Comment by charlesdaniels | Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlesdaniels | Hacker News Reader

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Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this:

Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far.

I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.

OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not worthwhile. Also no web clipper.

I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.

For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.

Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:

* Turtl[5]

* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time

* Standard Notes[7]

* Inkdrop[8]

1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

2 - http://happenapps.com/#quiver

3 - https://zim-wiki.org/

4 - http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/b...

5 - https://turtlapp.com/

6 - https://www.tagspaces.org/

7 - https://standardnotes.org/

8 - https://inkdrop.app/

I use DevonThink 3 [1].

It's got rich text and Markdown support.

It also supports PDF documents as first-class objects. You can drag PDFs right into Devon and they get as PDFs, meaning that when you click on a note, you view the PDF.

The PDF support is top notch. The viewer is built into the UI, and also lets you open in tabs and new windows. Lots of markup tools right in the viewer. PDFs are indexed, of course.

Its rich text supports attachments, just like Evernote, but they're much nicer. Drag a GIF and movie into a text note and it becomes a live player.

You can drag URLs right into a folder and they'll come up as web pages or PDFs, depending. Then if you want to actually store the page/PDF, you can tell it to.

Its folder structure is much nicer than Evernote's. You just create folders and nested folders. None of this notebook nonsense.

It's got built-in iCloud syncing as well as syncing via other options (Dropbox, WebDAV, more).

You can run it local mode. Devon divides its data into "databases" which you can open and close. Databases can be encrypted. So, for example, you could store important private information (things like tax forms, government forms, 2FA recovery codes, etc.) in an encrypted database on a USB drive somewhere.

It has some weird features I don't use, but which some people might like. For example, "RSS feed" is a note type. Adding the feeds automatically ingests the RSS feed's items as new notes.

One neat feature is the inbox system that tracks what's read and unread. So you can just dump new stuff into the inbox for later categorization/deletion.

The search is great.

I also like that it's not opinionated about layout. You can change the layout a lot — to show the note editor or just the list of notes, for example.

Has a nice iOS app, too.

[1] https://www.devontechnologies.com

I've tried a few apps on your list.

Agree that Zim lacks polish, and that the Windows version is a few versions behind the Linux version. However it's really easy to import a bunch of plain text or markdown files (with .txt extension...just dump it in the data folder and restart)

Standard Notes puts a lot of emphasis on security but doesn't yet have native support for inline images.

Tagspaces seemed more like a file organizer that had word processing features tacked on.

OneNote...I wish they'd restore the ability to use notebooks locally, the newer version wants everything on OneDrive.

OneNote does have a web clipper:

https://www.onenote.com/clipper

It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.

There's an actual "Article" mode which cleans up the text and puts text in onenote (and not screenshot).

Disclaimer: Ex-MSFT/onenote engineer.

Ah, you know I just noticed that a couple of weeks ago. Alas, I use it only for work, and it still doesn’t work due to a OneDrive limit (can’t fetch my list of notebooks).

It’s still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it’s not as awful as I said it was.

I stand corrected. It either did not have that, or it wasn't something I was able to find at the time I was using it.

A few more options are Notion[0], Dynalist[1], Nuclino[2] and Nimbus Note[3].

I've been using Dynalist, but Nimbus Note looks promising.

[0] https://www.notion.so/

[1] https://dynalist.io/

[2] https://www.nuclino.com/

[3] https://nimbusweb.me/note.php

My problem with Joplin is that it's not "true" Markdown (because of the metadata) - as such, I can't just use it as a "let's finish later properly this Markdown file" kind of solution.

How many of these companies will be around in 5 years? 10 years?

I am looking forward to iOS 13 Reminders and Notes. At least then my notes will not be on a platform that will probably dissolve within then next decade.

Well that's certainly fair. However in the case of both Joplin and Zim (and probably others), notes are either stored in or can be trivially exported to plain-text formats. Joplin's native, lossless backup format is just markdown in a tarball. Both are also open source.

Standard Notes might have a good chance of lasting that long. they seem very focused on the long term. can't remember the specifics now but I think there's a faq on their site where they explain their philosophy

I literally decided today to start using paper and pen for note-taking.

I haven't even tried half of these apps but I'm tired of looking for the one true note taking app that won't annoy me.

I’ve been there a few times for sure. But searchability is hard to live without, and it’s hard to integrate links, code snippets, and images with dead tree based notes. A big part of this probably depends on what you’re taking notes about though.

It does seem like a problem that should have a solid, open source solution by now. Joplin is decent, but still lackin in a few areas.

OneNote works great on every platform. Really!

OneNote is not bad. However, there is no way to export your notes from it and move them to another program. At least with Evernote I was able to export all my notes very easily and then import them to Bear.app.

Not on Linux. And last time I checked the macOS version was kinda hobbled compared to the Windows version. I know it has a web interface, but that isn't really a replacement for a native client.

a lot of what people wouldn't consider an outliner like Dynalist to be a replacement but i used to be a chronic Evernote user and somehow I am using only Dynalist now and nothing else.

it wasn't easy at first switching to something that didn't let you add images like Evernote does but the speed the at which you can jot down ideas in Dynalist made me forget about that problem

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