Joplin is an open source note-taking app | Hacker News Reader

Joplin is an open source note-taking app

joplinapp.org

195 pointscimnine107 comments

My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well.

I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.

I went from Notion to Joplin for note taking: I drop 1000s of images in a note and annotate them and publish them. Notion crashed all the time; so badly that support apologised and had to delete things for me. Joplin has 0 issues with it; it scrolls super fast, is a pleasure to work with. Also on a m1. I cannot say I noticed any bad behaviour compared to others, included Obsidian.

I went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I can easily interact with them with external programs and scripts.

Joplin, while being open source itself, has a "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure out how to interact with.

[1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only software using Joplin's storage method

is there anything with a lightweight learning curve akin to Obsidian that uses a accessible format?

Any text editor with markdown support should work. Just VS Code with a Markdown viewer is a decent replacement.

You don't _need_ all of the fancy plugins that Obsidian has, but some of them are genuinely useful.

It's "just" a SQLite database, I wrote a small Python script to extract my Joplin notes to a static site:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/

On the other hand Obsidian markdown with front-matter can be fed pretty much directly to a static site generator.

Sqlite does give some speed improvements and makes searching easier.

It’s SQLite; arguable the format most fast custom storage format requiring software (games notably) should use instead of rolling their own.

That’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1].

This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Plume looks neat!

What is the pricing model you have in mind?

Thanks!

It will be a subscription model. $25 paid yearly or $3 monthly (that’s the idea for now).

Plume looks very interesting! One place I personally find many apps in this category fall down is their ability to handle pdf’s embedded or attached within notes gracefully. This applies to desktop and mobile apps.

This may be a slightly weird use case but I accumulate tons of pdf’s that are often relevant to my notes and want them easily embedded and viewable in a first class way. Obsidian is a great example of how not to handle a pdf locking it to a small portion of the window and not allowing it to be full screened.

Forcing the user to dump all of their pdf’s into something like google drive locked away from the rest of their notes is a crappy experience and h fortunately keeps me using apps like evernote purely for this functionality.

Thanks! Hmm, I've seen many open-source Qt apps integrate PDF support, so I guess I can study them. I'm adding this to the to-do list. How do you usually add a PDF to your notes? Drag and drop? What's the ideal way you look to interact with it? You said no full-screen, so what it does look like?

If you need pdf viewing and management (indexing, annotations, citations), it might be useful to look into citation managers, which are built to do exactly these things: check out Zotero.

I am working on a knowledge structuring tool as well; will silent release soon: limandoc.com

You can put all your documents/PDFs there and structure them as you wish. And it will be syncing locally only!

Nice that's exactly what I'm looking for, as I use KDE and Qt apps fit in so well.

Will the client side be open source? I hope so because I'm on FreeBSD so you probably won't make a compiled version :)

Plume is actually based on my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. You can already get it on Flathub, Snap Store etc. Notes uses just a simple plain text editor while Plume has a completely revamped block editor that I built from scratch. That parts of Notes used in Plume will remain open source (per the MPL license) but the rest of the code will be closed source. At least for the time being.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Ah too bad, I do need a rich text notes app (and no markdown, I hate markdown, under the hood it's fine but I don't want to deal with it :) ). Also hate kanban and agile methodology by the way ;) Luckily I'm not a dev otherwise I would have to work with all of those lol.

But perhaps you could do the monetisation via the sync service only and make the app open source :) That would be great, at least for me so I could compile it on FreeBSD. Some others do this, like Obsidian, for which there's an actual BSD port. But it's electron, sadly. But I understand... It's a tiny niche. I'll keep looking.

Of course I can't use flatpak and snap. And I can't stand snaps so no way I'd use that. Flatpaks are a bit better but not working on BSD.

I really used to love tomboy. It was fast, rich text, would automatically hyperlink notes together as you typed, it was so great. But they stopped development on it. There were a few reboots but they were complete rewrites and lacked all the speed and smoothness I loved.

Is it a deal breaker for you that the app isn't open source? What if I create binaries for FreeBSD/your distro and there's no telemetry/option to disable connecting to the internet (even for updates)?

I support your app so much I would pay a monthly fee instead of a one-time purchase. My notes are as valuable as my life. I don't mind the app being proprietary if it gets the love it deserves. If you can accomplish the goals you set out, like providing good functionality and performance, then I'm cheering you on. My needs are very basic, just the minimum to accomplish Zettelkasten.

That's nice to hear. Same here, I have thousands of notes, it's my second brain. Sign up for the waitlist, I'd love you to try Plume when it's out.

That would work perfectly yes! It's not the internet connection that bothers me (in fact I'd probably use the sync).

But usually developers don't care enough about the tiny userbase of FreeBSD to even consider that. If you would do that, I would really like it, though I can imagine that from a time/gains perspective there is no point. Which I do totally understand.

One thing I like is that your monthly fee is very reasonable. Obsidian costs double the price of my entire Microsoft 365 subscription :) Besides it being electron that's another issue for me. Especially because it's just not really that great.

That's awesome to hear, then. I'll see what I can do (:

I don't mind using a closed source solution - but only if I can keep my notes separated from the application itself. Makes it easy for me to back up my notes and to use versioning tools like git. It also allows me to use bash to manipulate my notes independently of the application at any given time.

Plume seems very pretty - good job on that, but....

"All notes in Plume are simple plaintext strings under the hood. Right now, all these plaintext strings are stored in a SQLite database locally on your computer. But we have plans to remove the reliance on a custom database and to store all notes as simple .txt files inside a folder."

I've been burned too many times by organizational tools that like to keep your notes internally stored within their systems.

Gotcha, no worries, I'm 100% going to migrate the database to a simple arbitrary folder with .md/.txt files. I also want that for myself. It will take a few months of work after the initial release, tho.

A SQLite database is not really proprietary though. It's easy to work with. And perhaps there is an export function too in case you want to move.

There's Qownnote too, it's really nice and open source.

Oh yeah good point. I never checked that one out because I don't really use owncloud but it's worth a look.

> This degradation of software by web apps shows the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times.

A-fucking-men. Web tools are for building web apps, software tools are for building software. I avoid all these goddamn electron things like the plague if at all fucking possible.

Garbage on phones, garbage on computers, garbage on tablets. Garbage.

It's unfortunately very hard to avoid them. But indeed, on macOS, I try to find only native or native-like apps for my needs. It's the difference between a healthy diet and junk food for my computer.

will the mobile all be fast as well?

my issue is i can’t find a platform with a fast mobile app

it seems they’re all react native

I didn't yet try to create a mobile version, but I don't see why, as Qt Quick is very performant. I guess we'll have to wait till I port it and do some testing.

Scrolling in the webpage crashed my browser (Firefox, ios).

Weird, it seems to work fine for me (Firefox, iOS).

Does Obsidian feature a way to seamlessly sync between devices that doesn't rely on a propreitary service or external tool (Syncthing)?

Obsidian has a built in sync feature if you pay for it. https://obsidian.md/sync

Every time I see a post about a note-taking app, Obsidian is mentioned in the comments. I don't know if the app is really good, or if those are just paid comments. At this point I'm not even surprised anymore, especially when conversations always end with a mention of Obsidian Sync.

It's because there are two ways to sync content across devices, paid sync through Obsidian vs. git. Given sync is a p0 feature, it seems logical that both get mentioned when the question arises.

Also, the app's really good, and I pay for Sync -- git works well, but it's a bit clumsier on iOS. Never posted a paid comment in my life.

That's not all the ways to sync.

I share the vault folder between devices with syncthing. Free and open source.

It's the biggest & most popular app in the note-taking space. It's closed-source, which I don't love, and I've tried to look for alternatives, but there just isn't anything else that's as good as Obsidian. In a situation like that, you don't need to pay people to talk about your product. People will evangelize it on their own.

Try SiYuan Note.

I sync Obsidian with iCloud Drive and it's been 100% reliable and very fast so far (a few months).

You can use a plugin to sync to git repo. Folders in obsidian are really folder on disk and. In git.

At this point you could hook up ci for instance to publish a blog folder etc

Hmm, why not do one thing and do it well? Is there much benefit for each and every app to reimplement its own seamless sync?

I think in a lot of cases it's a means of monetizing an app where everything else is essentially free/full-featured without being behind a paywall

What's left if you take out "proprietary service" and "external tool"?

I wish I could compile those electron apps from source à la FreeBSD’s ports or whatever. I’d rather have the laptop compiling for a few days than using electron

How does compiling from source help you avoid electron?

yeah, it goes to show you that Electron based apps can be done in a reasonably performant way but it does require extra care/attention as Obsidian is an electron app as well.

I have about 13,000 notes (with embedded media PNGs, MP4s, etc) across 50 folders/subfolders on my Mac M1 and searching across all notes in Obsidian is for all intents and purposes instantaneous (less than a second).

Joplin released an ARM build a few months back -- so if you were using the pre-arm build it was bad, so just throwing this out there for folks who maybe had similar experiences -- make sure you are using the arm build (it should happen automatically now)

Disclaimer: I've contributed to Joplin in the past, and I use it dozens of times a day with no big speed complaints.

I use it on Linux and it's always really snappy and a pleasure to use.

Joplin is a decent open-source note app but I absolutely hate the way that they structure your notes.

If you have thousands of notes in a folder

  ~/my_notes
  ~/my_notes/work
  ~/my_notes/music
  etc.

Joplin takes them and stores the notes internally as a SQLite table with UUID named markdown files. It makes it very difficult to use bash tools, finding them, other IDEs, etc to work with your files after Joplin has ingested them.

Compare this to apps like VS Code / Obsidian / Logseq (also open source) which don't mess with your markdown file organization. You can just point them to a root folder and they'll work natively with your markdown files.

Furthermore, embedded media are also renamed to GUID.ext files and then are stored in ~/.config/joplin-desktop/resources which is terrible since now are notes are split from their related media.

This is the reason I don't use Joplin either.

Obsidian can handle an existing file structure.

I use Vim and folder sync to Nextcloud.

Where do you expect embedded media to be stored? For example, if I have the following note: ~/my_notes/art/renaissance.txt do you expect images in that note to be stored in ~/my_notes/art or in ~/my_notes/media, or something else?

In Obsidian, for example, you can choose where your media data is stored (and there are options to store them alongside the Markdown files, e.g. in a hidden folder). I guess OP’s point is that this would be a better way, or at least to store media in the same root folder as notes and not some arbitrary folder far away from the notes.

I don't use Joplin for the aforementioned reasons earlier, but they should at least let you customize the "media folder".

The embedded media is already referenced using relatively standard markdown syntax in a respective MD note, e.g.:

    ![image info](./pictures/image.png)

Since apps such as Logseq and Obsidian work with your existing notes, they avoid this issue of massive file duplication and don't need to move the files at all.

EDIT: I just realized if you're talking about adding media onto a note through the notetaking application itself, take a look at what Typora does as a good example of how to handle it. It auto-creates a relative folder called "note_name.assets" and moves them to it. Obsidian OTOH lets you specify a "media" folder that exists for each subdirectory of your existing note structure.

Thanks for all the info!

You can try TagSpaces as well, it works also directly with your file system and do not use a database.

Joplin works well for what it does and is good enough for regular note-taking. Has most features like live view, webclipper, sync & plugins for that extra missing functionality.

What you don't get is a "polished" UI with a WYSIWYG editor.

The storage format is markdown, but it has its own way of organizing files[1]. If your notetaking process includes multiple editors(other than joplin apps) then joplin may not be the best choice.

[1]. https://joplinapp.org/help/faq/#is-it-possible-to-use-real-f...

I came to the comments to find some insight about the format it stores notes on, so thanks.

That's a big advantage for me as usually the issue I had with other note taking apps in the past is how hard they lock you in, particularly after years of using them.

Joplin has a WYSIWYG editor mode. https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/rich_text_editor Joplin also can use external editors. https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/external_text_editor

Sure there's the rich text editor but it has limitations and you lose the functionality of some plugins. The rich text editor mode had bugs the last time I tried it.

By external editor I mean editing the markdown files directly without opening joplin app first. There can be many reasons to do that like editing in a terminal or auto generate/manipulate notes using a tool. We can still do it of required but we need to be careful not to touch the Joplin metadata.

PS: I use Joplin regularly. These are not complaints about Joplin, but just an fyi to help someone make an informed decision before they switch.

Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906 - June 2021 (74 comments)

Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with sync - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22439485 - Feb 2020 (36 comments)

Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238 - Nov 2019 (150 comments)

Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040 - Nov 2017 (204 comments)

I'm an Evernote refugee struggling with Joplin and Obsidian this morning. I've got thousands of PDF notes going back decades, and the ability to search on their OCR has kept me on Evernote for years. But the latest Joplin includes OCR out of the box, and Obsidian has the Omnisearch/Text Extractor plugins to add it.

Both of those use Tesseract to do OCR locally. I've got it working on Joplin fairly well. But it hardly works at all on Obsidian. That's unfortunate because Obsidian seems to be a much more user friendly and responsive app over all. Since I need the OCR search capability so badly though, I'm about to settle for Joplin. That's not a terrible fate, but the grass seems greener on the Obsidian side.

I wish I could replace Tesseract with some industrial strength OCR though.

That's not really what these tools are made for. Look into zotero or devontjink and use the note taking app for notes.

Thanks for the leads, but I need it on Linux and Android. You appear to be right about this use case being a stretch for Joplin/Obsidian.

Zotero for the win then.

How do you work with a Zotero collection on Android?

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/110371/available-for-be...

Could recoll help?

https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

Evernote works well now. It has improved.

I like Joplin’s sync server, which can be self hosted.

I just wish it didn't require having the app loaded to use. I actually use it with another editor on Linux. (It works surprisingly well with VS Code for example.)

But it's the best we have for Android, sadly.

I chose Joplin over Obsidian because they offer webdav sync and it’s trivial to set up sync with a synology NAS. Obsidian doesn’t offer it as it competes with their sync commercial offering.

For a long time Joplin's support on Android was buggy and late on releases, it's why I switched away. Is it better now?

It works fine for me. I've used it moderately and never had issues.

I am of the opinion that there isn’t really a good editor for Android, but Joplin is probably as good as we’re getting. (I love iA Writer, but it’s not as good as it could be on Android.)

I think the sync server is Joplin’s secret weapon on this front. I tried using Syncthing for managing my docs for a while, but I think having a dedicated sync server helps on mobile. I found using alternative sync methods was too wonky on a mobile device.

Syncthing on android works for Joplin only to version 2.5.

I’m speaking more generally. (As in, I used Syncthing to sync actual docs to a folder on my phone.)

But Joplin above 2.5 version wont read those synced data.

You can run a separate Syncthing instance and directly link it through the file system, which is what I meant.

Sure, but Joplon above version 2.5 wont read those data.

I use Microsoft's OneDrive free account to keep Joplin synced between devices.

Works like a charm. Currently using 0.7GB out of 5GB.

Same here! And you can encrypt the sync so you know Microsoft cannot get access to your personal information.

And how would you decrypt on mobile while allowing to edit the files?

Cryptomator works well as long as your on a desktop platform, but when you move to a smartphone they provide only their crippled file-manager which is not accessible form third party apps.

Joplin has built-in encryption, which works just fine on desktop and mobile, with shared passphrase between them

OneDrive sometimes mark encrypted files as suspicious and makes sync problematic.

Would appreciate any folks here who have tried both Obsidian and Joplin to summarize the key differentiators for them and which one they ended up on.

(on x platform, Windows/iOS use case here, but just post your needs)

I tried to move to Obsidian from Evernote after they raised the subscription price but wasn't able to onboard successfully - Obsidian seemed powerful but was too customizable for me, had to get back to more pressing day job needs before I could figure out a setup that would work for me, ended up just paying the Evernote fee another year.

I was suffering with Joplin for years and finally found the time to migrate to Obsidian a few months back. So far I'm much happier and more importantly, more productive.

The biggest points are about the UX. My workflow requires switching between multiple notes rapidly (e.g., TODO list, Project 1, Project 2, Employee 1, Employee 2, Meeting Notes 1, and so on) and Joplin doesn't have native tabs. The plugin is only so so but it works only on desktop (I'm on Mac).

On mobile it's a disaster. Doubly so on iPad which is just stretched phone version - working productively on iPad (which is otherwise just fine for my job) is impossible with Joplin. Plus the mobile app has awful design and awful navigation. Who on Earth would put the most used button to the top left corner? Swipe from the left doesn't work of course because the following:

Neither desktop of mobile app follow the system patterns. Keyboard shortucts, if they exist, are different. Navigation is different. Everything is sort of clunky.

I used Dropbox for sync and while it does work, it's very slow and there's no background sync. On a regular day I have to sync about 50 items (some of them are history I guess) which can take a minute or two, which is the time I don't have when I open my phone and want to quickly add an item to the TODO list. Couple that with no conflict resolution and a recipe for data loss is born :-) .

Initial sync on a new phone took me eight fucking hours when I had to keep the phone open and the app in the foreground.

What I do appreciate is the native encryption. Now I do all my work in Obsidian but keep Joplin for the secrets.

So this is the main problems I had with Joplin. Rant over (but you asked) :-)

The mobile design does leave a lot to be desired. It does fit my needs however because usually I am just jotting down a quick idea or reference for later. I can see how switching between multiple notes quickly can be difficult.

Not related to the parent comment but I have been using the math plugin and I love it. It does unit conversion and lots of other things!

I tried both, my Joplin experience is a few years ago so grain of salt and all.

Joplin is open source, doesn't really have a plugin ecosystem, has a custom storage format for its data and is _really_ easy and reliable to sync with WebDav (I had mine set up with Fastmail's webdav while sipping my morning coffee)

Obsidian (my current system for going on 2 years) on the other hand is the closest I've gotten to org-mode with a modern tool, with all the pluses and minuses.

The plugin ecosystem is completely crazy, you can find a plugin for pretty much everything. And you'll lose days of actual work progress bikeshedding the plugin system =)

Data is stored as regular standard files (Canvases are the exception, but there really isn't a standard for stuff like that).

Syncing with third party tools is ... workable if you don't switch platforms quickly - basically if you make a note on your phone and immediately switch to desktop, the note might appear or might not, depends on the phase of the moon. iCloud takes a while to sync and sometimes just freezes, works fine if you let it work. Dropbox, OneDrive etc aren't officially supported and tend to have conflicts.

I actually ended up paying for their sync service and it Just Works - even though it's not the cheapest option, but _for_me_ it's worth it because I regularly use multiple devices in short succession on the same notes.

My only concerns about using Joplin were security-related, when handling sensitive notes (financial data, logins, etc). The interface looked awesome.

Have Joplin plugins been secured/sandboxed yet, or are they still able to exfiltrate data? That's one reason I never used it for very secure notes, same with Obsidian. Joplin also used to store notes unencrypted locally, not sure if that's still the case. Of course most people don't mind, but I was investigating the highest-security note tool I could find at the time.

It absolutely boggles my mind that anyone releases a plug-in system without sandboxing nowadays.

Engineering effort

Which should be left at zero unless you can get over the "you actually do have a responsibility to take basic safety measures for your users" hurdle.

Instead we routinely get zero security at all and also heavily encouraging people to install entirely unchecked stuff in a built-in and implicitly-trusted first party UI.

Joplin is great for what it is, but it does not exactly fit my need. I have two things I want in my editor, but no two editors seem to have both:

- WYSIWYG editor: rendered text and editor are in same window - Vim Bindings - Bonus: Terminal integration (TUI)

The second has come to be even more important than the first, so I now take my notes in (neo)vim. I wish it was possible to have WYSIWYG in the terminal, but that seems to be an impossible task (rows of text all being the same size is baked into the terminal ecosystem).

Having a GUI WYSIWYG with vim bindings is probably pretty doable, but the lack of terminal ecosystem has discouraged me from looking into this (even though it is not that important, but I am a perfectionist).

I have been using Joplin for a couple of years, first for work and then for everything else.

I love that it’s formatted, but it’s also just text. I normally leave it in markdown mode and edit that directly (learn the syntax, it’s easy). To paste into email, documents etc, put it to display mode and it’ll paste html. Good.

@cimnine The key feature for me is global search (ctrl/cmd+p) but it doesn’t work well enough!! 1. it doesn’t favour exact matches and 2. it doesn’t jump to the match. I use vi-mode if that’s important.

Overall it’s excellent IMO. There are clients for all major platforms.

I've found nothing better than zim-wiki. The only issue is no mobile client. For brainstorming I like treesheets though.

Markor supports zim-wiki format. https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/

Basically my setup is: Zim + Syncthing for synchronization + Markor on android

I migrated from Evernote to Joplin and didn't lost most of the features. Currently Joplin syncs via free tier Dropbox, but it has 3 device limit, so I think I will migrate to Google drive when I need fourth device to sync.

I migrated to Joplin from Evernote. I can live with a slightly less polished UI. However the main issue is the time it takes to come up (launch) on my Windows 32GB RAM, Intel i7 laptop. It’s terribly slow to come up.

Past thread (2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906

I'm using it for work, and it's very nice. It's reactive (I have < 150 notes) and simple. Synchronizing works very well too

Android app over 2.5 version wont sync database with Syncthing. So you need to keep ver 2.5.

https://www.craft.do on macOS is a great text+media notes app, but I still use Obsidian for pure-test use cases for some reason.

I currently use The Archive app (Zettelkasten style) : https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I have worked on note-taking app but sadly I am not smart enough to get table editing support under iOS/macOS with NSText

I installed Joplin once but the icon in my dock was so garish that I immediately uninstalled it.

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