Joplin is a gem of open source, and I use it daily on all of my machines. I'm so grateful to have a good FOSS notes app that syncs cross platform. I've been a patron for years and recommended it to lots of people.
If anyone has questions about how I use it or my workflow I'm happy to shill this app more, lol.
I know Obsidian is the cool kid right now but I just absolutely can't imagine using a closed source app for something as personal and important as my notes.
Since the dev is hanging out in this thread, I will say that I'd absolutely love me some vim keybindings though.
> can't imagine using a closed source app for something as personal and important as my notes.
given that it's Markdown and local whatever you open it with at the end of the day doesn't matter much. That's the benefit of relying on a lightweight markup language, you're not locked in.
> If anyone has questions about how I use it or my workflow I'm happy to shill this app more, lol.
I've recently begun using Joplin and am still futzing my way around. Would love to hear about anyone else's workflow.
One question, not specific to Joplin, I always have with note-taking apps is what's the best way to organize content? Or do you not worry about that and simply use tags to create structure/relationships?
I use notebooks and nested notebooks heavily. I've found that a directory-style structure works well for me, especially because the integrated search is also good if I forget where I put something. I have never personally had success with tagging for organization, but maybe that's just me.
In no particular order, I recommend:
* WebDAV to sync your files, I just use some of my fastmail storage and draft off the $5 a month I already pay them
* Pasting screenshots from your clipboard into your markdown works automagically on desktop, drops the file with a generated name into the Joplin file structure. It elevates the tool quite a bit imo
* It is worth getting comfortable with some of the basic markdown annotations. Just knowing to use asterisks and underscores and whatever speeds you up a lot from having to go click the "bold" button or whatever.
* I really like editing with the preview pane open. It closes the loop for me, and is the best of both worlds where I get to just type the annotations at my normal typing speed, but also see the formatted output so I can make changes as I go.
As a Logseq user I'd say that your last sentence/question is correct. The graph that emerges from your page references forms the primary form of structure. If you want to be able to find X by searching for Y, either mention Y in X or tag X with Y. In addition, though, when you have a page foo/bar/baz, foo and foo/bar also become their own pages (not folders per se, although they'll show baz as a child) which does let you get a folder hierarchy if you need it (and every folder comes with an index.md, because it's a bona fide page). Especially useful for nested tags like #movie/comedy.
Joplin is great. But there is a huge gotcha if you start using it from iOS instrad of laptop client first -- you can never connect access phone notes from other device.
I think this is working fine now. I do have one current irritation, but understand that it is resolved by getting all the clients updated. (Just waiting on NixOS to update its version).
Basically, I enabled encryption, synced devices one at a time. I think my iOS client is a newer version than desktop, so I have a warning about the couple new entries that can't be decrypted (yet) on desktop.
I know I could go and figure out the update for my local install, but can wait a bit for the moment.
I really want to like Joplin, and I've tried to switch a number of times. But the mobile experience just isn't there for me. The iOS app is simple and reliable, which is good, but it's missing some of the touches that make mobile computing feel like it's made for mobile.
Specifically, things like swipes for navigation and for selecting or deleting notes. Also, many of the buttons are just too damn small for my sausage fingers. It's dumb, I know. Still, I find myself attempting to swipe to open the side bar then realizing my mistake after the second try and fumbling to reach the too small hamburger in the very top left of the screen.
Notes are something I reference at my desktop but generally write while on the go, so having a easy to use mobile app is a requirement for me. It's a shame though cause the desktop experience is so good.
just jumping on this to say I'm a Joplin user and I love it, thank you for building an awesome app. I currently also use notion because of Joplin's lack of note sharing on mobile; if good note sharing came to the Joplin mobile app I wouldn't need anything else. The only other feature I'd want that I think is missing from Joplin is the ability to define different storage locations / encryption keys per notebook to allow good separation of work and personal data. Overall though, wonderful app and I am so happy that something like it exists. I really feel like the intentions of the app developers align with my values, and that it will continue to go in the right direction for years to come.
Glad you like the app and thanks for the kind words! For separation between work and personal notes, we know support multiple profiles, as described here, available on both mobile and desktop: https://joplinapp.org/news/20220606-release-2-8/#multiple-pr...
By note sharing on mobile, what do you mean? I believe you can share some text from any app to Joplin. And there's also a way to share from Joplin to any other app (from the context menu). Or is it not currently working?
I use the iOS shortcut for pasting into Joplin and it works great other than not brining in the title.
Wanted to thank you for the great app! I left Evernote a year ago and it’s helped me get my journaling back on track. I use Dropbox sync and it wonderfully. I don’t remember the last time I had issues with it.
Only thing I hope for one day is the ability to see the article tags on each note in the list view so I can see which notes have which tags in common without having to click on the tag.
Multiple profiles is a great addition, but obviously would be even better if the app did not need to close and re-open. The risk for me is that a thought disappears in the time it takes me to swap profiles, but I think the keyboard shortcut should help with that on desktop :) the switching itself seems to be fast enough.
My use case is sharing lists etc (e.g a shopping list, task lists) with my wife who barely ever goes on a desktop computer, and have her be able to share lists with me, update them etc.
Joplin as a FOSS app is really a good initiative and I keep trying it from time to time. However having used smartphones for more than a decade now (and being a mobile developer) I have realised that, whatever would be the reason for an Electron app (there might be valid ones like resource, time, target audience etc), an electron app just doesn't cut it. So I doubt I can use an electron app on mobile. Problem is it shows :(
> Specifically, things like swipes for navigation and for selecting or deleting notes.
Gestures / swipe-navigation gets me every time too. There’s also a new enhanced editor on iOS but it’s a little clunky so I switched back to the plain textbox one. I still use and love Joplin, but tolerate some rough edges on mobile because it’s truly open source.
Joplin on desktop with the MacOS theme-plugin is great. The markdown editor on an actual Macbook outshines whatever is packaged with Linux, but both are very usable. Several other nice plugins on desktop that I rely on are inline-tags, simple backup, templates and the outline sidebar.
Overall, love Joplin and can’t wait to see more improvements as time goes on.
I also write on the go and reference on the desktop later. What is your current workflow? Apple Notes would be great except my work computer is windows, and apple notes in the browser is not great
Obsidian. It's not perfect but I like a lot of what it brings. Particularly, I like that the notes remain in an accessible format (though as long as the format is not proprietary I'd be fine) and the mass of third party plugins supports basically any workflow. The main issue for me is the fact that the main app is not open source (not for any particular reason other than that I like supporting open source initiatives). I pay for their sync option which works well, though on iOS your kinda forced into it as iCloud sync does not work well. Otherwise, though their mobile experience improved greatly in recently releases.
Thanks for this. I used orgmode for many years, and love it. My main issue is that I travel and found that using the mobile versions unpleasant. Obsidian looks very slick.
If I ever went back to a desk job I’d switch back to orgmode instantly. For now it’s OneNote + whatever is nearby that I can write on (and maybe Obsidian!).
For those that want to crosslink anything and everything I suggest Logseq[1]. Its journal and graph view are fantastic. And it has many useful plugins. I use it along with git-sync [2] and syncthing [3] now I can sync the notes across my work, personal desktops and my mobile.
I looked at logseq as an alternative to joplin but there were too many little flags that suggested to me that privacy and being free might not be forever. I don't have a problem with paying for software, but I don't like getting embedded in it when I don't know what the cost will be. Privacy wise, statements like "The aim of Logseq is to establish a better environment for both learning and collaboration, enabling us to form a network that connects our ideas and enhances the collective knowledge of humanity." worry me. I don't want my ideas connected with humanity and I certainly don't want my notes used to train someones LLM. Maybe this is an unfair reading, as they do claim to be privacy focused, but I am worried that they will discover far to many interesting and fun things to do with user data and I just don't really like where that sounds like its headed. If Joplin could do better sharing (with eg a colleague or spouse) on mobile and better separation of work/private notes (like different storage locations) it would be just about perfect for me for a note taking app, but then my needs are pretty simple.
Just try it out before interpreting their vision (which I totally ignored up until now). It is simply a nice system based on your local markdown files, allowing to easily cross-link notes. It is opinionated but I like that. It follows the bullet journaling approach and has a rudimentary integrated todo system.
I have personally tried many alternatives (obsidian among them) but nothing comes close to what logseq offers _to me_, despite its few shortcomings (it's not a lightning fast implementation, it bugs sometimes).
Same. I've tried a dozen different notes options and logseq is the one that has stuck the longest. After screen sharing it at work a little there are now 10 more people using it daily for notes and talking about how it's what they've always been looking for.
Thank you for the info. Since, I use my own local data and don't store anything on their cloud, I didn't read their cloud storage plan. I hope how they will not be able to train LLMs or connect with other data sources if the data is not stored on their cloud. One lesson I learned os that if you use any cloud storage, they can always update the ToS and EULA at anytime to break through privacy
> better separation of work/private notes (like different storage locations)
FYI, as of last year, Joplin supports profiles on both Desktop and Android that are exactly that. Though you do have to restart the app to toggle between the two.
> I looked at logseq as an alternative to joplin but there were too many little flags that suggested to me that privacy and being free might not be forever.
Exactly my thoughts when I looked at it a few weeks ago (minus the privacy angle that I didn't feel).
I also bounced off the slew of influencer-type blog posts and videos that promise you that Logseq will change your {life, studies, PhD, work} forever when all I saw in those videos were very, very simple outlines. The whole community (including the subreddit) seems very... promotional.
The code is open source... Go read it...
If you can't, ask a friend who can or trust the community to have did it for you. The privacy is the statement number one of why people choose logseq, there is a reason...
I don't have a problem with how its written now, their statements on privacy seem to conflict with other statements they make about the future of the product. They seem very ambitious in way that a simple note taking app will not satisfy.
Probably the reason was both Boostnote and Joplin seems to have stopped developing the application and shifted focus to monetization.
Also I personally prefer the (much) more technical way that Logseq work. It is not a markdown editor, but a knowledge base that stores its data as plaintext files in a markdown-like format.
One question: do you have pointers to a good way to setup git sync and syncthing? I pay enough to LogSeq to have free sync but I prefer to self host and also the current sync
model is somewhat flaky.
I have a private git repo in Github which is the folder that Logseq uses. I have a cron job to runs script for git-sync on all machines on reboot. I also have syncthing running on my personal desktop that shares this git repo with my android phone. It runs smooth as long as you don't do simultaneous edits from multiple machines.This will break the git-sync and you will have to do merge conflicts of that happens.
A huge fan of Logseq here. I can’t imagine my workflow without it anymore. However, I still can’t have it on mobile because of sync. iCloud is awful, Syncthing doesn’t support mobile.
my understanding is that syncthing doesn't work properly on iOS, because Apple doesn't allow background processes. So you have to manually sync all the time.
I'd imagine you'd get into some merge conflicts if you forget to manually sync and start editing notes.
That's why ios apps generally either use their own sync, or use iCloud. As someone that has a mix of devices (iOS, Linux desktop, macbook for work), this leave me with very few cross-platform options.
Longtime joplin user here - been using s3 sync storage since it was available. As long as it is open and free, that will be my note app of choice. Yeah the mobile app definitely needs work, and there's always room for improvement overall. But it is free as in "free beer", as well as "free speech". Both are hard requirements for me, at least for my notes (and data, in general).
I have years of notes in joplin, spread across dozens of notebooks and several profiles. I'm impressed.
There are a zillion competitors out there, some with extremely beautiful interfaces - but it MUST be open for me to even look at it.
How is the sync now? Does it only sync every 5 minutes, with the user requiring to manually press "sync" for every change? Or does it sync on changes automatically?
I'm asking because I used it in the past and the sync limitation often caused conflicts for my mobile and desktop clients
I use Joplin extensively on multiple devices and I find that the only way to completely avoid sync conflicts is to make sure you hit sync after entering data on one device, and then hit sync on the other device before using it.
FWIW, with OneDrive sync, I haven't noticed that problem. I use Joplin quite a bit from both desktop and mobile, but have been living without the browser extensions in an experiment since the beginning of this year.
Do you have an open issue for it? Curious as to what the fix is. (I jankily re-wrote the sync when it broke a while back so curious what's not working.)
I tried many note-taking apps and finally settled on Notable[0]. It's simple and you can point it to a folder with markdown files and attachments. Plus, you can just sync the folder using any syncing service, and use Noteless[1] on Android. The tagging support is superb, you can cross-link notes, render math using katex, and export to pdf.
Because of the simple folder structure, you can also use vim+fzf to search/navigate/create/edit your notes. The notational-fzf-vim plugin[2] is superb for that.
For web-clipping, I just use the markdownload[3] extension in firefox and save the markdown file in the notes folder.
Why not joplin? Mostly because joplin stores notes in an sqlite database instead of a simple folder structure making it not easily accessible by normal unix tools and editors.
Why not obsidian? Was never able to grok obsidian. Pointing it at my existing notes makes it just show up as a huge mess of unstructured notes. I guess it needs some effort to organize and link existing notes. In notable, I can tag a note as Books/CS, and CS/Books, and it'll show up in corresponding folder-like structures in the left panel. Can't do that in obsidian.
> Why not joplin? Mostly because joplin stores notes in an sqlite database instead of a simple folder structure making it not easily accessible by normal unix tools and editors.
But instead much more accessible to any kind of software, including a five line python script. While plain text files are useful, they shouldn't be taken to be the only true and accessible way of storing data, even textual ones.
Gitjournal used to make a lot of stuff (including things like rendering math equations) subscription-only, which was sufficiently off-putting.
I just looked at it again, and I think they've gotten rid of the subscription and made it a one-time "pro" purchase. That's better than subscription I guess. The only added advantage I see is that syncing with git is built in.
I've been using Joplin for a while now, syncing via Nextcloud.
One tip: I set up a cronjob to export into a Git repository so I have a complete history. The core of the script is:
joplin sync
joplin export --format=raw "$tmpdir"
# Rsync that directory to the repository
# This deletes files that no longer exist in the current export.
/usr/bin/rsync -a --quiet --delete --exclude=.git "$tmpdir/" "./"
/usr/bin/git add -A
Some pros of Joplin that go unnoticed vs other note taking apps:
1- Available on F-Droid (unofficially)
2- Available as a Flatpak (unofficially)
3- Supports syncing to file system (thus syncing via syncthing)
4- Supports encrypting the exported files
5- Open source
6- Can handle a lot of notes (I have around 5k, but some of those are large notes)
7- Dark Mode
These, among many other features make it my note editor of choice for the past 5 years.
Shameless plug for my native (Qt C++ based) open-source, cross-platform note-taking app[1]. It's fast, beautiful, and just works.
The next version will add an option to turn your Markdown tasks into a beautiful Kanban view[2] via QML. This feature will be paid but anyone will be able to compile the source with a simple CMake flag to get the PRO version for free.
Currently, it uses a DB but we aim to port it to support arbitrary folder (simple .md/.json files, depending on the complexity of the editor). I'm working on a mobile version and a built-in sync option as well.
Once the built-in syncing is complete I will probably only charge for that and the client itself will be completely free.
Thanks for making this. I look forward to trying it tonight. A few thoughts:
1. Any chance for a mobile version with cloud sync? Qt compiles for mobile too, after all. I access my notes from my phone all the time so this is a must for me.
2. How come so many indie devs are off making their own notes app instead of pooling their efforts? For example off the top of my head QOwnNotes is a Qt widget note app, and a QML-based one I think is called Noter but which I can't find anymore now.
3. Judging from the UI I take it you're an Evernote user, or used to be? There was a post today about all the Evernote staff being laid off, so I feel pressured to move away ASAP. Other than Joplin do you have any recommendations that work on mobile?
1. We're currently using QWidgets which doesn't look good on mobile. But we plan to port the UI to Qt Quick (logic will stay in C++). Our new Kanban feature and some other widgets are already built with Qt Quick/QML. And we'll work on syncing too. I wrote that in my comment above.
2. We're actually using a major component from the maker of QOwnNotes called QMarkdownTextEdit[1] for our Markdown editor. It Works great (thanks @pbek!). Just two days ago someone managed to port the syntax highlighter to QML[2] which paves the way for us to port the UI over to QML.
3. I never used Evernote (maybe I used it for a short time but I can't remember). Because we currently don't have a mobile app I use the built-in Apple's Notes on my phone that syncs well to the Desktop app and then I'll just copy over the notes to my app.
> 2. How come so many indie devs are off making their own notes app instead of pooling their efforts?
Notes are something very simple on surface, but can become very complicated and diversified on details. So everyone starts doing their own personalized sh*t, some are happy with this, and some learn the hardships of it and abandon their projects at some point. So we have a constant stream of half-assed notes-apps of various flavors, and some which are really well-made, to stay.
Looks nice. Good to see that there are still native apps in development! Looks a lot like Joplin - which I like.
But: I couldn't find anything about syncing my notes or mobile clients / other ways to access my notes. Even in the "vision" document. That's a must have functionality _for me_. Probably not important for everyone... therefore, good luck with your project :)
Hi there! I wrote in the above comment that it's planned. We'll support arbitrary folder (switch from DB), develop our mobile up (switch from QWidgets to Qt Quick), and develop our own built-in sync option.
Currently, you can change the database location to your synced folder (Dropbox, etc...) in the settings, but some users reported data conflicts while others said it works fine. You can try this but I'll wait till we officially switch from DB.
Last I checked this did not provide an obvious way for links between notes. This is a crutial feature for many folks who work with lots of small interlinked notes.
Piping content from the Internet to bash is a terrible way to distribute applications on Linux, I'd recommend making the official method a Flatpak instead. It'll allow you to sandbox your application, which is good for the user, and it'll handle the integration (e.g. app icon etc) correctly.
No user should ever be urged to install anything with that method, it's unsafe.
Is the issue with telling people to pipe URL output into bash? Or is the issue with any distribution method that isn't flatpak or something similarly privilege-limited?
I see how flatpak is an improvement, but I don't see how piping into bash is any worse than "install this .deb file / npm package / pip package." If the package author wanted to do something malicious, it's just as easy (if not easier) to put the malicious code in the package itself rather than a bash installer for the package.
If the installer is a precompiled binary, not much, though this is mostly a Windows-ism these days.
If we're considering the same batch script: You can read it,it before running and be sure that the endpoint doesn't dynamically give you different results depending on how you fetch it.
In either case, the proposal here was flatpak, which does provide security benefits like sandboxing.
If you trust the author of tool you are installing and the installer is by the same author, then why wouldn't you trust the installer too?
> It's 100% trivial to have it run rm or shred on all files you have access to while simultaneously printing correct looking install progress messages.
I've been using Joplin for a few years now. But only recently I've been exploring writing my own plugins for it.
I've never written a plugin for anything before but it's been very easy, and overall a very pleasant experience. My plugin basically lets you automate moving notes to specified folders based on what tags are present.
Big no-no to Joplin for me is that it is using some custom data format (sqlite I think). Why bother? Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files, syncing I can do myself e.g. (Synology, rsync) or use some file syncing service (Dropbox, OneDrive, whatever).
Zettlr does the trick for me without interfering with what I write.
"Custom" would be the way Apple Notes or Evernote stores their data in opaque binary blobs. SQLite is standard and you can open it with plenty of third-party tools, but I see your point about plain text files being more convenient for certain tasks.
I sync Joplin via Dropbox across phone and 2 laptops. In theory a prob? But in practice rare to never bc im only one user on one device at a time. And im making small changes at a time. There was 1 minor conflict once and Joplin saw it and i quickly resolved it.
I wrote my own note-keeping system[0] and very much wanted all of the notes to just be markdown files on the disk. It turns out that there are trade-offs to this. If you want plaintext markdown files on disk AND want fancy features like file versioning, a search index, tags, etc then you need to store all of that metadata somewhere and you're down writing a half-assed implementation of a DBMS.
Now, you can certainly bite the bullet and full-ass the implementation like Dokuwiki did, but that is really quite a lot of work and effort against simply `import sqlite` and writing a couple of tutorial-level queries. And it turns out that exporting all of your documents to plaintext, if you should so choose, is a one-line command away.
I was never able to get encrypted syncing working with Joplin. I tried every year or something for a while but it never worked. I kept looking for an Evernote alternative for years. The closest that got there is Leanote, which is a Chinese company's open source product. (https://github.com/leanote)
I finally gave up the search. Switched to unencrypted plain text md files synced with syncthing. On Linux I use Kate. It has a directory tree view and recursive search in said directories. It works great. On Android I am using Markor to point to the same shared directory. I don't think I'll ever start looking for a note taking app again. I also found I don't really take notes much. So there's that. :)
It really is very good. What made me not stick with it? Trying to remember. I think it was the fact that it is a little heavy and support/issues is in Chinese, which I don't speak. Later I simplified my setup and made everything local markdown files, handling sync myself.
You can actually try their hosted service for free. Though looking at it now, most of that is in Chinese too.
> Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files
You know what does that well? The filesystem.
I've tested pretty much all note-taking software out there. What ended up working for me is a bunch of markdown files inside folders, synced using Github.
I have search, formatting and preview thanks to VSCode, and I can access my notes on any machine that syncs with Github.
> Why bother? Just give me an app that can handle nicely markdown files
Markdown (and any other markup) really sucks for anything that is more than just plaintext with some formatting. The best markdown-app we have at the moment are those like Obsidian or Logseq, and they are very low-key compared with a proper richtext-app, like Notion or even a mature word processor.
And looking and the hard struggle of obsidian and their community-plugins, it might be really time to get a proper open richtext-format for the notes-space, to liberate us from markups and their limitations. Maybe something json-based, to bring the notebook-movement into the ring too.
I've used Obsidian, Logseq, Apple Notes, and Joplin recently.
I really like Obsidian for how performant it feels for handling really long md files with outline.
But the best capturing experience is Logseq. I just record everything I do in the journal (daily) page and just tag them (tag can have hierarchy and spaces too) . I don't have to think about directory structure or which file the info should go into. Logseq sucks for handling long form md files tho, so I keep Obsidian for that.
Joplin I tried to use it until it started having sync conflicts, and the sync corruption error cannot be dismissed. Google solutions suggests exporting JEX and delete everything and re-import. I give up after that.
Apple Notes is really nice too but lack coding highlight.
Joplin is great; unlike similar apps, it’s very fast. Even with gigs of pics in a doc, it still scrolls fast. Others I tried don’t even open or crash/corrupt.
Joplin is a solid option, using it along with Simplenote for some quick notes since Joplin's sync isn't that great.
But I was wondering whether there is somehting not tied to the simplistic markdown with next-gen note tech like rich text and CRDT for great sync conflict resolution and note history and non-Electron clients for performance?
I have tried to switch to Joplin from Evernote twice. But each time I have ended up being frustrated with the synchronisation. It is just too slow in my opinion. Perhaps I have too many notes, but I will be looking for another alternative to Evernote that can work on my phone and Ubuntu.
You usually get better sync performance by either self-hosting or using Joplin Cloud. I don't know of any good WebDAV provider, let alone a free one, and even the paid ones have limitations that make them unusable for sync.
OneDrive and Dropbox have a free tier and work with Joplin, but they throttle the connection. But I guess it depends on how many notes you have and how you use Joplin - a lot of people use OneDrive or Dropbox and it works good enough for them.
Fastmail comes with WebDAV. I used it with Joplin, but it pushes a very large number of files to the server. I have a paid OneDrive account. Found out that sync didn't work with OneDrive (random files just won't sync). Maybe they've fixed it, but I was not impressed.
Nextcloud has a surprisingly inefficient WebDAV implementation. It's not clear how they got it so wrong compared to, say, Nginx or Apache WebDAV, but they did. Maybe they are doing some processing on each request, creating thumbnails, checking for shared files, locks, or something that's not really necessary but it is slow as a result. Perhaps some config changes could indeed help though.
It only supports plain text notes (with Markdown rendering), but I've got years of notes in there, and it works on every platform. It's also owned and supported by Wordpress.
I keep looking for replacements but wind up every time coming back to Simplenote. Well worth considering as a baseline to compare other offerings against.
I got a large performance bump by increasing the number of allowed open connections from the default 5 to 20 in all clients. I’m syncing to a self hosted Nextcloud via WebDAV.
The funny thing about Joplin sync being too slow... years ago, I complained to the author that his markdown files weren't true markdown, and his rebuttal was that it was necessary to pollute those to get sync to perform well on Nextcloud/webdav. I pointed out how he might have just written a small NC plugin to achieve the same effect, at which point the thread was closed and I was no longer welcome to comment.
No discussion of note taking apps is complete without Zim Desktop Wiki [1], so let me be the one who sings its praise! It's less web or mobile oriented than Joplin but gives me everything I need. Plain text files, syncing, lots of plugins. And task management, oh boy. Task management is second to none, including orgmode. I'm a faithful user for years now and I am still happy I found it.
Also an extremely happy Zim user for desktop notes, projects & work journal.
Recently I was looking for a self-hosted equivalent to Google Keep (which I use mainly for lists, quick notes and web snippets), and tried out Joplin. It looked pretty good, but I wanted a web app frontend, which Joplin doesn't seem to have. I'm now trying out Memos [1] now, and it's pretty good so far (though I would love to see postgres support in Memos as well as the current sqlite DB).
I use Joplin over 3 years now, however Android app over 2.5 version is not possible sync over Syncthing. So I cannot update since 2.5 version which is not great, not terrible.
I use Joplin and it... it basically works! Bit ugly at times but I really enjoy having a thing that works on my computers and my phone. Sometimes I end up in Drafts instead on iOS because of how Drafts is really "just open and go", but even then I'll copy-paste it later.
Joplin is great at being a place to put a lot of ... simple rich text documents in a random manner, and have access to them. Wordpad with sync, and it does its job.
Been using Joplin as my main note app for over 2 years.
IOS, Web Clipper, and Windows clients. Synced to Nextcloud.
I do wish there was a webapp for me to see my notes in a browser but I understand the way it works how that would be difficult to create due to the use use of local files and syncing.
The ideal “knowledge base” app I’ve been searching for is as follows:
- Self-hosted
- Attractive web client that loads very quickly and works well on mobile
- Can point it at a nested directory of text/markdown and image/pdf files (no sql database)
- Text files are editable in place (no “edit” button, etc.)
- Markdown displays in a plain-text view (no hidden formatting characters, no “rich text” editor)
Every app I’ve tried misses at least of these. The closest I’ve found, strangely, is vscode-server, which is just too bloated and mobile-unfriendly to work for me. I’m perpetually a millimeter away from writing my own, but I feel like I need to stop doing that.
I use markor (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.gsantner.markor/) on android and it does everything I need. It's all a bunch of files, synchronized with syncthing, so I can use it on my desktop with any editor (maybe https://thiefmd.com/, maybe another one). No need for a server, I can use it while offline, it's lightweight to install and maintain.
I want to be able to access the same content from my laptop, phone, and tablet. I used Obsidian for a while with a convoluted setup (a Git repo with an iOS shortcut that fetched when the Obsidian app was launched), but it proved too slow and error-prone to continue using.
I want the whole stack to be open source, which is why I’m not using Obsidian Sync or an iOS Syncthing client. So while I don’t technically need web client, I don’t know of any other solution that would work for me.
I understand your concern, personally syncthing does a perfect job for me. I'm never editing from multiple devices at the same time, and by the time I switch to another device the content is synced. If not, I give it a little time and it makes me pause and use computers a little bit less, so it's not that much of a downside.
Like I said, the "database" is just a directory of files. You can use anything you want to keep it synced. I've used OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud to sync mine.
I'd much prefer "syncing" to be something I set up once, and then forget about it.
If it is "anything I want to do to keep it synced", then I'll be half-assing it forever, losing notes and so forth. Already doing that, and the 500 pages of notes from 3 years ago on Google drive, to the "attach it in Gmail to a draft so I can look it over at home", hell even a few somewhere on iCloud. For some things others might be interested in, I've even got a few github gists.
This, for me, is a problem that is central to notes software. It might be the one problem that makes or breaks them. At least with the pricey subscription garbage apps, they know enough to know that I don't want to have to think about syncing.
Contrary to popular belief, the mobile app is not forgotten - I count about 40 releases in total for the past 12 months.
We probably spend as much time working on it than on the desktop one, but unfortunately it is much harder to develop for mobile, especially when you have to make sure it works on the many different Android devices and iOS versions, plus the extra work to comply with the ever changing requirements from the Google and Apple stores. Many of these changes are not visible to the user, but without this boring never ending maintenance work the app simply wouldn't exist.
We do plan to update the UI/UX of the mobile app though, as we're aware it could be made more intuitive. I'm very keen on improving this and hopefully it will happen this year.
It’s a pretty clunky experience trying to creating and editing notes. There’s also the constant worry about conflicts, to try and cut them down I open the mobile app, hit sync, make an edit then hit sync again. I use WebDAV, maybe Joplin Cloud is better at it
I’ve been running multiple Joplin servers. One for personal and one for work. Hasn’t let me down yet. Always room for improvements, but it does reliable do the job. Easy import and export. No worries of being locked into anything.
Long time Joplin user. I LOVE Joplin. Got it synched with Dropbox. Several people have asked me what app I use when they see it. It's just what a note app should be: simple, cross-platform, markdown-based, can export notes.
People seem to be talking about this/these mainly for note taking, but I'm really only looking for the web clipping function. Evernote has been fine for my vast collection of chashu recipes, audio equipment schematics and philosophy enchiridia. I sure wouldn't want to lose that stuff. Joplin then? Obsidian? Something else? /rhetorical - I will keep reading the comments.
I love joplin - it has been my goto solution for adhoc notes for almost two years now. I use it on multiple devices and they all sync to an S3 bucket which is very cheap setup that works well once configured properly.
I don't love the default editing experience but the Rich Makdown extension solves it well for me.
The extension ecosystem is a bit of mixed bag. There are few good extensions but many are half baked.
Like that Joplin is open source and love the extensibility (plugins, API):
In my workflow, I have it set up to store my transcribed speech notes and todos
(with accurate offline speech recognition):
https://github.com/QuantiusBenignus/NoteWhispers
Love Joplin! I love it so much, my lazy ass actually donated. I spent quite some time searching for open source alternatives that don’t have an ulterior motive. Currently using nextcloud sync and it works. Sometimes the iOS app and the Linux desktop app are out of sync, but a sync fixes that. Would love to see mTLS implemented at some point!
Not sure why "refused". We want to support it but it's not trivial and it doesn't help that we don't have the hardware to test this. It will be done eventually
Same here. I only use note taking apps on my Mac, so syncing isn’t something I am interested in. For me the interface of Obsidian is really top notch. Typing headers and code block quotes doesn’t feel like it gets in your way.
My only complaint is that embedded images are saved at the root level by default. Would be nice if I could hide those or move them to an /Images folder,
I've used Joplin for a few years, had a few hundred notes on it and even sponsored it on GitHub. Then I've changed my smartphone which also brought with it an updated version of Android. The new Android version had some changes regarding how an app can manage a filesystem, which ultimately broke Joplin. I've waited a few weeks for an update (couldn't read my notes on a phone then) and even when it finally arrived, the process of synchronization was so slow and buggy I couldn't do it. That (together with other sync bugs I've been reporting earlier) was the reason I've lost patience and switched to Obsidian. Either way, I'm thankful for developers for those few years, that was a really great tool
My major problem with Joplin is the lack of a native client for Apple Silicon, otherwise it's great. I know you can run it with Rosetta but it's performance and load time is terrible.
Recently started using Joplin. I find myself reformatting everything I paste into it from the browser. I thought the long load time was just the program. Didn't realize it wasn't native. I find myself not using it because it does feel clunky and slow and just easier to take screenshots.
I'm different from a lot of people it sounds like here. I mainly use one big ass note and I want my note app to start as fast as possible to get the idea I have on paper asap so I can forget about it.
Nothing is able to beat the Apple notes experience, even if my main phone is an Android. I still prefer it.
The main thing is, Apple is instant, you open it and type. Joplin takes 3-10 seconds on my phone and doesn't remember what note I was on if not on standby mode.
Also syncing. Often goes wrong. I like one big notes for my main planning & things to remember. Most apps manage multiple fine, but one big one often goes wrong. Had issues trying Google keep and evernote. Havent tried it with joplin yet, will give it a go.
My phone recently died and had to move to a new device and resynchronize my Joplin "vault".
I have tens of thousands of notes and the Android app just cannot complete the first sync. I left it running all night (sync gets slower and slower as it progresses) with "stay awake" enabled on Android (because Joplin stops synching as soon as the screen locks or the app is not in focus) and even after restarting multiple times, sync never completes (it claims it finished, but most recent notes are still nowhere to be found).
This is using the WebDAV backend as that's the only option I have (so long as there's no Google Drive backend).
I am looking for alternatives (with a web clipper extension and native apps on windows/linux/mac/android).
Having started with Joplin, the three things that took me away were the (at the time) lacking mobile support, periodic syncing collisions, and probably most importantly, their non-standard file format. There was a tool that could extract files into standard markdown format, then repack them, but the overhead was tiring, and meant a few key environments lacked access, namely when I was accessing a server from the rack, and when the mobile app acted up.
I actually moved to just using vimwiki style setup with markdown and a markdown editor app on my phone for several years, before I stumbled across Obsidian.
I've since been using obsidian for about 9 months now, which is longer than my time with Joplin, and I will say that, once I got a stable sync going (I'm using the simple sync plugin and my own s3 compatible server), the plugin support, decent mobile app, and native markdown files have won me over. Though I'm still eyeing open source options with Logseq, just waiting on their mobile app to pick up and properly support plugins. I'll be more than happy to port everything as soon as it supports that.
As an additional note, I will add that despite Obsidian being closed-source, I actually feel more comfortable with my data there than with Joplin, primarily because all my data is just common markdown. With Joplin, if I archive content, I have no guarantee the notes on the file format will exist in 10 years (they probably will, but it's still a real possibility). With Obsidian, it's plaintext. There's nothing to need to rediscover, no file format to decode, just good old plain-text. In 40 years I'll still be able to read those files (though the storage media is a very different story). Sure Obsidian can change plans mid-stream, and I don't trust they wont, but all I gotta do is go back to my markdown editor and vim. No sweat.
> In 40 years I'll still be able to read those files (though the storage media is a very different story)
With Joplin, you can easily archive as Markdown+FrontMatter and that format will still be readable 40 years from now with text and metadata included.
Additionally, in case you forgot to make a backup, and 40 years later all traces of Joplin have disappeared from earth and you can't find an old version of the app, the backend is a simple SQLite database, so you can do `SELECT * FROM notes` and get your content back.
> Though I'm still eyeing open source options with Logseq, just waiting on their mobile app to pick up and properly support plugins. I'll be more than happy to port everything as soon as it supports that.
I tried it out for a while, I'm sure that it's a great program and it's various free sync options & encryption system may immediately put it ahead, but as a basic user I found it much more complicated to the point where I couldn't figure out how to simply sort files into folders (and I don't know if that's something you can do). There's an interesting tagging system to search posts with and there's a ton of plugins out there if you want to do things you can usually do.
I really ought to give it a shot again when I've got a clear head.
If you want a FOSS alternative to Obsidian that's just as simple you could try Zettlr, but currently it's rather rough. You have to change the UI settings to get the folders/file view that Obsidian has, and I found readability to be rather poor. Initially there's no way to make in text larger without zooming in the entire UI, font, and the themes that are available aren't the best for writing or reading notes (and if you like one specific theme you're sod out of luck if you want a darker version of it) – if you want to change things to your liking you have to experiment with the experimental Custom CSS option.
Tried both for quite some time, Obsidian has better community plugin support, better sync (paid) and stores plain text files instead of using a DB. Most importantly the mobile app (at least for iOS) of Obsidian is 1:1 with the desktop app.
Switched from Joplin to Obsidian and haven't looked back. Both apps are great initiatives though!
Does it reflect notebooks/folder structure also in the filesystem? That's exactly what I need from a PKM tool: that not only the files but also the structure of the notebooks is reflected in the filesystem so I can have interoperability. This way I can decide to work with Obsidian, EagleFiler, Notebooks.app or DEVONthink while also having the possiblity of using the regular Finder to work with my files.
For me personally the only upside is that I don't have to pay separately for syncing the documents and can use Dropbox instead. Yeah I could use Dropbox on my phone too for obsidian but it's not a great experience when all you want is taking/reading notes without hassle.
Worse. I want to see the result when writing so I always had to have a separate preview window open which stole a lot of screen space. Obsidian solved this with the WYSIWYG mode where a paragraph transforms to markdown when you click on it, but the rest of the document shows the end result. It makes the experience a lot nicer when embedding tables and images that you can look at directly and write in-depth about without just seeing a filename.
Out of curiosity, why do you require that? On my desktop, my system account is protected, never left unattended while unlocked, and I've got full-disk encryption.
I can't presently imagine a benefit to an extra password for my notetaking application, so your comment makes me wonder whether I'm missing something or whether I just use it a little differently than you do.
I have other people use my computer from time to time, but not for enough time to warrant a separate account. From what I understand, Joplin's data is also stored unencrypted on disk. I don't use full-disk encryption and I don't want to use it just for Joplin. Are people using my computer going to open up my notes app or snoop around in the sqlite db? Probably not. But I like to have the peace of mind.
These are the types of applications that I really love. It stores the data in a cloud service that already has enough free capacity for say a notes app. It's like how we can store pass(1) passwords on a git repository (Sync it with Github) and use that as the destination of Android Password Store[1], and you have a easy password manager that syncs across devices.
If anyone has questions about how I use it or my workflow I'm happy to shill this app more, lol.
I know Obsidian is the cool kid right now but I just absolutely can't imagine using a closed source app for something as personal and important as my notes.
Since the dev is hanging out in this thread, I will say that I'd absolutely love me some vim keybindings though.