Joplin: Secure Notebook

I've been using Nextcloud Notes as the server for synchronising all my notes across my devices. For editing notes, I've been using QOwnNotes on the desktop and the Nextcloud Notes app on my phone. It has been working well enough, but sometimes a little janky.

The note-taking market is absolutely saturated. Here's a few contenders:

• Evernote
• Notesnook
• Standard Notes
• Trilium
• Microsoft OneNote
• Obsidian
• Logseq
• Bear

I wanted a solution that would:

• Synchronise seamlessly across all devices and operating systems - laptop, desktop, mobile.
• Cater for multiple accounts (i.e. notes for each person in the household).
• Have a large feature set - dark theme, markdown, plugins.
• Have no lock-in - be able to import/export to markdown.
• Be open source, self-hosted and private.

Enter Joplin.

I saw a recent video (below) from Tom Lawrence on the topic, which made me revisit it. I've known about Joplin for a while now but I overlooked how versatile and feature rich this application is.

Joplin Server is great for synchronisation across multiple devices. So far, the experience has been flawless. You can share notebooks with other users on your server. This is handy for sharing shopping and to-do lists with family members.

I have deployed the Joplin synchronisation server on Proxmox with the help of community scripts. It doesn't take up too much by way of system resources.

The desktop application is feature rich, highly configurable and comes with all the export formats, profiles, plugins, tags, tools and settings. It's easy to import notes in and export them out.

The mobile (iOS/Android) application works very well, although limited in functionality compared to the desktop.

Overall, I'm happy to have made the switch to Joplin for note taking. It's worked well for everyone in the house with different operating systems and devices. If you're interested, it might be worthwhile having a read of their extensive documentation (linked below).

What is Joplin? | Joplin

Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified eith…

Joplin