It’s completely local if you want, and you absolutely don’t need to pay money for syncing. The entire app is absolutely free and fully functional. If you want free syncing you can either use iCloud, or else the RemotelySave plugin with something like Syncthing or Duplicati.

Syncthing is foss software I use for that, they don’t try in anyway to hinder you syncing using third party. Their paid option is just how they monetize

I use synching to sync all my notes across different devices. It has been working well for me so far.

Also Anytype, but it lacks plugin functionality

weird that it isn’t on F-droid

Just turn this option off in the Editor settings.

Sounds like you’re talking about the readable line length setting. That’s an option you can turn off in the default settings of the app.

I’ve been using Syncthing for this purpose. My notes are synced between a desktop, laptop, Android phone, and Android tablet. It took me forever to finally take the time to try Syncthing, and it’s been nearly flawless.

You need Obsidian sync for that. It works awesome. It’s not free.

I could see myself implementing that via API calls into the app to write my own git repo out of the data. Not sure if joplinapp or any of these apps have APIs, but I would hope so.

You’re also giving all of your data over to Microsoft, including to be scanned and fed into their AI models.

That’s a trade-off that many won’t mind making, but everyone should informed of before making their decision.

I also take a lot of handwritten notes but disliked the hand writing UI on Onenote, I’m using Goodnotes for this.

It would be great to have all my notes in one system but I don’t mind that much. Goodnotes has good OCR so I can search my notes.

Yeah, it can do that. There are Android and iOS apps (as well as desktop). It has list creation in one click. General notes are technically formatted in markdown behind the scenes, and some users like to write the notes directly in markdown, but Joplin’s default view is a “rich text editor” mode which hides all that stuff away and uses familiar word processor type controls.

Depending on your chosen cloud host (you can pick any you like) it can sometimes be a little fiddly to do the initial setup, but I think the default “Joplin Cloud” option is pretty straightforward.

I use Joplin, and can heartily recommend it, although there are plenty of alternative options out there too.

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Yep! As the other commenter who replies to you said, it definitely can. You don’t even have to selfhost it; the app’s developer hosts a cloud sync server you can pay for thays dirt cheap. You can also sync notes without the cloud server. There are a lot of ways you can use it without having to get into the technical aspect of it!

Yep.

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The notes being sync’d locally is exactly what would have allowed me to remain productive for that meeting. It sounds like Notion has this ability today, which is good to hear. In this example local access wasn’t yet an option. This was a few years ago though, and I’ll stop bringing this up as a gap since it no longer applies.

I used Evernote religiously five years ago. But I left it for OneNote as well. No issues since.

Trillium lets you run arbitrary JavaScript, plugging into their APIs. It lets you do some cool stuff that you otherwise couldn’t with OneNote. If you do need something more powerful than OneNote, and admittedly most people don’t, I’d recommend downloading trillium and checking out the sample JS code that the developer wrote.

Even better, Obsidian notes are stored directly in folders on your device as plain text (markdown) files.
It’s all there, nothing missing, and no annoying proprietary format.

Not only can you keep using them without the Obsidian application, you can even do so using a “dumb” text editor - though something that can handle markdown will give you a better experience.

If you really want, you can use almost any cloud-based solution that allows you to sync folders, with some caveats.

I use Obsidian with my Google Drive; it took me about 5 minutes to set up, and it works like a charm now. However, you need to set it up on every device you plan on using for synchronization. Also, you cannot work on the same document on two devices simultaneously. Otherwise, it works as you’d expect.

It’s definitely messier than the Obsidian cloud, but for my needs, syncing it via Google Drive is more than enough.

Unless I misunderstood “cloud service functionality”, an Obsidian vault can be placed almost anywhere on the file system. For instance, a remote/WebDAV drive or even the Dropbox/iCloud Drive/Google Drive directory.

Migrating is as easy as moving the vault directory from one location to another, and pointing Obsidian to it.

As always, on iOS, there are some caveats as it lacks a traditional file system. So, the Obsidian app cannot access the vault directory on, say your Dropbox. But there are workarounds for it, like hosting the vault on a remote Git repository - which is what I ended up doing. Of course, this is a non-issue on Android.

Obsidian has a help page that goes in detail about what I just said.

As for the Git repository workaround, I referred to this article to arrive at my current workflow.

As an aside, I would like to touch upon my experience with using the inbuilt sync on apps like Agenda and Joplin - both offering syncing using iCloud and Dropbox while the latter offering a whole lot more. It is a flaky experience at best, wherein a significant number of notes never really sync between the devices. This forces me to use my phone to view a particular note while my computer for another. This is where the plain text file foundation for apps like Obsidian and Logseq wins me over.

I’d happily pay a one-time fee to be able to use my own cloud service like Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud.

You can do that without paying. Obsidian vaults are just plaintext files on your disk. Just make a vault in your GDrive/OneDrive/iCloud sync folder and it’ll be synced.

There’s likely a extra hoop or two to jump through if you want mobile access, but it’s not too much extra effort.

There’s a custom extension to sync Obsidian with a Git repository if you’re familiar with that. Let’s you sync up your notes as long as you have an Internet connection and access to whatever source control you use.

Syncthing-ing the vault works for me. P2p instead of cloud.

I’ve been trying it out for the last week or so as well looking to replace OneNote and this is the only issue I’m having with it too. I have it in my Nextcloud and can view notes on my devices but not create/edit them (I believe this is due to a permission issue with Nextcloud but haven’t been able to dig too far into it yet). Other than that issue I love it so far.

FOSS doesn’t mean free as in beer. Even so, you can get support for all of the things you mentioned, and more, for free. You can find the link from my comment above by searching for “Awesome Standard Notes,” but since you mentioned editors specifically, this will take you directly where you want to go: https://github.com/jonhadfield/awesome-standard-notes#editors

Edit to add: you can enable a community created editor (other than the ones that are included in the paid subscription) by going to Preferences > Plugins > scroll all the way to the bottom > and then, in the text box under “Install Custom Plugin,” paste the url (like https://mortalhappiness.github.io/sn-tui.editor/ext.json for the Tui Markdown Editor), then click Install, review the extension info, and then click Install again. You can follow these same steps to install a different theme, too.

There are several Markdown compatible editors in that list, so you’re free to choose the one that works best for you.

The Append Editor supports multiple types of Markdown, including Github Flavored Markdown, as well as LATEX. You can get an inline check mark by prepending a line with - [ ], but when you press enter it doesn’t make the next line a checkmark, nor can you click a checkmark to check/uncheck it, so it’s not a good choice if checklists are your main use-case. Some better options:

Tui Markdown Editor requires you to manually start a checklist the same way, but then a new line in either markdown or wysiwyg mode will also have a checkmark. You can also check/uncheck in wysiwyg mode with a click.

The Rich Markdown Editor is also good for checklists. It only offers a wysiwyg experience where you type in the same view as the final one (rather than having a split view), but there’s no top menu. You can still type the normal Markdown characters with exceptions when it’s something that requires multiple characters. In that case, type / on a new line to get a list of options, then type a couple characters and choose the best option. For example, I can’t just type - [ ] and get a checklist because it escapes the characters so that I get a list that would render the [ ]. But I can type / and then type “checklist” or “todo” (really just 2 characters of either of those words) and choose that option to start an in-line checklist. And if I hit enter, the next line defaults to being another checklist item. You can also click the checkmark to check or uncheck it.

For a dedicated task list, Scratch also works well. It’s not Markdown behind the scenes, though (but it is still readable plain text). You can start a checklist by clicking the checkmark icon in the top menu. Like the Rich Markdown Editor, a new line will create a new checklist item and you can click the checkmark to check/uncheck it.

You also might check out the “Advanced Checklist.” It’s in the “Official Extensions” link but I just tested and was able to install it on a free account. (Note that you can also self-host the “paid” editors other than the Super editor and use them for free, though that does require a bit of extra work.)

There are other editors on that page and also other community written editors in general out there. The Marp Editor lets you create presentation slides. The Mermaid Editor lets you create diagrams. Heck there’s even a Music Editor (for tablature, not for directly generating audio). There are a couple sketch / whiteboard apps. I’m not saying it has everything you could ever dream of, but there’s a lot and it’s easy to extend for anyone with front end web development experience.

Regarding your point about Simplenote syncing faster: I assume this is because Standard Notes is end to end encrypted, but Simplenote is not (Unfortunately generally e2ee adds additional overhead to syncing operations as the server cannot optimize nearly as much). There may be more to it than that, though. I’ve looked at Standard Notes’s code a bit but haven’t looked at the server code for Simplenote - as far as I can tell, Simperium, the backend it uses, is not open source. (The frontend is, though.)

That said, I’ve never noticed Standard Notes taking particularly long to sync. I don’t have thousands of notes but I do have several hundred (pretty close to a thousand). Were you seeing bad performance with Standard Notes or just worse (but still fine) performance? And if the latter, can you share some more details?

For me, not being end to end encrypted is a dealbreaker for my private notes (unless I’m self-hosting the app, that is). I’m not comfortable with someone at the hosting company just being able to access my notes. But that’s not important to everyone, and if it’s not important to you and if Simplenote otherwise does everything you want, then by all means use it - it’s a great choice.

I have to agree. I considered Standard Notes but I would have to pay for super notes in order to use images, even if I self-host. Same for code blocks, organizing notes into folders, spreadsheets, web clipper. Have to get the most expensive plan for offline access and being able to have local backups, although it is discounted if you self-host completely but why still pay a sub at that point? I would rather pay once and then be able to self-host using their super notes without paying more every month.

I liked Obsidian but wanted encryption that works on my android so I went with Joplin.