There are tons of Notes app available in the playstore and f-droid. I have use my fair share of them these are my best 5 recommendations. All of these are free to use and have to pay extra if you want specific features.
- All in one - Wenote - This is the most powerful note app I have used. This has memo, voice record, calendar, sync, color coding, various fonts, categories etc. Some of these features are behind a paywall. But It is a one time payment. It looks minimal and is light weight.
- All in one but foss - Joplin - This is an open-source project. Available on almost all platforms. If you want a powerful cross-platform note taking application then this is the best bet. This is Completely free but has an option of premium sync option. You can use free sync service to nextcloud and webdav.
- Security - Standard Notes - This is a note taking application that focuses on security. This is an open-source private notes app meaning your notes are end-to-end encrypted, so only you can read your notes. It has a minimal and clean UI. It has dedicated apps for most platforms and syncs your notes securely across all your devices, including your Android devices, Windows, iOS, Linux, and Web.
- Modern - Bundled Notes - This is the most modern looking Notes app on my list. It is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. A powerful notes, lists, reminders and to-do app. Easily organise notes, lists, photos, files, and more. A google keep alternative.
- For casual use - Notally - A lightweight note taking application. A simple and elegant open source notes app. Notally is a minimalistic note taking app with a beautiful material design and powerful features. Dark mode, Completely free, Adjustable text size, Auto save and backup, No permissions required.
P.S: Obsidian is also a great Note taking tool.
And then you have people who use Obsidian
And add Syncthing to sync your obsidian vault with all of your devices and you have the perfect solution
Does this avoid paying for their sync services? I’d love synced notes but to be honest, I wouldn’t use the feature enough to pay for it
Yes.
You can sync your markdown with any sync solution. So yes. Super useful.
Yep. I’ve been using Obsidian/Syncthing for about 2 years now. It has been 100% flawless for me. Changes sync across devices within seconds.
And still unable to just store it on some personal cloud space like Gdrive, mega and OneDrive :|
I want my goddamn stuff there instead of local storage.If you can map those drives to your PC and phone you could do that.
Mapping/Mounting is what’s difficult. The default Google files explorer has not a way of mounting my OneDrive account. Not even GDrive is able to as far as I am aware. And I have a Pixel to boot. Seems really trivial if even Apple just seems to mount the iCloud to the file manager natively.
And this option (Google Files) only links to the appropiate app. Even GDrive is just linked there -_-…
This
I wish it was open source. I used to use Obsidian until I started to replace everything with FOSS alternatives. And from all the proprietary software I used to use, Obsidian is the only one which I miss.
I’ve tried logseq, Joplin, rnote, zettler, silverbullet.md, and a long list of alternatives, but nothing comes close to Obsidian…
I migrated from obsidian to logseq and it’s “alright”.
I miss the clean md files from obsidian, but other than that, logseq is pretty powerful.
I also like notion, except its cloud based.
I hate that everything in logseq is a bullet point. I just can’t understand why they do that. And it pollutes my markdown files too if I open them with other editor.
It sells itself as an “outliner”. Which is bullet pointing everything. That’s actually how I take notes.
I though about other ways to parse it, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
It would be nice to have another mode for non full outliner documents, if you just want a markdown file, instead of an indexable list of blocks.
Logseq is block-based. Each bullet is a block. This is very powerful because it allows you to interlink concepts, ideas, at the level of the block vs page.
I don’t see any utility in doing that. I want to take normal notes. It was super annoying.
You can link to other paragraphs/blocks in Obsidian.md as well? You can literally link to a sentence…
I did a little research and found a Redditor who was able to answer better than me:
Logseq makes it easier to work with blocks, transclusions can be edited in place, and you can automatically be building another page consisting of blocks you’re writing in your daily journal or another page.
EDIT: I was really curious about the major differences and what is enabled by Logseq’s block-based architecture so I asked my network on Mastodon and got some great answers!
Some folks may not know this but Logseq has a built-in whiteboard feature too that’s also FOSS. I use it all the time to mind-map new blogposts and newsletters.
In Logseq the starting page is always the journal page for the day. This allows you to build up content without worrying about where it should go. Once you have something you feel you can run with, then you can move it to its own page.
EDIT: more features enabled by Logseq’s block-based (bullets) architecture over on Mastodon.
How’s it for personal knowledge management and second brain kinda use?
I like the diary format, and how the links between notes work. And the filtering and querying features. But mostly, I just keep notes for the days, and use checklists to capture future tasks, and then filter by “tasks only”.
I also write drafts for work documents, but didn’t figure how to tag them, or use much of the linking functionality there.
Why limit yourself to FOSS? Obsidian does not collect telemetry (Quote: Additionally, our apps do not collect telemetry data)
I understand (F)OSS is cool and all the hype around Lemmy but I don’t see how limiting your tool box helps someone?
Replacing proprietary tools like MS Office etc. is obviously a good thing if you can substitute it.Getting invested in an ecosystem you can’t self-host is a non-starter for me. Anything cloud-based is eventually going to go away or the price takes it out of reach. Also, if I can fork it, I can fix it.
Logical and understandable POV.
Personally though I can’t see it as a good reason though.
Getting invested
Just don’t invest too hard and be able to move if it’s possible. Obsidian.md for exanple isnt FOSS but their way of markdown makes it very easy to just use Visual Studio to visualize the markdown.
In essence: No need to go 100% after one program.
Do I need Outlook? No. Is it more convenient and the UI is (personally) better than Thunderbird? Yep. Can I change my mail app to say Thunderbird? Sure. It’s IMAP based.Anything cloud-based is eventually going to go away or the price takes it out of reach
Fine reason. But not everything proprierary has to be cloud based? Subscriptions creep more and more into software but it’s not like every non-(F)OSS is a cloud app now.
Pricing is another issue in itself. (I should really donate some € to the devs of some tools I use)I donate quite a bit for things I use, Joplin and KDE being high up there. I completely buy into the idea that if I use it, its worth money, especially so if I’m not locked in.
A notes organizing system is an investment, a huge one. Migrating systems isn’t trivial, which is why I want the system i choose to be there years from now. It will be my second brain one day. A good one that I can rely on is essential and changing is not something I take lightly after having done it a couple times already.
Let me tell you about the 200 plugins required for my workflow…
“[…] store your interests, questions, ideas, favorite quotes, reminders, reading and meeting notes easily and future-proof”
Obsidian is really great but I can’t recommend Standard Notes enough; it is my Google Keep replacement and has served me well.
Obsidian and joplin are really similar.
I have tried markor. But didn’t like to UI.
Notesnook is pretty good too.
It has great UI.
I use Simple Text Editor
Minimal.
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Joplin and obsidian are really similar. It was tough choosing between them. But I prefer joplin. Both are excellent though.
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You have clients for windows, mac and linux. Linux AppImage is so convenient.
Upnote is a masterpiece
I love upnote, but wish they didn’t change the icon.
I have a lot of notes on Google keep, how would I copy my notes over if I wanted to switch to one of these apps?
Maybe find a way to export and import in csv format. Might be quicker to just copy paste manually unless you have 100s of them.
Assuming it’s not >hundreds of notes but <100 I would argue to do it manually.
Yes it’s annoying but the upside of it is, that you could comb through old notes and bin old ideas, knowledge etc. Helps to keep it fresh.
Joplin also supports end to end encryption on your notes, and you can self host the sync server for free sync you control.
Edit to add: you can also sync it via self hosted WebDAV (like nextcloud)
Nextcloud sync is convenient.
It is. I used to sync mine via nextcloud, but I don’t run nextcloud on my homelab anymore, so I switched to Joplin server. Nothing wrong with nextcloud, was just not what I needed.
I like Notesnook a lot
I’m using Notesnook. One thing that’s really annoying is the checklist feature. It’s so difficult to check off an item instead of hitting the text box. And changing it to read-only also disables the check boxes from being able to be changed.
Could you explain that one? I just tap the box and it checks. Never had any type of issue there.
And changing it to read-only also disables the check boxes from being able to be changed.
Being read only by definition would prevent you from changing anything.
One thing that seems convoluted as hell toe is adding the separators to lists, which I like but to this day have to fuck around in the options to get one on there everytime, but still seems to be the best one I’ve found.
Obligatory Quillpad mention: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.quillpad/
I used quillpad before switching to notally. Quillpad is awesome.
Any reason you switched?
UI preference.
Same here, Quillpad appears abandoned. Last update was in 2022. A lot of great apps refuse to update UI with the times. Material has come and gone, now all that stuff just looks outdated.
I just use Another Notes
Simple and does everything I need.
Been using Joplin over a year now, works well for me. Would recommend
Great app.
Yes I agree, it also syncs to Dropbox, syncs very fast. works very well in Linux, Android phones
How is Notesnook not in there, FOSS, E2EE and zero knowledge, unlike Standard notes it’s not totally crippled unless you pay a completely overpriced amount to buy. I’m all for laying for great apps, but Standards pricing is a complete spit in the face for a notes app.
