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?
Seconding obsidian.
And you can self host the live sync plugin to keep all devices in sync with each other.
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
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.
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.
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.
zettlr: free, open source (GPL3), no database.
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.
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.
+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.
I went with Nextcloud Notes, because I don’t want anything saving files locally that I then have to worry about syncing. I can just point a browser at it from wherever I am, or use an app. Also, it’s nice that Nextcloud Notes saves them as markdown, so I can easily migrate the data elsewhere if I ever want to. And those markdown files are treated like normal Nextcloud files, so if you do want to sync that stuff, your notes sync along with everything else.
I really like Obsidian
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!
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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 use Trilium, it just scratched the need I had which obsidian and logseq couldn’t somehow.
Something I’m really looking forward to is the ability to self-host Notesnook. I’m currently really happy with the hosted service already and am looking forward to self-hosting it as well.
