OSS Notetaking App: Notesnook

notesnook.com Notesnook | Open source & zero knowledge private note taking app

Express yourself with freedom, no spying, no tracking — only private notes. Unlike Evernote and other note apps, your data is private — not open for everyone to see.

Just wanted to share my experience with notesnook as a daily note taking and information organizer app. The free tier is fairly barebones but you can use it for simple stuff, but I'll say that the paid $50 per year tier is really nice. I'm surprised at the polish and feature set for a OSS project from 2019 but it's also really euphoric to find something private, secure, sleek, feature rich, and OSS

Hacker News @lemmy.smeargle.fans Notesnook – open-source and zero knowledge private note taking app

Hacker News @derp.foo Notesnook – open-source and zero knowledge private note taking app

39 comments

----> https://joplinapp.org/

13
- Used to use it until I found something better
  
  -1
  
  So better for you is convoluted storage formats and zero guarantees it will stay open source / free / self hostable run by a for profit company founded on the bullshit around Standard Notes? Okay great enjoy.
  
  0
At 50 bucks a year, I'll just continue using logseq for all of my notes. At this point in my life, I really don't trust anything that charges money and I can't host myself.

10
- Can you not self host it then?
  
  1
  
  You (practically) can't. All components are available and open-source, but there's still some work to be done to allow using a custom server. They are apparently working on this.
  
  2
50 dollars a year for a note taking application? How can anyone think that this is remotely reasonable? Also, can you not shill this so hard? I don't have strong feelings for Joplin, but the way that you're trying to knock it down, it's bordering mental.

7
- How can you say that? $50 dollars is the same as Obsidian, half of Evernote, and the same as Joplin's pro cloud tier. Why do I shill it so hard, because it's the best option for me in the note taking app sphere and I really like it. Why do I knock down Joplin, because it falls into the FOSS trap of making people use something that needs to be configured to be usable.
  
  3
  
  I actually have to agree that the price is too high. Yes, Notesnook is competitive. But they're all way too expensive for my taste. I'm really not happy with any of the solutions I've seen recently.
  
  For comparison, I pay for bitwarden. It costs me $10 per year. That's a price point that I'm more willing to consider.
  
  7
  
  How is it a "trap" to spend an hour or two configuring a tool to your exact needs, which you will then probably be using literally every day for years.
  
  2
For those but happy with the $50/yr tier, I received a discount offer at the end of my premium trial. Ended up being $25 and I think it's certainly worth that. That said, I'll self host it as soon as it's available.

Acreom is another in this segment of app that is very promising. It is not open source yet, but will be. And I do prefer the plain markdown file format of it and the likes of Obsidian compared to NN, but still a cool app.

6
It will be a cold day in hell when I consider using any software running on Someone Else's Computers (tm) for journalling or note taking. Even less so when there are a number of FOSS, self-hostable, highly configurable and feature-rich solutions out there (I personally am partial to Trilium).

6
I’m currently on Obsidian, but looking to change to an open-source alternative. I am a heavy note-taker but have no need for Obsidian’s “knowledge base” like features.

Glad to see you recommend Notesnook! The free tier looks very good by itself. Sync, unlimited notes, offline, rich text. Do you mind answering what “limited organisation” means? What are the other downsides of the free tier? The paid plan is definitely cheaper than Obsidian, but there are cheaper open-source alternatives I’m also looking at (each with downsides of course).

One I know is Joplin which, similar to Obsidian, requires payment of Syncing. It’s Basic plan (all I would need) is a third cheaper than Notesnook, while the Pro is more expensive. Then there is Cryptee which I could also use for free for a long time, or pay similar to Joplin. Notesnook is cheaper than Standard Notes though!

3
- You can get syncing to work with Joplin for free through Dropbox (or any other medium) free plan. Synchronise to local file storage and use Syncthing to keep it synchronised across devices
  
  5
  
  Joplin sync is just about the buggiest thing I've ever used
  
  0
- I use Joplin, my notes are synced across devices, and I pay 0 dollars. I'm using Dropbox to sync, also a free account.
  
  2
- Also, unlike Joplin, Notesnook has a roadmap of features, tracking their status:
  
  They also have an option at the bottom where you can directly see and vote for suggestions:
  
  2
- https://notesnook.com/pricing/
  
  Organization is limited so the free version has limited notebooks and tags to sort things around.
  
  I payed for Obsidian and used it for the year, I can say that Notesnook's sync is a lot more dependable than Obsidian's, especially with syncing android notes with desktop. On obsidian things would always get overwritten or not synced properly. Also unlike Obsidian, Notesnook has built in todo list function out of the box which is a huge game changer for me. They also have reminders, in beta, but pretty usable.
  
  I used to use but it ended up being way to janky and too big a headache to deal with
  
  1
- https://yewtu.be/watch?v=I9ibGRNjK3E
  
  0
How far are they with self-hosting? I saw that on their roadmap a few months ago.

3
- https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server/issues/1
  
  5
  
  They've just implemented really good sync btw. So far, it has been great. Might see some issues at some point, idk...
  
  1
Notesnook locked my session every other week requiring me to authenticate again. But it doesn't even do this like every other app out there, it first asks for the TOTP code and then for the password. So reverse from how password managers work, requiring a lot of manual back and forth.

So quickly writing a thought down sends me into a chain of context switches and completely disrupts me.

I gave up after a while. Happened on all my devices too, so it wasn't a weird setup either.

3
Search by tags is broken, like in most software. But it seems really nice, and the design and polish is really good.

2
@mossy_capivara@midwest.social I have a genuine doubt and I swear if you convince me I will pay for Notesnook because I really wanted to pay for it a while ago.

I used Notesnook for a long time but I used it before they made the basic (unpaid) version more restrictive, where you couldn't even put a code block without being asked to pay, but before that and after I have used Joplin + Nextcloud and I can say it's reasonably good but what I don't like about Joplin is that it doesn't have background sync, do you happen to know if Notesnook has background sync or if they plan to?

And another doubt, something I love about Joplin is that I create a notebook and I can create a notebook inside that notebook, but in Notesnook I don't remember being able to do that and that is something uncomfortable for me. I mean, in my case let's say I have a notebook called Windows without any notes, it's just like a base to know where my other notes are organized and inside that notebook I create other notebooks that are where I actually write my notes, for example, I create a notebook called "CLI Programs", "Open Source Programs", "Closed Source Programs" and everything is organized in a very comfortable way because inside the Windows notebook I have those other notebooks, and then I create a Linux Notebook and do the same, but in Notesnook I can't do that, how would you do that for example in Notesnook? I know I could just create a notebook called "Open Source Programs - Linux" and then another one called "Open Source Programs - Windows" but I really feel that would be a mess for the view, what I like about Joplin is that I can sort my notebooks inside others in a tree style. In my case, within "CLI Programs" each note is equivalent to a separate CLI program with its description and images, and I remember I had tried to replicate that in Notesnook by creating a single giant note called "Programs" where I mixed the different categories but it was a disaster honestly.

1
- What do you mean by background sync, like it syncing as a background service without needing to open up the app?
  
  Unfortunately, nested notebooks are still in the planning stage but they are on the road map. It's also something that I would really like to see added, but for right now since I get unlimited tags and notebooks and you can also select a couple of colors I've made a "tech" notebooks and made tags like "linux "lemmy" and things like that and then I can just stack the tags and if need be add a color to it to differentiate it further. I wouldn't say that Joplin is bad just that leaves a lot to be desired and especially things that I really need for my day to day and just like that is integrated to notesnook. Right now they're almost done with adding different app formats but nested notebooks is pretty soon on the list
  
  1
upnote $29.99 Lifetime

-1
- What's upnote?
  
  7
  
  Nothing much. What's up with you?
  
  11
  
  That's all folks !
  
  1
- I can't seem to tell, but does it have the option to write with a stylus?
  
  1

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