This really pisses me off. I have so much shit in OneNote and use it regularly.
Feature Notion Joplin Obsidian Evernote Zoho Notebook GoodNotes Zim Wiki Standard Notes MyInfo Cloud Sync Yes Yes Optional Yes Yes Yes Manual Yes Manual Offline Support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Handwriting Support No Limited No Yes Yes Excellent No No No Encryption No Yes No Partial No No No Yes No Hierarchy Support Yes Yes Yes Yes Partial Yes Yes No Yes Free Version Yes Yes Yes Limited Yes Limited Yes Limited No Platform Support Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android Win, macOS, Linux Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Web iOS, iPadOS, macOS Win, Linux Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Web Windows E: I noticed a couple mistakes. Lemme know if you spot others and I can edit (at time of this writing anyways)
I personally use Obsidian, but I know that other have suggested logseq. Might be useful to have in your table. Also, Obsidian does have an Android app.
I suggest You track, which has a Wiki component. It had extensions like Draw.IO as well for diagramming which is basically a necessity for me.
Its self hostable or a free cloud version.
Great note - thanks for the contribution.
This is a good time to switch to Notesnook, which has a OneNote importer.
Why am I about to shill so hard for this particular app? Simple, because after Evernote enshittified over a decade ago, I switched to OneNote as the least terrible alternative, and then spent the next ten years trying to find an actually good, open source notes app.
Call me Ahab because this motherfucker has been my white whale for a not-insignificant portion of my life.
Notesnook, finally, hit everything I wanted;
- You can self host it (but you don’t have to)
- Self hosters get everything on the paid plan for free
- It has a web app, a desktop app, and a healthy ecosystem of phone apps, with - very importantly - 1:1 feature parity. Everything you want to do you can do from any of the interfaces and for the most part they’re even laid out identically.
- It has a proper rich text WYSIWYG editor. It does not demand you learn FUCKING MARKDOWN. JESUS H CHRIST I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN A FUCKING SYNTAX TO MAKE NOTES, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
- But for those who care about that stuff, it is built on markdown, and all your notes can be exported in markdown, so there’s no lock in. And you can use markdown in the editor (without even having to switch modes like a lot of other editors).
- Everything is encrypted by default. Notes can also be individually password protected.
- You can share copies of notes with optional password protection and self-destruction.
- It has a really slick UI. Everything works, everything is intuitive, there are tonnes of keyboard shortcuts. I find I actually have an easier time writing long form text content (such as a novella I’m working on) in Notesnook than I did in Word or LibreOffice.
- It builds a TOC for notes automatically. You can link notes to each other, and links are bidirectional so you can track which notes link to a particular note.
- You have sorting by both tags, and notebooks. Notebooks are infinitely nestable, and - this is really cool - notes can exist in multiple notebooks simultaneously.
- It has robust web clipper for Firefox and Chrome.
- Very robust attachment support.
- God so much more, I’m having to deliberately stop here.
What it’s currently lacking is drawing support. If that’s a must have for you, check out Joplin instead (at least for now, I’ve seen some talk about Notesnook integrating Excalibur for digital canvas, which would be a superb solution).
Anyway, please check out Notesnook. It’s excellent, and I like sharing excellent things. https://notesnook.com/downloads/
I cannot agree with you any harder about FUCKING MARKDOWN. Fuck me I hate that every fucking note app wants me to write in fucking markdown. FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
I am trying it out given all the praise.
- I can’t create more than 5 (!) tags in the free version
- it can’t export notes in anything else than borked text files in the free version (formatting lost, no markdown, no pdf, no html)
- it doesn’t let me choose where I store my notebooks, in fact does not tell me where it saves them at all
- backup files are not human-readable, they don’t appear to be zip files in disguise, they are seemingly locked to notesnook (“.nnbackupz”)
- the importer/converter is on the web, and requires me to upload all my plain text MD files for conversion
I use QOwnNotes on the daily, which does not have any such limitations. On the other hand, it’s a markdown editor, which means your monitor space is divided by two : it has separate editing & preview panes. It’s honestly a bummer because apart from that it’s pretty much perfect
It has a proper rich text WYSIWYG editor. It does not demand you learn FUCKING MARKDOWN. JESUS H CHRIST I DO NOT WANT TO LEARN A FUCKING SYNTAX TO MAKE NOTES, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
I’m curious about this agressive stance. Why is markdown so triggering for you ? I get the pros of WYSIWYG but it has also some cons. On Lemmy for instance you use markdown without even noticing ?
I use Obsidian and I’m happy with it. The markdown syntax is really easy and it’s « almost » WYSIWYG because you see the markdown only at your cursor. It even has a plugin for excalidraw.
Yeah after spending my adulthood on reddit and lemmy markdown is second nature and I don’t like it not being maintained in notesnook thr way it is in Obsidian. I’d prefer a foss solution though and notesnook looks like otherwise it’s better
What a fucking shill. I’m downloading this right now.
Did you by chance self host the sync server using docker compose? Their instructions aren’t great and I was hoping you had some tips.
For anyone else interested, if I figure it out, I’ll post what I did here.
Edit 1: I finally got it all setup but syncing isn’t working so I guess I did something wrong 🙄 . Troubleshooting now
So yes, I did, and yes, their docs suck (better documentation is on their roadmap).
There’s a really good guide here on Lemmy that I recommend instead. https://lemmy.ml/post/25006407
Following this I had it up and running in no time. Check the comments as well, I added some notes on getting attachments working. If you’re still having issues shoot me a message and I’ll try to help.
: I finally got it all setup but syncing isn’t working so I guess I did something wrong
$5 says you need a srv record or something that wasn’t obvious from the docs
I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The client app connects to all 4 servers it needs a connection to. I can create a user on the server and all clients can login using it, I just can’t get notes to sync.
Official docs here
I found this tutorial1 and this tutorial2
Tutorial2 makes this one port change to the official docker compose file but otherwise is seemingly the same as tutorial1:
notesnook-s3: image: minio/minio:RELEASE.2024-07-29T22-14-52Z ports: - 9009:9000 - 9090:9090With that change, and setting the port of the domain to 9090, I can access minio in the browser. But I don’t know if that’s necessary or not. I’m stumped.
+1 for notesnook. It’s probably my go to example of how good open source projects can be.
1 star reviews on the app store consistently mention sync issues and bugs that delete notes and don’t allow opening. Have you encountered any of this?
Not even once. The syncing has been incredibly robust for me. It also has a really nice flow for handling conflicts.
Of course, it’s worth keeping in mind that it can new self-hosted, so experiences will vary.
I’m using the self hosted version. Take from that what you will.
I’ll give it a look. I’ve been using Joplin since Evernote enshittified, and I didn’t know it had drawing support. I very rarely use Markdown, though. You can hide that with two interface tweaks, which I did years ago on my machines. (I have to look it up again every time I add a new machine, so it’s not perfect.)
Is Notesnook FOSS? I expect any closed-source software to enshittify over time. 🙁
Yes, it’s all open source and can be self-hosted. They run a paid plan, but if you self host then you get all the paid features free.
I came back here to say “It says right on their home page that it’s open source.” :-) I installed it & I’m running the importer now to see how well it handles large numbers of notes. Thanks much for the tip!
I did find that with a very large OneNote account the importer struggled, specifically because OneNote was timing out and rejecting the requests after a while.
My solution was to backup (in onenote) and then delete the notebooks that had been moved already and then run the importer again.
Obsidian also has an importer, and some good sync plugins.
Not to judge a book by its cover (ironically), but that name…
too bad it doesnt support handwriting i was looking for something to unify my handwritten and markdown note-taking
If you can, take a moment to upvote Drawing Support in their suggested features section; https://notesnook.com/roadmap/
You badass you
It’s the usual rename and replace that Microsoft love to do.
“OneNote for Windows 10” is going to be replaced by “OneNote for Windows”
Why they always do the kill, rename and replace instead of just replace with an update? Each kill&replace operation leads to lost users…
Because they are too big to make intelligent decisions.
Well shit. Time to rip my own files because their migration stuff is going to be all Microsoft proprietary.
Obsidian ftw
I’m very interested in OneNote alternatives. I’ve been using OneNote for longer than I’ve disliked Microsoft… and I still think it’s a good app. Pretty much the only thing I don’t like about OneNote is the increasingly close integration with Windows accounts. I’d rather my notes were not scanned and uploaded and processed by a US mega-corp…
Anyway, people keep suggesting stuff like Joplin. But that isn’t even vaguely close to OneNote in terms of stylus and inking. For me, inking is the main core feature. And so in terms of alternatives, xournal++ is a closer fit. (xournal++ has essentially no organisational structure for notes; but it is really great for inking.)
What I’d really like is basically the organisational structure of Joplin (or whatever other alternative) + the inking power of xournal++. And ideally being able to import my vast amounts of handwritten OneNote work! – But that last bit is probably too much to ask.
I’ve been using Any.type for a bit over a year, and am very happy with it, but I don’t believe it has hand writing support.
There is a free tier that includes 1gb synced storage (optional).
It’s open source. Somewhat similar to Obsidian, but no plugin support that I’m aware of.
I switched from OneNote a couple of years ago.
For hand writing i suggest using Rnote and for normal keyboard writing I suggest Joplin. Keep it synced using cloud provider or using Syncthing for free.
About organizational structure in Rnote I unfortunatelly recommend just saving files in a structure of folders. Rnote is the most polished alternative to hand-writing capabilities of OneNote I’ve found :c
About importing notes. I don’t think that’s possible but you can surely export them all to PDF from OneNote. I did that when I migrated.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll check out Rnote sometime soon.
(As I said, I do like the writing & drawing features of xournal++; and so I’ve been doing a bit of basic file / folder organising with that already; but it certainly isn’t as easily browseable as OneNote.)
Everyong recommending Obsidian in the comments, where are Logseq users?
So pleased I dumped Windows and moved to Linux recently.
Everyone should look into dumping “big tech” and move away from Microsoft, Apple and Google. It’s great. And the best part of it, no AI in sight.
That’s not true. I can run any AI I want. Emphasis on “I want”. ;)
While OneNote for Windows 10 still has roughly half a year, Microsoft will start nagging users with update prompts much earlier. For starters, in June 2025, Microsoft will slow down the app’s sync performance, thus forcing customers to ditch the old app, especially those using OneNote on multiple devices or for real-time collaboration.
Next, in July 2025, banners will make their way to OneNote for Windows 10 to make sure users are aware of the upcoming end of support. Microsoft says these banners “could impact users workflows.” You do not say, Microsoft.
Wait. You’re gonna throttle them and then wait a month to tell them why you’re throttling them? What?
Neowin is the web site where their writers can stupidly claim that Qt getting an advertisement module means that KDE will have ads in their apps soon.
Stop linking to them.
I like Joplin, it could work for me but about 6 months ago I had to quit. My use case is against my s3 instance (not amazon) with 3 devices syncing. It became corrupt everytime.
Has this improved?
Joke is on them, I moved all my notes to Joplin 😎😂
Until they make a proper upgrade to my surface 10, I will have no other choice but to stay on the windows 10 version.
I use it all the time
