I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven’t looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.
Or Obsidian? Take actual control over them including rendering if you want to customize that.
Maybe it’s a different use case 🤔
Obsidian is closed source, so once the company dies, no one can modify the app. Joplin on the other hand is open source.
What I really like about Obsidian is that it stores your notes as plain text/markdown files on your computer. So you always have access to them, even without Obsidian itself. Markdown is also a fairly common format, so it shouldn’t be too hard to move them somewhere else later.
But your concerns are still valid and I generally also prefer free open source software.
The app may be closed-source, but the data is all markdown, which should be easy to move to other apps.
At some point I realized that the solution to this little problem is Emacs org-mode. It’s just sitting there waiting for people to use it.
I’m a l former emacs user of ~10 years and I could never get used to org mode, so it’s definitely not for “normal” people.
Additionally, in modern times being emacs bound means no decent mobile client, no web interface, and mandatory roll-your-own sync and backup.
There’s a few friends I know who swear by org mode up and down, but it’s a considerable effort for most people to use it.
Haven’t tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin’s ability to handle that with no issues.
Obsidians really good with lots of notes and linking them together as well as adding metadata to them.
It really depends on your use case. The plug-in ecosystem is also quite rich.
Years ago I was a paid Evernote user. The app kept displaying ads on startup trying to get me to pay even more for the “higher tier”. Right then and there I knew the company was dead.
Not only that, but they kept adding features and telling me about it. I was paying for their existing features, and yet half the time I would go to add a note and by the time I clicked through their “we did something you probably don’t care about” popups, I’d forget what I wanted to note.
Don’t understand how they made it this long.
Venture capital spurred by effectively negative interest rates.
Free money.
I hadn’t heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they’d gone under years ago.
Everyone here are so cool with fancy open source alterantives. I’ve been basic and been using Notion for all my med school notes and beyond and while it’s been mostly great the few episodes of outages have been so frustrating. Wish there were some easy to use solutions with all the text formatting options Notion has.
Obsidian
As much as I love obsidian, I’ve been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it’s Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.
I made the mistake of having bunch of columns, annotated images with captions, and tables everywhere that obsidian’s addons couldn’t really replicate the experience. For prep work around writing research papers, it’s probably easier to use than notion for sure.
There is a recent thread discussing Evernote alternatives at https://beehaw.org/post/986939
Personally I exported my notes from Evernote, imported them to Joplin, and setup Syncthing to handle synchronization of note content between my devices. Not exactly a trivial setup but not difficult either. Also fully open source and much more secure.
Once Apple overhauled Notes a few years ago AND offered a way to import from Evernote, I never looked back. For anyone in Apple’s ecosystem Notes is one of the best (and completely free or cheap on any iCloud+ plan).
One thing that Evernote got right is that it made it easy to export your content. I really appreciate that about the service. Leaving Apple Notes is not as easy.
How do you import from Evernote?
From what I remember, you do a full Evernote export and then in Notes on the Mac you do “File --> Import” and you point it to the exported file. I only did it once and many years ago so the process may be different now.
I forgot Evernote was still a thing. Used it for a short while back in 2012 when there were not many decent note taking apps.
Same. Glad I never actually relied on it…
Ever since I discovered LogSeq and Obsidian, I stopped checking out other note-taking software
God I love Obsidian. Especially the community around it.
Obsidian honestly spoiled me with the fact that my vault is literally just a folder of markdown files.
I love Obsidian but haven’t heard of LogSeq, do you use both but for different things?
They are very similar. The main differences are:
- LogSeq uses bullet points. Obsidian is just pure markdown
- LogSeq is open source. Obsidian is closed source
- LogSeq has a predefined structure to it (folders). Obsidian allows you to have whatever folders you want
Personally, I use LogSeq for my day to day work. Primarily because I prefer the bullet point approach when taking notes. But some people would prefer writing long continuous text with Obsidian.
So to each their own. If you’re interested, try both (they’re both using markdown, so you can transfer between the two). I went back and forth a few times before settling with LogSeq
I can search and read about LogSeq, but I can’t find anything about Obsidian. Can you please help me out? Thanks.
In addition to the other recommendations, I like Nicole van der Hoeven for Obsidian info.
I highly recommend checking out the Obsidian Discord server and Eleanor Konik’s Obsidian Roundup. The community around Obsidian is insane and they’re so dedicated.
I’ve been using Logseq at work and I LOOOOVE it.
LogSeq
I never heard of it until now. I’m a veteran of trying out and dumping so many note taking solutions. I’m certain to try this one, too! Maybe I’ll finally find The One.
After leaving Evernote way back when I was in the wilderness for a while. Finally landed on notesnook, haven’t gone back since.
I finally bailed on it this year.
I have this suspicion that it might survive even this though, it’s been through so much over the years
They made it 1/10th of a century. So far, so good, right?
I mean… haven’t they been surviving purely on inertia for a while already?
They had my inertia. I moved from free to $25/yr. Then watched as it crept up to $60/yr with basically zero improvements. I bailed at $120/yr for a terrible transition to a new db style that could only be updated in real time as you opened each note (taking 3-45 seconds per note to update) and a promised AI component for which I have no use.
Inertia was carrying me as well. First it was $35 for premium, then $70 for several years, and then last month they announced it was going up to $130 and that’s when I bailed.
At $70 it wasn’t too bad and I stayed the last year or so also because they actually published a native Linux app that worked on par with the Windows and macOS app. I won’t say it worked great because since they moved it all to Electron or whatever it’s been slow/clunky all around. But at least it was available and consistent.
And that is why I self-host as much as I can
What’s a good self hosted thinking like Evernote?
It’s not quite as full featured as Evernote, but I like Joplin. It can sync using Nextcloud, OneDrive, WebDAV, and other services. It’s end to end encrypted and works well on Android!
For note taking, you might even get by without self-hosting, looking at software like Obsidian which works perfectly fine with just SyncThing to sync between devices, or just literally any other file syncing solution, self-hosted or otherwise.
Holy shit someone tell danny brown to save his raps
I didn’t even know Evernote was still a think. I thought it had died years ago
Anyone know a good alternative for storing PDFs with preview and search?
