential. Let’s jump in!
xTiles – One App To Replace Them All (2024 Review)
What is xTiles?
xTiles is a modern brainstorming, note-taking, and collaboration platform designed to streamline productivity and enhance team collaboration. Its intuitive interface and versatile features make it a compelling choice for both individuals and teams looking to organize their ideas and projects efficiently.
Key Features
- Organization and Note Taking: Capture ideas in various formats including text, voice recordings, sketches, and photos. Organize information using boards with a drag-and-drop interface. Save text, images, and links from the web.
- Task Management and Reminders: Create to-do lists to keep track of your daily work. Set reminders for tasks and deadlines. Pin important notes and ideas for quick access.
- Search and Accessibility: Find anything you saved in xTiles quickly using the search function. Access your information across devices (desktop, mobile, web) with instant synchronization. Works online and offline.
- Other Features We Love: Integrates with various services like Google Calendar, Zapier, Slack, and Google Drive. Offers templates to jumpstart your projects.
What we loved about xTiles
Visual Organization
xTiles offers a unique visual layout, allowing you to organize notes and blocks in dozens of combinations to make it very clear. Customizing and tailoring the board’s layout to the project and content is very straightforward.
Unlike Notion, which has a more linear structure, xTiles lets you drag and drop different blocks such as Notes, Images, Lists, Tasks, Tables, and even embed content. It’s also possible to create multiple panes and sheets, like in a spreadsheet.
It’s also very convenient to have multiple dashboards under a workspace. In our case, in our team’s workspace we have a board for our YouTube channel, another one to track our meeting notes, and one of our client work and ongoing projects.
Collaboration Tools
This is one fundamental area for our team and one aspect we heavily use in Notion: team communication. Tagging, commenting, and mentioning team members is key to tracking progress and running projects smoothly. However, we’ve had over a dozen hiccups with Notion, mainly due to lost or unsent notifications.
In xTiles, teams can easily share tiles, comment on each other’s notes, and work together in real-time. It works great with mobile/native apps and is ideal for brainstorming sessions, project planning, and collaborative research. In our case, for example, we use it heavily to sync progress on our YouTube videos.
Also, it’s easy to add up to 10 guests or share the board publicly. One big plus is the Search Engine indexing feature. As we do a ton of agency work around SEO, this feature lets us create downloadable templates that people can find online via Google and other search engines without creating additional landing pages.
This way, xTiles allows you to share and sell information/frameworks as a digital products! Perfect for creators like us. By structuring your information – be it project plans, creative frameworks, research findings – as tiles within the app, you can create a shareable and sellable resource. This empowers you to collaborate with others on projects or even build a customer base by offering these informative tiles for purchase. Plus, the search engine indexing will make it easier to get found online and reach your target audience, without any additional effort from your side!
Customizable Templates
If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. xTiles provides plenty of customizable templates to cover different needs. We were pleasantly surprised by how many different starting points are available, whether for project management, meeting notes, or personal to-do lists.
In addition, there’s a template marketplace where you can get better-crafted templates from the community or even sell yours! (By the way, we love apps like xTiles that create a marketplace for creators like you to monetize your skills right on their platform.)
Integration Capabilities
Another aspect where xTiles shows its competitiveness is its integration with other popular productivity apps like Google Drive, Slack, and Zapier (coming soon) to pull in information from various sources and keep all their work interconnected.
We particularly look forward to their Zapier integration, as Zapier allows us to channel many of our marketing efforts (such as email newsletters, collect analytics, and build reports). Once supported, we will be able to dump data directly into xTiles and build nice boards at affordable rates.
Native Apps
Our team is scattered across many countries: the US, Sweden, Argentina, the Philippines, etc. We need to be able to work on the go, and that means mobile apps. Luckily, xTiles has native apps for mobile and Desktop.
Pricing
xTiles offers three main pricing plans: Free, Plus, and Business. The Free plan provides unlimited blocks, pages, projects, collections, and views, but limits file storage to 5MB per file.
The Plus plan bumps up the storage to unlimited and adds premium templates, collaborative workspace features, and unlimited personal workspaces for $10 per user per month.
The Business plan (launching soon) is intended for companies and offers everything in Plus, along with teamspace functionality, unlimited collaborative workspaces, and SAML SSO, at $20 per user per month.
xTiles vs Notion vs Miro
| Feature | xTiles | Notion | Miro |
|---|---|---|---|
| User Interface | Minimalist and modern | Clean and functional | Visually rich and vibrant |
| Usability | Intuitive drag-and-drop, grid-like | Flexible content blocks, linear | Interactive boards |
| Templates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Collaboration | Real-time collaboration | Strong collaborative tools | Highly interactive with real-time collaboration |
| Integration | A few, growing list | Wide range of integrations | Extensive integrations |
| Pricing | More affordable | Subscription-based | Subscription-based |
| Mobile App | Efficient and fast | Comprehensive features | Full-featured |
| Offline Access | Yes | Yes (but limited) | Yes |
| Target Audience | Teams and individuals seeking simplicity | Teams and individuals needing comprehensive tools | Teams requiring interactive brainstorming |
| Unique Selling Point | Simplicity and speed in managing tiles | All-in-one workspace with embedded apps | Extensive visual collaboration tools |
xTiles’ Potential to Excel
- Simplicity and Speed: xTiles offers a minimalist interface that is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. Its focus on managing “tiles” makes it very efficient for organizing thoughts and tasks quickly.
- Pricing Affordability: Compared to Notion and Miro, xTiles often comes out as more affordable, making it an attractive option for users with budget constraints.
- Efficient Mobile App: The xTiles mobile app is designed to be fast and efficient, allowing users to manage their tasks and notes on-the-go without the bloat of more complex apps.
- Real-time Collaboration: While all three platforms support collaboration, xTiles provides a particularly streamlined approach to real-time interaction, which can be more intuitive for users not needing the depth of tools provided by Miro or Notion.
Roadmap and Features We’d Like
One last thing we loved about xTiles is their transparency towards the roadmap and upcoming features. Since we talk daily about AI Tools on our blog, we were curious to test out what xTiles could deliver on this front. Even though nothing has yet been released, we can see that an AI GPT integration is being developed during Q1/Q2 2024. Similarly, we can see other cool upcoming features such as intelligence URLs, Image Sliders, etc.
Wrapping up: Is xTiles Worth It?
In the current content economy, the life of a creator and creative agency is not easy. Organizing and running a content pipeline can be a total mess, whether it’s a one-person or 100-person team. Yes, there are tools out there to help out with this task, but in previous years, the space rapidly exploded, and very few companies tried to solve the problem holistically, focusing on what’s best for the work itself. xTiles is definitely one of those companies.
While we are eager to see and test out more features during 2024, the potential of xTiles lies in the visual organization of assets, tasks, and notes, with incredibly powerful board customization options. This user-friendly interface will definitely help teams and members who are trying to focus on work and not on project organization and logistics, thereby improving productivity and efficiency.
Kudos to the xTiles team; we look forward to integrating more features into our workflow.
Other posts you might enjoy…
- Notion for YouTube Content Creation (2023) – FREE template
- Zoom Whiteboard vs. Miro – Which Should You Use?
- Fathom – Best Notetaker for Zoom?