itshalfempty

These days, there’s a lot of choice in the market when it comes to productivity apps. There really isn’t a “best” solution either - each seem to solve a slightly different set of problems to varying degrees of goodness.

When it comes specifically to taking notes though, it’s been frustrating to find a product that I like. While I certainly haven’t used every product on the market, I have used several. What I’ve learned that is important to me is:

• Performance
• Easy to edit, including on mobile
• Offline access and editing
• Flexible organization (or maybe more specifically, not being locked into a very specific way to organize notes)
• Sync content across devices - principally Android on mobile + Desktop support on Windows/Mac/Linux
• Embed images directly into notes

There are some features in note-taking / productivity apps that I don’t find important. Things like:

• Handwriting notes. I think this is neat, and I do have a tablet where I could use this occasionally - but practically I never will
• “Databases” or other dynamically-generated tables, views, lists, etc. For personal notes especially, I just don’t need this
• Collaboration features, including public sharing
• A focus on formatting. Some basic formatting is great, as it helps organize notes – but I find it pointless to worry about changing font sizes, colors, etc. for notes

Here are a few products I’ve tried, and what my thoughts are.

Google Docs

For notes, it’s awful. Google docs is ok for documents, but it gets unweildy very fast when taking quick notes. It’s also very slow to find and open docs.

I haven’t really given Google Keep a try - but my initial thoughts are that it’s a bit too light-weight for me. I also worry that it will be killed by Google.

Microsoft OneNote

I’ve used OneNote off-and-on for a long time. I remember liking it in college (in the rare times I took notes electronically), but I’ve struggled to fit it into my day-to-day life. Overall it does check a lot of boxes, and because I’m already paying for an O365 subscription I effectively get it (and cloud syncing) for free. At the end of the day though, I’ve stopped using it for these reasons:

1. No templates (on the web and mobile clients), and I absolutely hate the default style sheets.
2. Performance is a bit slow, and I frequently ran into syncing issues
3. Organization is a little limiting (notebook, each with notes). Notebooks with a lot of notes are especially annoying

Evernote

I’ve given Evernote a try several times over the years. Most recently I signed up for the free trial and cancelled after less than an hour. The sorting functionality in Evernote made it a non-starter for me, as I want custom sorting without resorting to adding numeric prefixes to every note. It’s also fairly expensive for just recording notes.

Notion

I really liked Notion initially. Databases seemed cool and powerful. I was able to have a paid account with shared notes and separate personal notes.

It turns out though that we didn’t really have too many reasons to have a set of shared notes. At least not at the steep cost of a subscription. Plus, while databases seem fun, practically I never managed to make them valuable for me and just stopped using them.

Besides, Notion is painfully slow. It also doesn’t support offline access, so occasionally trying to pull up even a grocery list when the cell or wifi signal is poor is really frustrating.

Obsidian

Now we’re talking! A free-to-use (for personal use) app, that looks nice and supports pretty much every platform? And the notes themselves are just simple Markdown files stored on your local machine? Yes please!

I like a lot about Obsidian. It’s fast, it’s local/offline-first, and notes are really simple Markdown files that are quick to view and edit. I’d probably call it almost perfect for use on a single computer, or if treating notes like code and storing them using some kind of source code management system.

However, syncing across devices is kind of gross. They push folks towards their subscription cloud service pretty heavily. While there are plugins that allow for syncing to other backends, they don’t really have the same level of support and come with some trade-offs.

Obsidian also features the same global search feature as Evernote - though it’s possible that a plugin would alleviate this pain for me.

Joplin

And now we arrive at my now-favorite app. Joplin is a fairly lightweight, open source, bring-your-own sync provider notes application. At least on Android, Mac, and Linux, the apps work well and are very fast.

It’s also local/offline-first, but syncing is built into the core system and it supports many storage providers. I’m using OneDrive, but only because I already pay for it.

Like Obsidian, files are just basic Markdown. However, unlike Obsidian, they are decorated with some metadata and stored in a flat folder with a random name. That makes them a little less nice to work with in raw form - but on the plus side note names have no limitations.

Joplin also supports end-to-end encryption - which is nice to make sure that no one with access to files in cloud storage can snoop on notes. This feature isn’t very important for my use case, but I’m glad to see that it is supported.

So far I’ve been pretty happy with Joplin. If I could change one thing about Joplin though, it would be to make it possible (or easier) to have multiple profiles or accounts, each with a distinct set of notebooks. That would allow me have a set of notebooks for work, and a fully separate set of personal notebooks.