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.
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.
After leaving Evernote way back when I was in the wilderness for a while. Finally landed on notesnook, haven’t gone back since.
Same. Glad I never actually relied on it…
Ever since I discovered LogSeq and Obsidian, I stopped checking out other note-taking software
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.
Don’t understand how they made it this long.
Venture capital spurred by effectively negative interest rates.
I hadn’t heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they’d gone under years ago.
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.
I mean… haven’t they been surviving purely on inertia for a while already?
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.
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.
Man, I saw something about the other day and it doesn’t make me feel good about still having some work notes in Evernote. I’m going to have to find an alternative, but I need collaboration and low cost (cuz my company is cheap AF). And I know those two things don’t usually go together.
Notion FTW
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.
And that is why I self-host as much as I can
They made it 1/10th of a century. So far, so good, right?
