Joplin 4+

It’s free privacy features are pretty good but the project is small. The community around it isn’t that large and the dev team is smaller. As such the UI isn’t as good as notetaking apps by larger companies. I would appreciate it if Joplin had support for encryption and passwords for notes at rest on your computer.

The thing that really bugs me is how technical you have to get in order to recover accidentally deleted notes. There should be a two step process to deletion with the first deletion sending it to a trash container that self emptied in intervals and where you can permanently delete notes after some time.

I was looking for a tool that I could use to organize and access my burgeoning collection of notes, and this app is ideal for me. I can use Markdown within my notes to easily create tables, etc. I can easily add jpegs and pngs to my notes. I can easily create links from within one note to another. I can easily rearrange my notebooks and move notes around without breaking links between them. I can easily access and work on my notes on my MacBook Pro, my iPad Pro, my iPad Mini, and my iPhone. I decided to try the app‘s reasonably priced Joplin Cloud, and it’s working beautifully. I‘ve got end-to-end encryption that is nearly invisible, in terms of how long it takes for things to sync and open. Did I mention the healthy community of plugins available, or how much I enjoy being able to also call up Joplin and run it from the command line when I‘m programming? When I was first setting up the app, I had to work through a couple of glitches, which was made much easier byte developer’s responsiveness and the app‘s active discussion boards. Right now I’ve got 482 notes in 42 folders, revised 1,024 times (?!). Some are quite short and others are vey long. The app has never choked or lagged, and searches are very fast. I love this app and use it all day, every day.

The name says it all. I grew tired of Evernote and wanted to switch to a FOSS alternative that I could self host. It doesn’t match Evernote feature for feature but in terms of my core needs, I have no complaints. Pleasant interface, cross platform, nested notebooks and tags, end to end encryption, multimedia notes, decent search. Importing from Evernote was very easy.

The things I miss about Evernote are the OCR to search within PDFs, the better polish around their search UI and smarter search in general, and the ability to share notes via the web app (Joplin doesn’t have a web UI). All in all, I can live with these trade offs considering that this app is completely free and I own all of my own data.