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.
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.
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
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?
Seconding obsidian.
And you can self host the live sync plugin to keep all devices in sync with each other.
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.
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.
Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)
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…
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.
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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.
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 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).
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!
If you already have Nextcloud their Notes app is easy to use and has a mobile app
