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Looking for a good note-taking app
Looking for recommendations for a multiplatform note taking app. Needs to support Windows and Android. Some things I'm looking for:
- Markdown support
- offline/local support (should be stored in an easily accessible and movable format e.g. markdown)
- is free or only a one time fee
- Syncing (either a one time fee via app dev or built in support for GDrive or OneDrive)
- Mind mapping functionality (including linking between notes)
- flexibility to be both a knowledge base and a place to keep todo lists and general small notes
Obsidian hits most of these features but without paying $8/mo, syncing is a huge pain in the ass. I got it to sync between machines if I store my vaults in Google Drive, but I'd prefer to have them locally then synced. I don't mind paying for software, but I'm trying to avoid another monthly fee on top of everything else I'm paying for. I'm open to staying with Obsidian if I can solve the syncing issues, too.
Is Syncthing off the table for your use case? I’m using it to sync an Obsidian vault across my desktop, laptop, and phone and it’s working great for me.
Thanks. Someone recommended this to me a while back, but I didn't know it had a Windows client. I'll have to give this a try. Would love to really dive into Obsidian. I've had it for a while but have been hesitant to really commit to it without solving the syncing issues.
Obsidian+Syncthing was the perfect solution for me during my master's degree. It worked more or less flawlessly although the iOS client was a little temperamental. I'm currently trying to roll a git-based sync situation for a bit of version control 😁
I found a community plugin for Obsidian while messing with Syncthing last night called "Remotely Save". It can sync to S3, OneDrive personal, or Dropbox. Seems to work pretty well without having to rely on 3rd party software or apps running constantly in the background.
How did you get iOS with sync thing working on obsidian? I tried but it looked not possible.
Git is possibly going to work, just annoying to have to deal with conflicts on a non-computer.
Ah sorry, I didn't use obsidian on my iPad, I was syncing a lot more than just notes. I'm fairly sure you can't do it that way on iOS simply because of the siloing of data. There might be something you could do with shortcuts though?
On Windows SyncTrayzor is a nice wrapper for Syncthing. Don't be too put off by the lack of recent commits to the project, it's just a wrapper and the internal Syncthing service gets updated to latest.
I use obsidian, dropbox and dropsync. The last one is an Android app that just gets the folder from dropbox to my phone.
So far it works pretty well, but it's not instant, I sync every 30 minutes (I think you can set it to any interval).
I make most notes from my laptop anyway.
I use Obsidian and highly recommend it. It is as bare-bones or complex as you want. As for sync, I have my vaults stored in cloud folders that I use for other uses as well (like OneNote or iCloud) and don't pay for Obsidian's sync services.
It looks like this should work. I'm going to give it a try. Was a little confusing to set up a two way sync without duplicate folders but I think I got it.
Sorry for the multiple comments, but in the spirit of trying to be helpful, there's also Logseq. I probably should have thrown this out there first. I personally didn't like using it, but I do know its popular, checks some of your boxes, and has full sync coming soon.
I'll second Logseq. I switched to it from OneNote. I sync it via iCloud but it should also work with OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. They offer a paid service to sync as well, but I have not found a need for it.
As far as I can tell, Logseq and Obsidian are very similar. Logseq is open source and free unless you want to pay for their syncing service.
Logseq seems to have too much of an emphasis on daily notes instead of being good for creative projects or mind mapping. Journals in their world seem to be just single notes and organization doesn't seem like it would work super well for my needs.
You can also mostly ignore the journal and use it as a wiki. E.g., Usually the only thing I use for the journal is just for quickly creating a new page and then click that link and edit the wiki page instead.
There are plugins to do mind mapping and other things that you might want to look into as well.
I’ll admit I mostly use it for work so my use case might be pretty limited.
Good luck in your search!
Logseq's focus is that of an outliner: every paragraph is its own bullet that you can collapse or expand or reference (think of the minimal unit of knowledge being a paragraph like in Notion instead of a page like in Obsidian). There's also an implicit focus on journaling, as the default home page shows today's daily note (functionally the same as having Obsidian daily note core plugin active and set to auto-open today's note on startup).
Otherwise it's indeed functionally very close to Obsidian (wiki link, backlinks, graph view, whiteboards), the latter having a broader ecosystem. Note that both use markdown as their backend file format. People can and indeed some do use both program at the same time.
I use Joplin. Cross platform, sync to multiple different repositories, encryption.
I looked at Joplin a while ago but haven't really dove into it. I like the sync options for Dropbox and OneDrive built in. Might give it a try and replicate my notes from Obsidian and see how it goes.
What is mind mapping? If you don't mind me asking.
I second Joplin. It's the first note app/system I've switched to that I haven't felt the need to switch away from after a period of time.
It's encrypted and then I sync it with a Hetzner NextCloud instance
Lately I’ve been using Acreom, which seems like it would satisfy a lot of your must-haves. I like the app a lot so far - I do kind of a “today list” and notes format which seems to work really well with it - but admittedly haven’t been using it too long yet, so I can’t say there are no snags, just that I haven’t encountered any. (Also, I think I heard about it via Tildes? I don’t entirely remember. If so, thank you whoever initially mentioned it, it rocks.)
I've tried several things over the years and nothing as stuck quite like Obsidian has for me. Really love how it's "just" markdown files in folders on disk instead of an opaque database file or something, meaning I'm not really locked into it in the long term so long as I'm not leaning on plug-ins too much. Also, no looming question of if I'm going to lose everything if it goes belly-up like with cloud based stuff like Notion.
The fact that it's filesystem-based means that you can use the many thousands of file management tools to help wrangle notes too, which is super nice. I haven't done a ton of this but recently set up Hazel to automatically place any daylogs over a week old into month folders, and then automatically place month folders not in the current year into their own year folders, keeping the most recent/relevant logs immediately handy and archiving the older ones.
Org-roam sounds like it might check all of those boxes, if you're somewhat technically minded.
Edit: And by technically-minded, I just mean that Emacs can be a little intimidating at first, but the documentation and community are super expansive and helpful and you can literally build it into whatever tool you want. Unfortunately, while there are a few phone apps you can use (and Emacs through Termux), it's not quite as feature-rich as the desktop, if that's what's important to you.
It looks like it's only available for Linux systems and has to be complied from source? That's a bit too much and I need whatever solution I have to work on Windows and Android.
Hm, I'm not sure about that as far as Org-roam goes, but Emacs is available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, and I'm pretty sure org-roam is just a plugin for Emacs. I know I used regular old Org-mode for Windows without any issues. I'd be surprised if it was that complex.
Here's an article I found on how to set it up for Windows 10: https://github.com/nobiot/Zero-to-Emacs-and-Org-roam
Thanks. I'll give that a read. But even then, no Android will be difficult because I want to take my notes on the go. And it still doesn't solve my syncing issue unfortunately.
Fair enough. It's certainly not for everyone. I use Orgzly on Android and it works well enough for simple note capturing and note referencing.
But it's all built on loose files which you can store on Google Drive or One Note. I sync with no issues.
I recommend Notion.
One of my favourite features is you can create pages as links in pages, which can be formatted into a list that can be hidden like a drop-down.
Which can make it feel a bit like a maze, but to me feels like a natural way to organize your notes and information. You can always make a contents page, linking to all the specific parts you want.
I have used it a little bit and I find it one of the worst note taking apps possible. It's cool for cataloging stuff like collections due to it database like nature but for note taking UI and UX are atrocious.
It's good for other things but it definitely isn't meant for note taking or even simple to-dos.
Notion isn't going to work for me. It has some cool features, but there's no Markdown support, it's online only, and if you export your notes, it's not fully readable by other software because they throw in proprietary tags and such.
I went through hundreds of note taking apps and the best one I found was Nimbus Notes.
https://nimbusweb.me/features/
I made a thing which supports some of this, but lacks the mind-mapping:
https://tinylist.app
The only thing I have to pay for is a VPS to host the CouchDB server. The tiniest offering at Vultr is sufficient for my needs; it's only a few bucks a month. I basically view it as paying a subscription to my own app except then everybody gets to use it. Occasionally somebody will contribute via Ko-fi and that covers a month or two of expenses.
UpNote is pretty simplistic yet powerful.
I'm using Notable at the moment. It just uses the file system for .md files, so sync support is a given. It also has a mind map view. I don't know how flexible it is regarding small notes / todo lists, but is is free.
I just use Syncthing, git for extra redundancy, and plain markdown. Edit with whatever text editor you like.
If you do this the only caveat is be sure to:
You can get the same functionality as tiddlywiki hyperlinks by using regular markdown relative links
For diagramming and other charts I recommend small DSLs like this:
An unexpected option: Google docs.
There's a setting that lets you use markdown syntax as a shortcut on input, and you can also export docs as markdown.
It also supports checkboxes so to-do lists are straight forward.
My biggest gripe is lack of end to end encryption so I'll never put anything personal or sensitive in there. But it's fine for work notes.
Otherwise I'd second notion
It's quite easy to request a refund if an app doesn't work the way you want after you've bought it.