Paperwork: An open source Evernote alternative

As other&#x27;s have mentioned, the WebUI is a major no-no.<p>Evernote&#x27;s strength lies in its Desktop application and very useful clipping service.<p>The fact that Evernote uses its own cloud storage instead of say an encrypted folder in Google Drive&#x2F;Dropbox etc is a negative of the service. Sync is required but implemented in the most undesirable way in Evernote currently.<p>Paperwork is promising, but seems to have replicated the negative of Evernote, while foregoing the reason why people use Evernote in the first place.<p>So, if you want to Paperwork to take off:<p>1. Implement it as an offline Chrome App with Dropbox+Google Drive sync. 2. Implement a web clipping+screenshot extension.

It&#x27;s a good start, but I feel the UX could do with some refinement. Why is there no default notebook upon signup? Why isn&#x27;t there a big fat &quot;Add a note&quot; button on the top of the list of notes? Why do I have to explicitly press save after editing a note? And why is is soe obscure icon of a floppy disk, instead of a button with the text &quot;Save changes&quot; on it? Etc.<p>All the functionality is there, but as I see it, an app like this is all about good UX and very little about the technical features.

Looks like a good start!<p>I played around with it a bit and it&#x27;s still pretty far from being a true Evernote alternative.<p>A lot of the value in Evernote comes from its crazy powerful search and rich ecosystem. Both are currently still lacking in Paperwork.<p>As of yet, it does not search within PDF documents and it does use OCR to extract text from images, though both could be achieved with open source technologies such as Solr and Tesseract.<p>The lack of ecosystem (iOS&#x2F;Android apps, desktop integration etc.) also makes sense, but the APIs are all there, so there is no stopping anyone from adding those.

I dream of a future where there is a standard rest interface for cloud file storage, that somebody will put an API in front of any non-compliant services, and that applications can talk to any datastore with minimal hacking.<p>This has been done before with, eg ODBC.

Another open source Evernote&#x2F;Onenote alternative is TagSpaces(tagspaces.org) It runs completely offline on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and Android, and since recently it features a server edition, running on top of a ownCloud installation.

For note taking I use the open sourced Notational Velocity [1] (actually I use nvAlt [2] which is a fork that has some extra features like Markdown support). My two favorite features are that it can store your notes as plain text files in a folder of your choice, plus there&#x27;s syncing through Dropbox or Simplenote. Notational Velocity is a Mac app, but with Simplenote you get x-platform support.<p>[1] <a href="http://notational.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notational.net&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brettterpstra.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;nvalt&#x2F;</a>

How is this different than Wallabag? (<a href="http://wallabag.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wallabag.org&#x2F;</a>) Wallabag is mature, has mobile apps, self hosted or on their servers and allows you to export stuff as PDF, epub or json.

Nice! I&#x27;ve been using Evernote for a while now. I have a MacBook Pro I use for work, but I use Linux at home. After using both the web client (because that&#x27;s my only option in Linux except Wine) and the native OS X client, it&#x27;s clear that the Web Client is lacking.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to an open source alternative.

Nice beginning!<p>I agree with everyone that the UX needs some clean-up (default notebook created automatically, large Add Note button, etc.), however, there is one functionality that Evernote removed a long time ago, and I&#x27;m still searching for an alternative, and this new app also doesn&#x27;t support it.<p>The feature to create unlimited child notes. It used to be that you could have a tree structure with a parent note, then a few child notes, then a child of those child notes, etc., but last I checked, there&#x27;s only one layer of depth. Only one child note can be created for each notebook and you can&#x27;t set that child to be the parent of another note. I love all the other features, such as tagging, clipping, etc., but this was a killer feature that I haven&#x27;t found anywhere else.<p>Do any of you know an alternative app that has this feature in a note-taking application?

I&#x27;m surprised to see that NeverNote hasn&#x27;t been mentioned yet.<p><a href="http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nevernote.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been looking at a good document management&#x2F;note-taking app, to use in legal work, and I&#x27;ve found it surprisingly difficult. My needs are simple: 1) Rich-text notetaking; 2) DOCX&#x2F;PDF markup, ideally with annotation extraction; 3) indexing and search of DOCX&#x2F;PDF with preview; 4) drag &amp; drop desktop integration; 5) mac + pc. The cloud-only solutions are right-out. Evernote comes pretty close to hitting all the points, and the Skitch-derived PDF annotation summary is awesome, but the Mac&#x2F;PC databases aren&#x27;t compatible so they can&#x27;t be put on a shared drive.

I just created an account with fake data and it looks quite promising. Are there plans to recreate the function of the Evernote Webclipper?<p>I love Evernote. Since they are very slow and expensive, a real competitor would be great for them.

I think with open source user tools (as opposed to developer tools) you are better off directing your effort to projects which already exist.<p>That&#x27;s not to say that you can&#x27;t or shouldn&#x27;t try to scratch an itch. It just seems that attempting to create an alternative to Evernote is a target which is unlikely to be successful as an open source project or as a commercial project. Evernote has a budget, a full time, full-stack development team and lots of mojo. You aren&#x27;t going to create a better Evernote. Instead, you should aim to create a far more powerful tool to address the target which Evernote is shooting for. That&#x27;s the only way a small, scrappy dev shop with a product lacking polish is going to rattle a much larger competitor. Sure, this is open source, but it still needs to be compelling enough to grab momentum.<p>If you feel you don&#x27;t have an answer which is much better, then perhaps throw your weight behind an existing open source project which is already kicking ass in that space. For example, Org Mode is arguably far more powerful than Evernote. There are pros and cons of each, but part of your effort could be in addressing the weaknesses of Org Mode.

Good stuff. This would be a nice project to have running on Sandstorm <a href="http://sandstorm.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io</a>

Another nice, open source and very simple note taking web app is <a href="http://laverna.cc/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;laverna.cc&#x2F;</a>

Interesting, I am curious if this can be used by psychiatrist &#x2F; psychologist who need to take patient notes. Notes need to shared between psychiatrist &#x2F; psychologist &#x2F; social worker. Typically a patient needs all three. Also the notes would need to be secure (hipaa) compliant. I wonder how much work would be needed to build a MVP using paperwork as a start.

I kinda hoped for a satirical website which advertised the usage of pen and paper for taken notes. I&#x27;m disappointed now.

I ditched evernote after I lost my data twice. Sadly I have yet to find a solution which I feel would be an adequate replacement. Even Paperwork is far from it. Either the proposed alternative is even buggier than evernote, or it doesn&#x27;t implement the full featureset I need.<p>I kind of feel that for me the pinnacle of Evernote was version 3. The lure of being able to dump <i>any</i> information into it and sort it later was basically what got me using it. I could launch the app, type in &quot;Phil&quot;, and get Phils contact details from a business card I scanned in previously. I even used it a few times to save maps and a travel itineracy to my phone for conferences I attended. As the marketing put it, it was like a reliable &quot;second brain&quot;. I don&#x27;t think any of the alternatives I have tried have nailed this at all.

I would suggest to consider TiddlyWiki instead: It&#x27;s open source, it is a super simple low-tech solution (it&#x27;s just one self-contained file) <i>and</i> it comes with built-in encryption. You can additionally just put it in your Dropbox to have it automatically versioned and synchronized.

Another dissapointment. I want personal Wiki combined with calendar (something like Zim). It should run acrosss many devices offline. And synchronize using existing network infrastructure (Git or email). I will probably have to write it by myself :-)

There&#x27;s also Simplenote. I can recommend it. It&#x27;s pretty cool, it&#x27;s just plaintext, and it just works. I migrated to it after I got sick of the formatting in Evernote getting screwed up and sync issues causing data loss.

Is there a way to do something meaningful with the demo without creating an account?

I would have liked if Paperwork (or any other note-taking app) had the option storing your notes in text files (plain or markdown). Then, the back up and syncing could be handled by Dropbox&#x2F;Sugarsync&#x2F;other.

I periodically check for good open source alternatives to Evernote.<p>Previously I found<p><a href="https://github.com/grena/gruik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grena&#x2F;gruik</a> Demo <a href="http://gruik.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gruik.io&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https://github.com/shubik22/BetterNote" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shubik22&#x2F;BetterNote</a> Which clones the Evernote UI, demo <a href="http://www.betternote.us/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.betternote.us&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m not the author, but I believe he&#x27;s welcoming any help on taking this further. There&#x27;s a neatly organized list of things to do in the Github issues.[1]<p>See also his request for help on HN.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/twostairs/paperwork/issues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;twostairs&#x2F;paperwork&#x2F;issues</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8942823" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8942823</a>

I am not familiar with Evernote and the other tools -- but when I try to test Paperwork, I got stuck:<p>How can I create a note? When I press &quot;New note&quot; simply nothing happens. I can take no notes, add no documents -- nothing. Just two big white areas that are plainly saying and doing nothing.<p>Ok, I found the problem: When I use &quot;German&quot; interface language, it does not work. With English interface language there comes a new dialog. Guess, this is a bug.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about something like this for a long time! But mainly focused on security and privacy features! This one looks good as a starting point!

Also, for those who want to try it out, and don&#x27;t want to register, I made an account:<p>username: test<p>pass: testtest<p>email: test@test.com<p>This is awesome, definitely a great start (as others have said). I&#x27;m currently working on a similar thing (in that it is open source and replaces some of the pay&#x2F;ad-powered products that exist in that area) and appreciated seeing this.<p>Have you considered starting a small hosted service?

This looks very promising.<p>Could you please share the roadmap? When is the support for desktop clients planned?<p>When can evernote documents be migrated?

I think a very simple step that could be taken to improve adoption would be making it more obvious that you don&#x27;t need an email to try the demo. I would mention it right on the demo &quot;Signup&quot; page.<p>Judging by some of the comments here, something that simple would likely get more people to try it.

The plethora of interesting alternatives mentioned in the comments looks like an indicator that instead of one more however well done attempt at solving the problem we actually need a set of well defined protocols and formats that allow for interoperable solutions that suit everyones needs.

Amazing! You should use the &quot;Heroku Button&quot; for a quickily implementation<p><a href="https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-button" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devcenter.heroku.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;heroku-button</a>

Is there an open source version of the Evernote web clipper or something similar to Pocket? I would love that.

Why is an account needed for the demo??? That turned me off enough to give up. I am tired of having to create an account for everything and anything - and it makes managing passwords harder, or promotes using weaker passwords. I don&#x27;t want to live in a world where each step I take on the internet requires a separate account&#x2F;password!

Looks nice but who knows if it will be maintained five years from now?

&quot;...web UI...&quot; oh no. Not really an alternative then.

The website with its light gray text on white background is very hard to read. Consider joining the contrast rebellion <a href="http://contrastrebellion.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;</a>

I really love it when an open source alternative born.<p>Will check this out!

Cool stuff.<p>Multiplatform is the difficult part.

Very good initiative, thank you very much!<p>If you would like to switch to are more capable framework it would be much easier to add some collaborative features. I recommend strongly looking at the Python Pyramid framework or at Flask (or at Django, if you want more &quot;rails that lead you&quot;) as soon as possible, so this could grow into something really powerful. Many java frameworks also have everything you will need.<p>Unfortunately there are still many frameworks used nowadays, that are missing very important things around groups, ACLs &#x2F; RBAC and collaboration. I do not know why, but especially in the PHP world these things seem to be looked at as some &quot;advanced science&quot;, with a few exceptions.<p>Not integrating these features from the very beginning into your product will determine the long term direction of your project without you even knowing about it. This is the dangerous result of using popular, but very limited and limiting frameworks that do not support your growth.<p>An experienced developer will of course identify these weak points of a framework immediately, unfortunately many people still waste a lot of time with these misleading trap-frameworks, just because they are cool today.<p>It is important to spot at the weaknesses of these half-assed &quot;frameworks&quot; and clearly tag them as dangerous for serious project work. Laravel is ok for a quick and dirty prototype that helps you to model your ideas, like a brainstorming session, but should not be used for a real project. And this modelling phase should be very short, quickly moving on to the more involved engineering process that takes all aspects of a modern web app into consideration.<p>Hopefully it is not too late for your project to switch - it will be a very good investment of time, I promise!