Hey everyone, I’m trying to replace most of the private owned app I use by FOSS ones, and today i’m pointing at notion.
I just use it as a way to organize my notes and use it both on my laptop and phone, and i’m looking for something that can have that fonctionnality.
I’ve already looked into a bunch of foss note taking apps but I didn’t see any that could do it. (maybe i didn’t look hard enough tho)
I’m willing to use syncthing or smth similar if needed.
do you have any recommendations? anyway, have a nice day and thanks to everyone making the internet/softwares more libre and accessible!
Joplin can sync between phone and laptop with a number of network storage options
https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/sync/
or you can self-host Joplin server.
https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/packages/server/README.md
EDIT: I am going to edit this to reflect that I HAVE NOT tried Joplin 3.5 which says: "
More reliable syncing and sharing
Syncing and sharing have been made more robust in everyday use. Joplin now handles repeated syncs more efficiently, avoids unnecessary data usage, and is better at detecting and syncing all changes, particularly when using WebDAV and S3 sync targets."
Until I have new data I will scratch this out:
In Joplin, I have never been able to successfully use an s3 instance with two or more joplin clients. It corrupts eventually. This is using a bucket for storage directly, not WebDAV.From my research the best bet is self host, webdav, or some kind of file sync
That’s weird… I’ve been using S3 to sync Joplin between Linux and Android without corruption issues for more than a year now.
Looks like you are lucky so far. It is still in beta and not considered a full fledged part of Joplin, they have told me as much.
I admit I havetn’t tried in the last six months. I think I might, the release notes for January 2026 say they improved sync.
I also was using 3 clients, so maybe I hit it faster. Maybe 2 is ok.
yeah I use webdav on my home NAS with just one phone and one laptop. probably going to self-host serve so I can do shared notes with the Baroness.
Joplin. I use it on my phone, multiple laptops and Linux desktops.
I also second this. Working like a charm for me over 4 different devices and 3 different Operating systems.
I second this.
Do you ever regret that Joplin does not store notes in plain text? (meaning you couldn’t edit your notes in a plain text editor if you wanted to)
Nope not a bit. But you mean through exporting stuff I assume(?).
If for any reason I need to move something to a text file (very rare) then I just cut/copy and paste without the MD.
I just meant like if Joplin ever stopped working or vanished overnight. I know it might seem like a contrived scenario, but I’ve always been a little skittish about apps that don’t store files in plain text in case I want/need to use a different editor. Sounds like that hasn’t been an issue for you, though, which is cool.
obsidian is not FOSS BTW
Sadly, because honestly, all the FOSS options that are mentioned in this thread don’t even compare to how snappy, useful and expandable Obsidian is 😭
fully agree but the head coder is aggressively anti-foss on mastodon and I don’t like that. trilium is a decent alternative but it doesn’t have a phone app, and no not triliumnext.
Joplin. It’s cross platform and just works. No hassle.
notesnook
Obsidian + Syncthing has been working prefectly for several years now for me, across Windows, Android and Linux.
Obsidian is not open-source…
I use Joplin through some WebDAV with my cloud provider, kDrive.
Works perfectly once set up.
I don’t know if you could make it work directly from your phone to your computer though.
Notesnook should do it! It has a premium monthly subscription thing that gives you some extra functionality, but the free version does sync automatically between devices. I’ve been using it for a year now myself and have had no complaints.
Is there something wrong with Standard Notes that I should be aware of? It hasn’t been mentioned here. It has the AES-256 encryption standard, there is a free tier, it’s open source and it undergoes regular security audits.
I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard good things about Notesnook.
Been using Notesnook for almost 3 years now and it’s just awesome. Highly recommend!
Could look into self hosting an Obsidian Sync server, see this blog:
https://pinggy.io/blog/self_hosting_obsidian/Obsidian - https://obsidian.md/
edit: And you can obviously do it without pinggy’s tunnel for remote access.
I just syncthing the obsidian vault, works for me…
Honestly most of my notes are just text files describing the installation process saved together with the installation files in a folder on my NAS. Not much of a note taker outside of that. I’ve heard many enjoy Obsidian though. :)
That (folder with files) is pretty much what an obsidian vault is, except it’s markdown files (of which text files are a subset). Should just import in with zero issues.
Ah, I should’ve clarified - my notes are all over the place as "README"s or "INSTALL GUIDE"s in different folders together with the files needed to do the install in question. :)
I had problems with it creating new notes all the time. Glad it worked for you but I moved to Joplin
not (completely) open source but signal has a “note to self” function i use for that
Anytype is nice.
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to find anytype
I’m using Logseq and it’s the least bad of the FOSS options I tried so far.
Its crazy, with a complete fresh install and 0 notes, this application takes half a gig of memory and is constantly making the CPU work, when it’s just running, not even being used?
I think its wild that it hogs resources like this for a text editor 😅
Yeah, one of my issues with it. It’s a browser app in a non-browser corset, like so many modern “apps”…
I see Logseq recommended a lot, but does it still try to force you to use bullet lists only?
Yes, basically. Fits my workflow as I usually use bullet lists anyway. You can hide the bullet points and have it be just blocks, in the backend (MD file) it’s still bullets though.
Syncthing and Org Mode.
Org-mode is especially great for people who like branchy outlines as their notes. It allows to jot down a note quickly and to move them around in the tree as the heart desires. I have thousands upon thousands of notes, mostly short one- or two-sentence long.
Plus both Emacs and Orgzly allow some programmatic fiddling with the notes.
The downside is that copying anything with links or formatting out of Org requires converting its markup to Markdown or whatever.
The downside is that copying anything with links or formatting out of Org requires converting its markup to Markdown or whatever.
The upside is by default org mode can export to markdown, and with Pandoc installed you can basically export to any file type known to humanity.
Firstly, I don’t need my entire four-thousand-notes file be exported to Markdown.
Secondly, that doesn’t mean that if Org used Markdown, exporting would be impossible.
Copying from Org is objectively bothersome, because Org’s markup format is only used in Org and nowhere else.
It objectively isn’t bothersome, it only takes a handful of keystrokes to export to markdown or to any other format you want.
I am sorry complaining about Org mode’s markdown format not being used elsewhere is absurd given how many extensibly options there are for Emacs built in even without adding in anything custom.
No, the org mode file format is the most extensible, open, powerful file format for primarily text based notes ever made. You are simply wrong here, I am sorry.
There are also apps that directly use the org mode file format such as Orgzly, Beorg and Orgro.
You’re objectively wrong there, sorry not sorry.
At some point you might want to print your notes, publish them on the web, or share them with people not using Org. Org can convert and export documents to a variety of other formats while retaining as much structure (see Document Structure) and markup (see Markup for Rich Contents) as possible.
The libraries responsible for translating Org files to other formats are called backends. Org ships with support for the following backends:
ascii (ASCII format)
beamer (LaTeX Beamer format)
html (HTML format)
icalendar (iCalendar format)
latex (LaTeX format)
md (Markdown format) odt (OpenDocument Text format) org (Org format) texinfo (Texinfo format) man (Man page format)
Users can install libraries for additional formats from the Emacs packaging system. For easy discovery, these packages have a common naming scheme: ox-NAME, where NAME is a format. For example, ox-koma-letter for koma-letter backend. More libraries can be found in the ‘org-contrib’ repository (see Installation).
Org only loads backends for the following formats by default: ASCII, HTML, iCalendar, LaTeX, and ODT. Additional backends can be loaded in either of two ways: by configuring the org-export-backends variable, or by requiring libraries in the Emacs init file. For example, to load the Markdown backend, add this to your Emacs config:
(require 'ox-md)
https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html
There you go, maybe try reading a bit about the thing before commenting on it?
It’s remarkable how you continue to trudge ahead while being objectively wrong about everything. Your opinion is absurd, and everything you cited is incongruous to the discussion. Try saying anything in any way relevant next time. Again, not sorry in the slightest.
