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?
Joplin works well for me.
Joplin with NextCloud for sychronization + pivn for having access from everywhere :')
Another vote for Joplin here, but I prefer to host Joplin server for synchronization because it’s much faster than NextCloud.
+1 for Joplin with Nextcloud / WebDAV sync.
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?
Have you tried Remote Save plugin?
I use it to sync from a webdav on my NAS at home to work computer if I ever need it. It also syncs from services like OneDrive, Dropbox, S3 etc.
There are other versions of similar syncing.
Does this work similar to Syncthing where it syncs the markdown files to the local file system? If so, that’s definitely helpful, but I’m trying to avoid saving/storing my personal notes on my work laptop. I’d rather access them through a web interface and avoid local storage (in certain use cases). Another example is where people can’t install custom software on work computers, so it’s helpful to have a non-Obsidian way to edit the files for those times.
Not being able to install local apps is a valid issue. But if you are really concerned about a work laptop, I wouldn’t trust something just because it’s web based. Depending on the company, they can access that data if they really wanted to just alomst as easily as a file on disk.
I host a copy of Obsidian on my server, and I can access it through a reverse proxy. There isn’t any authentication though, so you have to use something like Authelia.
Do you mean that you use a VNC connection to access your server UI? Or is there a way to host Obsidian as a true web app?
It’s VNC, but it’s included in the docker image I use, so nothing extra other than adding authentication in front of it.
It just stores them to the folder you choose as a vault for your notes. I have seen people put their vaults on a USB stick which they encrypt for security.
No web version of Obsidian as far as I know. Have you tried SimpleNote?
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 [email protected]
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.
+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.
Great point about this being such a personal preference thing. I was thinking that as I was reading through all these passionate replies.
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.
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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.
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…
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.
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 use Trilium, it just scratched the need I had which obsidian and logseq couldn’t somehow.
Yes, same for me!
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).
