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.<p>I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.
Joplin is a decent open-source note app but I absolutely hate the way that they structure your notes.<p>If you have thousands of notes in a folder<p><pre><code> ~/my_notes
~/my_notes/work
~/my_notes/music
etc.</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>What you don't get is a "polished" UI with a WYSIWYG editor.<p>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.<p>[1]. <a href="https://joplinapp.org/help/faq/#is-it-possible-to-use-real-file-and-folder-names-in-the-sync-target" rel="nofollow">https://joplinapp.org/help/faq/#is-it-possible-to-use-real-f...</a>
Related:<p><i>Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with synchronization</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906</a> - June 2021 (74 comments)<p><i>Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with sync</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22439485">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22439485</a> - Feb 2020 (36 comments)<p><i>Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238</a> - Nov 2019 (150 comments)<p><i>Joplin – A note-taking and to-do app with builds for desktop, mobile, terminal</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040</a> - 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.<p>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.<p>I wish I could replace Tesseract with some industrial strength OCR though.
I like Joplin’s sync server, which can be self hosted.<p>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.)<p>But it's the best we have for Android, sadly.
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.<p>(on x platform, Windows/iOS use case here, but just post your needs)<p>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 <i>too</i> 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.
My only concerns about using Joplin were security-related, when handling sensitive notes (financial data, logins, etc). The interface looked awesome.<p>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.
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:<p>- WYSIWYG editor: rendered text and editor are in same window
- Vim Bindings
- Bonus: Terminal integration (TUI)<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>@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.<p>Overall it’s excellent IMO. There are clients for all major platforms.
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): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520906</a>
<a href="https://www.craft.do" rel="nofollow">https://www.craft.do</a> 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) : <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/" rel="nofollow">https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/</a>