2y ago

Notes taking app

I'm looking for a good notes taking app to replace The Bad Ones like Evernote.

I want to have the content available over multiple devices (iOS app if possible) and preferably also a web editor.

Any ideas?

75 comments

Joplin works well for me.
- Another vote for Joplin here, but I prefer to host Joplin server for synchronization because it's much faster than NextCloud.
- Joplin with NextCloud for sychronization + pivn for having access from everywhere :')
- +1 for Joplin with Nextcloud / WebDAV sync.

obsidian.md
- 2nd vote for Obsidian.
  I've moved from OneNote and Evernote about two years ago to Obsidian. I tried out (and still do look at) all the note-keeping apps and Obsidian beats hands down. For me, the major determiner was that it saves to plain text files that I can just transfer into any future app easily. The other aspect is that plug-ins enable you to tailor how Obsidian functions to your own working processes.
  I've found keeping Obsidian in sync over iCloud pretty good as long as you keep the number of plug-ins on phone and iPad limited.
  
  Obsidian is great except for the times when you can’t sync your notes to a local file system (like on a work computer). Does anyone know of a self-hosted web app that’s effective for reading/editing the markdown files?

I really like Joplin
- Is Joplin something you can host or fontina use their cloud?
  
  You can self host. They even have official lemmy community at !joplinapp@sopuli.xyz

Seconding obsidian.
And you can self host the live sync plugin to keep all devices in sync with each other.

huge obsidian.md fan here. it doesn't have a web editor, but since your notes really are just markdown files it's easy to mix and match with other markdown editors. for quick notes i like to drop into markor on my phone rather than obsidian, since they're compatible and obsidian takes longer to load due to my love of plugins
i use syncthing to get my vault onto all my devices on the fly, plus a git repo for longer-term archival. i believe syncthing doesn't play so well on ios due to system limitations, however, so using the official "obsidian sync" service might be a better bet in your case?

I use Joplin. It supports syncing with OneDrive, Dropbox and NextCloud. Also supports encryption which is great if you are syncing to onedrive or dropbox.

Another vote for Trilium.
A couple of years ago Roam Research was trending, I read some articles and reviews about it and I liked the concepts it introduced. I looked for a free, open source self-hosted cross-platform alternative to Roam and found Trilium.
Its native on Windows, Mac, and Linux, while it doesn't have any Native Mobile apps, the webapp works on great on mobile and can be installed to your phone launcher as a PWA.
It does everything I want, and I use it a lot. A bunch of my colleagues have been recently moving from Evernote or Notable, over to Obsidian, and I understand Obsidian is the new hot thing, but I think I'll stick with Trilium.
My advice would be to try out a bunch. Note taking is surprisingly nuanced and personal preferences play a major role. Try each one for a week or two, and see which best matches your workflow and your requirements.
- Great point about this being such a personal preference thing. I was thinking that as I was reading through all these passionate replies.
- +1 for Trilium, been using it for about a year now and I like it over the other solutions I've tried: Joplin, Obsidian, and logseq.
  Don't forget about Trlium's white board feature! I didn't know it existed until recently - create a new "canvas" style note to get it started
- I also useTrilium but I have to say that the mobile experience is pretty poor. You loose the ability to add labels and most of the desktop features are stripped away. If all you need is to simple read and write, then the mobile web app may suffice. There is also a bug where many android keyboards cause typed characters to duplicate (a ckeditor bug)
  I'm still sticking with Trilium because the desktop app is super. I'm definitely looking forward to a mobile app at some point (its bound to be developed by someone!)
  
  I agree with that, mostly. However I find I don't really ever need to add or edit content on mobile. I only use the web app on mobile to lookup something when my laptop isn't at hand. There is the official Trilium Sender app for Android that allows you to forward text, pictures, links, etc from your device to your Trilium server, then you organise the content when you get back to your laptop. I find that fills any gaps in functionality. I hate brain dumping or editing long or complex paragraphs of text on my mobile anyway.

Obsidian is popular. Markdown-based and lots of plugins. Can get super powerful.
You can try Appflowy. It's a Notion clone written in Flutter. Open source and batteries-included for a bunch of note-taking applications.
Nextcloud notes seem to be a good evernote alternative. Just notes, nothing bigger.
- Second obsidian. And if you want to self-host a sync for it you can.
  There's a selfhosted sync plugin that lets you sync changes between many devices with a couchDB handling it all.
  It works pretty smooth, and keeps my computers and my phone in sync as long as I'm on the LAN or VPN.

Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)
- I've been using Carnet for note-taking, which is a nextcloud plugin. It has been a great replacement for Google keep, but it's really buggy. How has your experience with Nextcloud Notes been?
  
  My experiences with Nextcloud have been on another level in general. Really positive. I use it for a lot of things including notes, and its been really solid.
- How is performance now? I moved away from it a year or so ago because the performance was pretty bad on my system, even with an external database.
  
  I don't think its too bad, but it probably depends a lot on a lot of factors.
  Since I first started my hardware got a lot stronger, and nextcloud, php, and mariadb have all improved and so my experience has gotten pretty decent.
  Remember though, there's a ton of biases here, so I could be wrong...

Logseq + Syncthing?
No web editor though—well, they have a tutorial web app that I think you can force into editing your markdown files, but that's not what it's meant for.

Use Joplin and you can stop searching. FOSS and multiplatform with selfhosted options, great sync and a lot of plugins to adjust it to your taste.

I use Trilium, it just scratched the need I had which obsidian and logseq couldn't somehow.
- Yes, same for me!

In a different post I mentioned I'd left Dropbox, and that I was replacing Evernote with Obsidian. I had lots of good suggestions for markdown editors, and one that I'd never heard of, but I've been testing today is Silverbullet. It's main appeal to me is that I can use it effectively on iOS since it has a mobile friendly web interface.
My setup is I'm using SyncThing over tailscale to keep my laptop and server in sync, I run a local instance of SilverBullet on my laptop and the wepapp on my iPhone over tailscale to a SilverBullet instance on the homelab server.
- Ooh... Silverbullet looks really useful!! Just installed, need to figure out what I can do, looks like a lot of functionality!

I migrated away from Evernote a few years ago, where I kept my "paperless life" (PDFs of receipts, bills, etc) and general notes (work, study, etc). Opting to self-host most of the things I can, I moved the notes to Dokuwiki and the rest to what is now Paperless-ngx.
This year I realised that Obsidian suits my needs better than a wiki, so migrated the notes to that. If it's just for your stuff, I'd recommend the same. (Though if you collaborate with anyone, I've heard Notion is a better option specifically for that.) Obsidian has a lot of extensibility, which will steepen the learning curve, but it's worth it.
I sync Obsidian's Vault using my Synology NAS's "Drive" client, and Obsidian works perfectly with Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The only shortcoming is iOS (because iOS), though I believe you can work around it using Obsidian Sync or at least one other tool I've seen mentioned. It might also be possible via the Obsidian Git extension, but I've not tried it with iOS and requires (from a self-hosting perspective) that you have a local Git server (for example).

Joplin for notes, Floccus for Bookmarks.
- Thanks for Floccus suggestions. It says it syncs over Nextcloud Bookmarks, does that mean you wouldn’t need a dedicated app except for Nextcloud?

zettlr: free, open source (GPL3), no database.

If you already have Nextcloud their Notes app is easy to use and has a mobile app

Wow. A lot of comments! Thanks all. I will check them and see if there is something that matches my use cases!

I've used Outline for 2 years. It's honestly really nice. Pretty simple to selfhost and you can set-up internal auth with something like Authelia.
However I recently moved to Obsidian.md because of the large community and add-ons available. I love it. For device synchronisation I use Syncthing and I can't complain. It has no WebApp but it's available on every platform
- I love outline as much as the next guy, but calling it simple to selfhost is a bit of a stretch. It has lots of moving parts and not having an auth solution built-in makes it not suitable for the average user.
  That said, it does beat other wiki solutions by a wide margin!

I really like Obsidian

I'm finding logseq very interesting.
FOSS and filesystem based. But you have to figure out sync yourself. I'm setting it up with syncthing, but I'll have to replace it with git because I need it to work across ios and android systems.
- They have a sync that actually works pretty well. As the product is still beta you can donate and get access to the sync service.

I bounced around a bunch of different apps after leaving Evernote myself some 6-7 years ago. Evernote was cool, but started getting worse. I can only imagine how bad it is now. I also learned that migrating away from Evernote's walled garden is a bit difficult.
I don't have any recommendations for ones with a web editor. I specifically wanted a local app for my notes, which Evernote seemed less interested in and more interested in pushing their web app. After Evernote I've been using a folder of plain-old Markdown files, synced to my home server, and using various editors for those Markdown files. Things I've tried include VSCode, Typora, and QOwnNotes.
Today I use Obsidian and haven't hopped around for the last 2 years. I love Obsidian and have basically no complaints about it. Again no web editing, but if you just want local files (that can sync across devices) then Obsidian is excellent.

Trilium user here. Only thing is some issue with the keyboard when used from android.

I ditched Evernote and moved to Standard Notes. It’s everywhere for me, iOS, windows, Linux and MacOS and it has a web client which is consistent with all versions of the app. My only gripe is easy image embedding. But I’m living without it.

I went with Nextcloud Notes, because I don't want anything saving files locally that I then have to worry about syncing. I can just point a browser at it from wherever I am, or use an app. Also, it's nice that Nextcloud Notes saves them as markdown, so I can easily migrate the data elsewhere if I ever want to. And those markdown files are treated like normal Nextcloud files, so if you do want to sync that stuff, your notes sync along with everything else.

I haven't found a good replacement. I use a combination of syncthing (files), paperless-ngx (pdf), markdown notes (text, lists), memos (todos), radicale (caldav todos), wallabag (web note/archive), images folders and my mobile phone apps (photos/gallery, zettel notes, paperless-ngx app, syncthing).
I enjoyed Evernote back in the day, but yeah..

I currently use primarily Logseq with a little Obsidian because it’s just a really pleasant text editor and Zettlr for long form writing and research. The nice think about keeping it all Makrdown is that I can use any of them depending on what features/UI I need.
Logseq does have the web editor but it’s more of a demo (it’s literally called demo.logseq.com) but it gives you the full vanilla feature set as long as you connect a local directory. I use Logseq Sync just because I was paying to support the team anyway, and it’s worked very well so far. Just ran into an issue where my laptop with most of my notes broke and so I made a portable version of the app to put on a USB and work on a library computer and it ran and connected to my Logseq Sync remote graph surprisingly seamlessly.

I use markdown files + Nextcloud for synchronization. What I like about it is that I can use any markdown editor. Currently I use Nextcloup app on mobile and Pulsar or Nextcloud Web UI on desktop.

I used Evernote, Simplenote and various other ones and settled for Clickup for now, unless it gets enshittificated, too.
It mainly markets as a productivity app with todo lists, but also has a great document and note management system builtin.

May I ask what is wrong with Evernote? It's always worked well for me.
- I assume privacy

I know we're in selfhosted, but if you're just looking for an Evernote replacement, OneNote is the OG and really gets the job done.

I don't think this satisfies your use cases perfectly but an interesting solution for sure. I prefer note taking in vscode using the patricklee.vsnotes extension. Here's a write up on it at c/vscode. You can commit your note changes to a git repo on github or other elsewhere, giving you access from many different places.
- I have manual commands creating notes and symlinked notes dirs and a global gitignore for something similar but I namespace per repo which is much more convenient for me.
  
  Well that's interesting! But I don't write see how that would work. Mind explaining a bit more? Perhaps s little demo with notes from two workspaces?

Something I'm really looking forward to is the ability to self-host Notesnook. I'm currently really happy with the hosted service already and am looking forward to self-hosting it as well.

Personally, I'm just using Simplenote. Just the other day there was this post.

What kinda notes are you looking to take? If you want something real simple but works across all devices, is super fast and with great search, try Simplenote. If you want something with more power, I’ll echo what others here have suggested and say Obsidian. Don’t do notion.
- What's wrong with notion?
  
  My biggest reason for moving off Notion (and to Obsidian) was lack of offline availability. This has left me in a bind multiple times.
  
  Basically this https://www.notion.so/product/ai. AI hype train, won’t be long til this is default (if it isn’t already) and they steal all your notes/writing to feed LLMs and monetize your work without you knowing.