Nota is distinctively more focused on the eCommerce experience then Uplift, Uplift is more styled towards a corporate theme.
Nota has 3 different shop styles, 3 different products post styles for WooCommerce, a custom integration of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and two different cart types – slideout and floating we really invested a lot of time making the shopping experience on both those plugins super slick on all screen sizes.
Nota and Uplift are more advanced in terms of back/front-end performance and functionality then Dante/Neighborhood. Nota includes more general options/page builder options to help you essentially create any type of layout you need.
With the latest Nota release we really invested a lot of time refactoring the framework that powers the theme which improved overall performance, this is hugely different than the Dante/Neighborhood era themes.
On the main demo, even full content, we managed to achieve a grade of 97% for PageSpeed and 93% YSlow.
The refactored core framework for Nota also allows for even easier extension of the functionality of Nota via a child theme should you wish to do so.
Hopefully that helps you out in your decision.