Ditch the expensive note apps for a sweet open source alternative, managing your own data and synchronization with S3-compatible storage!

I've tried a lot of them (Evernote, OneNote, Notion, Quip, Obsidian, Standardnotes, all the app store riffraff). Someone posted on LinkedIn recently about Evernote going up to $149.99 a year.

Here's the deal, a good notes app really needs to do a few things well (subjectively):

• Usable - not even amazing - UI that isn't cluttered and trying too hard
• Ability to sync and back up notes between platforms
• Good Markdown capability
• Extensions/plugins that work
• Dark mode pls

This is why I would like to introduce you to the one that has been good enough I've not bothered looking for more alternatives!

Joplin¶

Check out Joplin as a replacement! You can check out the open source code on GitHub, as well.

I am not saying it is the perfect app or holy grail. I am saying that it is free, open source, and good enough that you can sustainably use it as a daily driver for a lot less than $150/yr.

I won't go extensively into the UI setup I use or hotkeys, because it's worth hacking about and browsing their docs to get familiar. I'll go into the other config pieces I care about below.

Profiles¶

You can have separate profiles with a quick switch in the File menu:

This is useful if you want to have your typical "shared" notebooks like with a team at work, and a separate place for personal notes. How can you do that and keep things synced between multiple people? Well, I'll show ya!

S3 Sync¶

You can choose your Synchronisation methods (with that British English spelling, you'll be feeling classier already) and select the - as of the time of writing this post - beta for S3 sync.

Any S3-compatible storage is capable of doing this, like DigitalOcean Spaces. Depending on your use case and amount stored, Amazon S3 might still be cheaper. It is a flat $5 cost for up to 100 buckets and 250GB of space and a pretty generous data transfer amount (~1TB egress) compared to Amazon S3, so for personal use I prefer to go with DO for most things.

For work, I have a shared Amazon S3 bucket and a profile configured to use with teammates where we can sync notes, and I use the handy profiles to switch!

Create a DigitalOcean Spaces Bucket¶

First head on over to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/spaces and log in (or sign up if you do not have an account) and create a new Spaces Object Storage bucket.

Then choose the datacenter/region you prefer and give it a name.

Finally head to the API settings on the left navigation bar and select the Spaces Keys to create a new Spaces bucket key.

Once you have this key/secret, you can input them into Joplin.

Configure Joplin with S3 Sync¶

If you put in the right URL + bucket + access key and secret, you should be able to hit the Check synchronisation configuration and get a success message.

Then when you log in anywhere else, like iOS, you can just put in the same config and sync notes just as seamlessly as with any of these paid apps!

Markdown & Plugins¶

Native Markdown support is pretty good, with some wysiwyg checkboxes.

The things I wanted like admonition Markdown was pretty easy to solve with plugins:

That way you can have the cool little text blocks like so:

I wish this worked more like it does in Material for MkDocs (which this site now runs on!) but it's easy enough anyway and I am happy with the fact that if I stop being lazy I can extend/configure Joplin further with other plugins.

Dark Mode¶

Have you seen the screenshots!? It's got it out of the box, baby!

Conclusion¶

Joplin is a user friendly notes app. especially in the world of open source.

• The download from their site is packaged and installed as easily as commercial software.
• The in-app update works well (downloads the latest installer FWIW and requires you close it).

• Self-managing sync allows you to pick up where you left off across any major platform or operating system!

Overall, if you're on the hunt for a new notes app as you exodus from Evernote or something else, this may just be it. I use it for all kinds of things from TODO lists to short stories I am trying to write about cat kingdoms!

Hopefully this helps someone escape the clutches of another subscription nightmare!