Joplin works well for me.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Joplin with NextCloud for sychronization + pivn for having access from everywhere :')
Another vote for Joplin here, but I prefer to host Joplin server for synchronization because it's much faster than NextCloud.
obsidian.md
2nd vote for Obsidian.
I've moved from OneNote and Evernote about two years ago to Obsidian. I tried out (and still do look at) all the note-keeping apps and Obsidian beats hands down. For me, the major determiner was that it saves to plain text files that I can just transfer into any future app easily. The other aspect is that plug-ins enable you to tailor how Obsidian functions to your own working processes.
I've found keeping Obsidian in sync over iCloud pretty good as long as you keep the number of plug-ins on phone and iPad limited.
Obsidian is great except for the times when you can’t sync your notes to a local file system (like on a work computer). Does anyone know of a self-hosted web app that’s effective for reading/editing the markdown files?
Have you tried Remote Save plugin?
I use it to sync from a webdav on my NAS at home to work computer if I ever need it. It also syncs from services like OneDrive, Dropbox, S3 etc.
There are other versions of similar syncing.
Seconding obsidian.
And you can self host the live sync plugin to keep all devices in sync with each other.
Use Joplin and you can stop searching. FOSS and multiplatform with selfhosted options, great sync and a lot of plugins to adjust it to your taste.
Logseq + Syncthing?
No web editor though—well, they have a tutorial web app that I think you can force into editing your markdown files, but that's not what it's meant for.
huge obsidian.md fan here. it doesn't have a web editor, but since your notes really are just markdown files it's easy to mix and match with other markdown editors. for quick notes i like to drop into markor on my phone rather than obsidian, since they're compatible and obsidian takes longer to load due to my love of plugins
i use syncthing to get my vault onto all my devices on the fly, plus a git repo for longer-term archival. i believe syncthing doesn't play so well on ios due to system limitations, however, so using the official "obsidian sync" service might be a better bet in your case?
Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)
Joplin for notes, Floccus for Bookmarks.
Another vote for Trilium.
A couple of years ago Roam Research was trending, I read some articles and reviews about it and I liked the concepts it introduced. I looked for a free, open source self-hosted cross-platform alternative to Roam and found Trilium.
Its native on Windows, Mac, and Linux, while it doesn't have any Native Mobile apps, the webapp works on great on mobile and can be installed to your phone launcher as a PWA.
It does everything I want, and I use it a lot. A bunch of my colleagues have been recently moving from Evernote or Notable, over to Obsidian, and I understand Obsidian is the new hot thing, but I think I'll stick with Trilium.
My advice would be to try out a bunch. Note taking is surprisingly nuanced and personal preferences play a major role. Try each one for a week or two, and see which best matches your workflow and your requirements.
+1 for Trilium, been using it for about a year now and I like it over the other solutions I've tried: Joplin, Obsidian, and logseq.
Don't forget about Trlium's white board feature! I didn't know it existed until recently - create a new "canvas" style note to get it started
Great point about this being such a personal preference thing. I was thinking that as I was reading through all these passionate replies.
If you already have Nextcloud their Notes app is easy to use and has a mobile app
I really like Obsidian
zettlr: free, open source (GPL3), no database.
I use Joplin. It supports syncing with OneDrive, Dropbox and NextCloud. Also supports encryption which is great if you are syncing to onedrive or dropbox.
I migrated away from Evernote a few years ago, where I kept my "paperless life" (PDFs of receipts, bills, etc) and general notes (work, study, etc). Opting to self-host most of the things I can, I moved the notes to Dokuwiki and the rest to what is now Paperless-ngx.
This year I realised that Obsidian suits my needs better than a wiki, so migrated the notes to that. If it's just for your stuff, I'd recommend the same. (Though if you collaborate with anyone, I've heard Notion is a better option specifically for that.) Obsidian has a lot of extensibility, which will steepen the learning curve, but it's worth it.
I sync Obsidian's Vault using my Synology NAS's "Drive" client, and Obsidian works perfectly with Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The only shortcoming is iOS (because iOS), though I believe you can work around it using Obsidian Sync or at least one other tool I've seen mentioned. It might also be possible via the Obsidian Git extension, but I've not tried it with iOS and requires (from a self-hosting perspective) that you have a local Git server (for example).
In a different post I mentioned I'd left Dropbox, and that I was replacing Evernote with Obsidian. I had lots of good suggestions for markdown editors, and one that I'd never heard of, but I've been testing today is Silverbullet. It's main appeal to me is that I can use it effectively on iOS since it has a mobile friendly web interface.
My setup is I'm using SyncThing over tailscale to keep my laptop and server in sync, I run a local instance of SilverBullet on my laptop and the wepapp on my iPhone over tailscale to a SilverBullet instance on the homelab server.
Ooh... Silverbullet looks really useful!! Just installed, need to figure out what I can do, looks like a lot of functionality!
I use Trilium, it just scratched the need I had which obsidian and logseq couldn't somehow.
Obsidian is popular. Markdown-based and lots of plugins. Can get super powerful.
You can try Appflowy. It's a Notion clone written in Flutter. Open source and batteries-included for a bunch of note-taking applications.
Nextcloud notes seem to be a good evernote alternative. Just notes, nothing bigger.
Second obsidian. And if you want to self-host a sync for it you can.
There's a selfhosted sync plugin that lets you sync changes between many devices with a couchDB handling it all.
It works pretty smooth, and keeps my computers and my phone in sync as long as I'm on the LAN or VPN.
I use markdown files + Nextcloud for synchronization. What I like about it is that I can use any markdown editor. Currently I use Nextcloup app on mobile and Pulsar or Nextcloud Web UI on desktop.
I'm finding logseq very interesting.
FOSS and filesystem based. But you have to figure out sync yourself. I'm setting it up with syncthing, but I'll have to replace it with git because I need it to work across ios and android systems.
They have a sync that actually works pretty well. As the product is still beta you can donate and get access to the sync service.
I currently use primarily Logseq with a little Obsidian because it’s just a really pleasant text editor and Zettlr for long form writing and research. The nice think about keeping it all Makrdown is that I can use any of them depending on what features/UI I need.
Logseq does have the web editor but it’s more of a demo (it’s literally called demo.logseq.com) but it gives you the full vanilla feature set as long as you connect a local directory. I use Logseq Sync just because I was paying to support the team anyway, and it’s worked very well so far. Just ran into an issue where my laptop with most of my notes broke and so I made a portable version of the app to put on a USB and work on a library computer and it ran and connected to my Logseq Sync remote graph surprisingly seamlessly.
I know we're in selfhosted, but if you're just looking for an Evernote replacement, OneNote is the OG and really gets the job done.
There’s a new app called Anytype and it’s very Notion like and works on many devices (also on iOS). IIRC it has been released recently and looks promising. Personally I don’t use it because I dislike the idea of having to categorize your notes before creating them and that’s why I use Logseq nowadays.
One thing to keep in mind is that when switching to a different platform you have to use it at least for a few months so you don’t get into the loop of searching for better tools even when they don’t differ that much.
What kinda notes are you looking to take? If you want something real simple but works across all devices, is super fast and with great search, try Simplenote. If you want something with more power, I’ll echo what others here have suggested and say Obsidian. Don’t do notion.
Trilium user here. Only thing is some issue with the keyboard when used from android.