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Standard Notes

standardnotes.com

99 pointssealeck76 comments

I am a paid subscriber but I am not happy with this at all. The mobile phone app is a pretty buggy, when I start typing in 1 place the cursor jumps to another. Copy/paste has also given me problems.

I do like that it encrypts locally on disk like it does in the cloud. Several other apps I've looked at has said at rest encryption isn't worth it, I guess arguing that users could use veracrypt or some other solution.

If I had to write a one sentence summary of Standard Notes it would be "An E2E encryption app first, a note taking app third".

In total agreement with this, the mobile app is another buggy victim of React Native. Plus I've had data loss on sync at least once, which has shattered my faith that their sync backend is reliable. It might have happened many more times and I'd have no way of knowing. I'm only subscribed at this point because I got an 80% discount a couple years ago. Do not use them if you value your data.

> “An E2E encryption app first, a note taking app third”

Don’t leave us hanging on the second!

Even their marketing seems to give this impression. They seem more focussed on the fact that it is encrypted than the actual product itself.

> The mobile phone app is a pretty buggy

…Is it written in a cross platform framework?

It's a web app wrapped in React Native.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197613

Exactly this. I use SN but I'm always looking for an alternative.

The mobile apps are very buggy and while the team tries to resolve issues, basic things should not be breaking occasionally. I want a notes app to just work.

Locally-encrypted, cloud-synced is sort of the sweet spot I find for Standard Notes, so I am a paid subscriber.

It is easy to use across different devices and operating systems, and they do a good job of continuing to give me access to my own information. (E.g. encrypted backups, ability to export notes).

I don't really use the myriad editor features, because if they do matter much, I'm using Emacs. So I suppose a decent small-Emacs type mode would be nice, like if there was the equivalent of Zile or something.

I would also love to be able to link across notes, wiki or Zettelkasten-style, but that has not been a priority of theirs to date. (I asked.) Too bad, that.

Man, there are like 1000 of these notes apps - they are all the same Notion-Roam-Evernote clone, they've all got dumbass startup logos plastered everywhere, 'made at MIT', youtube influencer quote cancer, and they all run the same shitty as fuck Electron.

Make it stop.

I did a double-take when the bare-minimum feature of 'rich text' was locked behind a $15/month subscription.

I don't actually mind that. I'm personally fine with plain, monospaced text, ideally with URL detection.

AI-generated images on the front page do not inspire confidence.

They're weird, but are they weirder than the copy-paste Humaaaans (https://www.humaaans.com/) nonsense that you see all over big tech websites?

My main issue is that they look ugly. They look like what I would get if I spent 3 minutes getting some robots from DALL-E without caring much about the result or refining the prompt.

My issue with it is the artistic consistency, which is clearly not there for the images Standard Notes put on their front page. Clearly they did not go for a streamlined or minimalistic style which feels disconnected from the actual product itself. Corporate Memphis art is souless but uniformity is part of the intention. They don't have random parts standing out like an eyesore.

They aren't even close to being as ugly as Humaaaans though. That well may be the most annoying thing on the internet.

No, they do not. They would have been much better without any images at all. The longer AI-generated images are around, the easier they are to spot, and the uglier they appear.

I would prefer to just see screenshots of the app instead of the AI generated art. It just feels like they had empty space to fill so they put some futuristic looking AI generated art.

For anyone using Standard Notes, how confident are you that syncing will always work and your data won't get lost?

I keep trying out new note apps and I keep coming back to Google Keep and Notion for exactly one reason: deleted data caused by bad syncing on buggy mobile apps.

Latest one I tried was Taskade, and I spent hours copying over all my notes. Then one app update later and the dreaded self-deleting data hits.

So I'm back to Notion again and very wary of wasting time trying out another notes app.

The reason I want to switch: Notion does too much and is slow on mobile. Google Keep is... Google. Plus it's missing a few features I want. Taskade was a great middle ground for me.

I have had data loss in the past, so "not confident at all" is my response.

The problem was I hadn't found any alternative that "just works", as in stores and syncs notes across all my devices without any hassle. I looked into Obsidian but their sync is a separate product that was a bit pricey at $96 a year. (I got a Standard Notes 5-year plan for $90 as part of a sale in 2019.) Might just move off at this point since I use SN every day by now and I can't stand the numerous UX issues anymore.

Note that with Obsidian you can roll your own sync. I set it up with Syncthing. However it's tricky to set up on Android and when I got a new phone I decided it wasn't worth the hassle to set up again.

When it did work though, it worked well. Maybe I should have another go.

Have you looked at Obsidian? It offers paid sync service which hasn’t lost a file for me for the last year or so I’ve been using the sync service.

At least standard notes produce conflicting copies when collisions occur. Obsidian simply overwrites the old with the new, which makes it completely unusable to me. This is a non-issue if you always have reliable internet connection, but that's not always the case in practice. I don't like the way standard notes handles it, but at least I've never lost any notes with them.

That's 100% inaccurate: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Troubleshoot+Obsidian...

Is it though? The documentation states:

> When Sync downloads a new version of a file, and finds that there are conflicts with the local version, the changes are merged with Google's diff-match-patch algorithm.

Based on the docs it doesn't sound like you can intervene in this process manually. Standard Notes creates a conflicted copy of the note instead, and that's what I'd prefer.

Sad that it seems like every notes app with sync seems to have at least one showstopping issue like this.

Keep reading man.. https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/File+recovery

Then let us know when your show stopperless implementation is ready.

You can also sync via iCloud for free

If you don’t mind it very simple, I’ve found SimpleNote to be pretty good over >10 years of use. However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss.

I have also had a couple instances of data loss in Notion, coming back from periods offline.

> However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss

Exactly the problem I'm talking about. I'll never use another note app that has this issue.

One of the main purposes of note taking apps is to quickly take down notes. If they can't handle that without losing data then the entire app is a failure, no matter how good the rest of it is.

It's like saying "yeah it's a great word processing app, the only problem is that it doesn't accept keyboard input".

It has daily email backups even in the free tier, that's good enough for me to soothe that particular anxiety. I've been using it for over a year with no issues (apart from the buggy mobile client as mentioned on another comment).

The issue with Taskade (and another similar app I tried a few years ago, the name escapes me) was that it tries to sync while I am creating a new note and then deletes everything I've just typed.

This only happens on the mobile app but it's exactly the same problem with two separate apps so I guess it must be common.

Someone below just mentioned that Simple Notes has the same issue, so that's 3 examples.

They really do sell that it will always be around but I don't actually have confidence in that.

Obsidian has been my local editor of choice for a while, as more-or-less the closest thing to what Ulysses used to be before it got turned into a subscription app and nigh-abandoned at the same time.

Yes, Obsidian seemed quite good, but after trying it for a while, I found the text formatting too clumsy for handy use. I'm trying out Trilium now, and really like it. Especially good is really easy text/table/formula formatting, that it really is local, and local encryption, with cloud services optional (which Obsidian also has).

If you haven't, I'd say check out Logseq as well.

My biggest hurdle is searching within a note.

I asked once about this - there's IIRC an alternative editor that supports this on desktop, but I'd like it generally.

I think some of this comes from some people making really long notes, and some people not - I remember a precursor note-taking app having a broken in-note search function as well, and when I reported it the developer said something to the effect that it's not a valid use case...

I hope they figure it out eventually - pasting notes into sublime text just to do a search is a bit silly ...

(The developers generally are pretty helpful and earnest about their app, I've been a paying customer for a few years now and am happy with the app for the largest part)

Same. I got into the workflow of copy/pasting long notes into TextEdit so I could ctrl-F normally. It began to feel so outrageous that I was paying for a text editor and had to resort to a workflow involving a second text editor for a fundamental text editor function that I finally came to my senses, exported my notes, imported them into Obsidian, deleted Standard Notes and never looked back.

I left NotePlan when the author doubled the price to $120/yr. I didn’t want to get too wrapped up in a platform that randomly jacks its price so much.

While I agree with you on the price hike, you can always ask Standard Notes for a discounted subscription if you mail them directly or see my username.

I wish they had a very simple styled editor as a default. All of their editor options in the paid plan are clunky.

For simple notes, bold, underline, and monospaced styles might be enough (think Apple Notes or even simpler).

Agreed. Editor buttons always get in the way of my typing in weird ways and can’t be hidden reliably.

I've been using this for 4-5 years.

I don't need bells and whistles for note taking.

It's just a bookmark I open, and reliably syncs across my devices.

I've never looked for anything else.

> I don't need bells and whistles for note taking.

Me neither.

          notes()
          {
          if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then
              mkdir -m 00750 -p /some_syncable_directory/notes
              Now=$(date '+%B %d %Y %H:%M')
              echo -en "\n$Now\t$@\n" >> /some_syncable_directory/notes/notes.txt
          else
              echo "${Now}"
              cat /some_syncable_directory/notes/notes.txt 2>/dev/null
              fi
          }

I always wonder how these companies price their services, because my initial reaction is always "$Q/month? That's insanely expensive to do XYZ!" That is certainly my reaction today.

If I was looking to pay to securely sync notes in the cloud, I could see $10/year (note: not $10/month) being a completely reasonable fee for 1GB of storage. Maybe $20/year just for the convenience factor alone.

Convenience is a critical differentiator, because it's possible to sync notes with end-to-end encryption in the cloud completely free via any number of methods. I personally use Obsidian and the "remotely save" plugin. Obsidian charges $96/year for its own sync service which while much cheaper than Standard Notes also strikes me as wildly, offensively, overpriced.

While I'm happy enough with using Standard Notes for free, $15/mo for the first paid version is way too much for the extra features. I get that it adds a simple spreadsheet function and 2FA stuff, but some of that is not what I want a notes app for. If they want to make a productivity suite, go ahead, but I can't justify that jump to make my notes for checklists and markdown when all I wanted was a good notes app.

On top of that the macOS app doesn't work right for like over a year now and it's still not fixed despite updates every few days.

I'm already paying for Bitwarden Enterprise for personal/SMB use and I could just use that for my Encrypted notes instead. But while I use macOS and iPhone mostly, I still use a Linux workstation daily and I can't use iCloud Notes on that, so I may just use Nextcloud for my non-sensitive notes. I already use it for To-Dos and Calendars.

The price point is not ideal for what Standard Notes offers on top of their free tier. They can price their offering however they want to simply because they have positioned themselved as the only game in town when it comes to private synced notes that you don't need to geek out to use daily.

Don't have anything to comment on the macOS app as I am not an Apple user, but they have vastly improved the PC and Android versions of the app not too long ago. My thousands of notes load almost instantly compared to what was a slow boot up a couple years ago.

If you are in for an upgrade to the paid version you probably can get a deal with them if you ask them directly. That may bring down the monthly cost to roughly $7 for the top tier plan or you can go even cheaper if you use my username.

UX leaves a lot to be desired, is the least I can say about it if I can’t call that downright horrible. This being not a native app screams in your face, I mean it shows.

But then the other apps that I find useable have their own unique challenges — Bear is completely subscription based - for my level of usage, that doesn’t make sense.

UpNote - is unapologetically not ee2e. That’s just unacceptable. UX wise it’s really good though and it’s cross platform.

FSNotes - has miles to go in design and also stability. I used to recommend this a lot earlier, but after buying the app and using it for quite sometime I realised, it just doesn’t cut it. Not even close to being in the league of top native note taking apps.

So I am stuck with SimpleNote (if course no ee2e; it’s my legacy note app, looking to move away) and Bear (I don’t think I’m willing to pay subscription fees monthly/yearly forever for my non heavy-duty note taking).

Yeah, so much collective effort spend on the notes app, yet not a single great one :(

For what it’s worth, Joplin is pretty close for me. I’d love a version that took full advantage of Mac native stuff but even the version that exists is pretty rad.

NotePlan is the only thing that keeps me from going all in on Joplin — it’s pace of development is fantastic if you’re apple only.

Joplin is excellent, that you can sync to a local directory (bit finicky to setup) is a massive win since I just write to a directory under syncthing (also amazing btw) and my notes are seamlessly available everywhere for me.

I’ve been using Standard Notes for a few years now, replacing Evernote and Google Docs. For simple notes that is more than enough. I have considered upgrading to the paid version just to support the project but I don’t need the features.

I can't really give it a try since it doesn't offer much more than Obsidian at the same price point. The mobile app for Obsidian is quite good.

I also use OneNote. I know, I have a problem.

Happy user here. Local encryption. Has apps for all my devices. Even though the apps aren't the best, I haven't found any alternative that ticks all my boxes.

In this space - Iive been using (on-and-off) logseq and enjoying it https://logseq.com

I've been using SN for a few years as a paid user. Not the most intuitive design for sure but works great once you get used to it. Great product overall!

This fits my note-taking needs, but I think (1) it's too expensive, and (2) there's not enough flexibility.

I currently use some file cloud/sync, reading the files locally with some markdown editor/viewer.

Hows this compared to notion?

It’s not at all the same thing, as it’s not block-based like Notion is. It’s comparable to other “standard” note-taking apps like Evernote, Google Keep, Bear, Joplin, etc.

And obsidian sync?

And tana?

The paid version is too expensive for the few features I would want out of it, so I’m stuck with the free one which is ok. Solid idea though.

Apps that advertise “good place to store your racy photos” without front-and centre profiles of their executives?

Seems like a ridiculous security risk.

I use this, have been for a good while (several years). No issues other than broken auto updates. I have thousands of notes in it.

What is your use case? Or, why do you want or need such extreme privacy with your notes?

I just use it for normal note-taking. I don’t think anything about their security model is extreme, it should be standard to use ZKK for encryption when cloud syncing.

If I didn’t need cloud syncing between devices I would have stuck to vim and a local git repo.

Really curious to hear if anyone has used this for storing photos/media? And what the UX / functionality is like.

The paid plans get you a file attachment extension, which you can point to your cloud storage provider (e.g. Google Drive) via an authorization token and then use for attaching files to your notes.

My personal experience with it was awful: something clearly bolted on as opposed to nicely integrated as you'd expect; no inlining, no previews, and it would either periodically require resetting the token or not work entirely (I can't remember right now, it's been a while since I dropped it due to these annoyances and not really needing the feature).

Another data point for the paid options in general being buggy and unworthwhile. Tags, which they had the guts to remove from the free version, might be the most interesting feature worth paying for.

I prefer Notesnook a lot more. It's more polished than this. Really enjoyable to use.

My iPhone also has secure E2E encryption for "Secure Notes" in the built-in Notes app which is probably sufficient for most people.

Also, technical note: having a separate Intel and Apple Silicon Mac app is a dead-giveaway it's an Electron app (not that I mind those).

Every once in a while I think I must be missing something by just using the Apple Notes, but so far I’ve always come back. Recently I discovered it supports Evernote import, and so I migrated that stuff to Notes, too.

In my experience, the missing something is "have at least one computer that is a Windows PC" - at which point you are limited to a website. (Not the end of the world.)

Even better - if you use this Secure Note feature you simply can't get the note on a Windows PC.

I'm happy with Apple Notes. BUT, give me markdown!!!

I really don't care what happens to the note. I want mark-up but doesn't have to be markdown. I want WYSIWYG with 'limited' Markdown-esque formatting (i.e. if I set the font to something, then all notes should have that. If I change the 'default' color of notes, then all notes should update (themes). Bonus points if you can save/export into a plain-text viewable format.

So far, nothing fits this bill. Obsidian comes close but I have small issues with it.

100% agree. There are a lot of unnecessary features, that I rarely use. As a customer, you need a simple reliable service.

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