If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around.
After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode.
It is free, it is extensible, it is not going anywhere in next decade+, it let's me encrypt on my own terms, it let's me store and share on my own terms, it is as lightweight or as heavyweight as I want, it can be as pretty or as ugly as I want, I can edit it anywhere, search and organization is ridiculously advanced compared to anything else out there (or everything else is ridiculously behind).
Its biggest strength and arguably biggest weakness is its tied to Emacs. It is a horrible learning curve for beginners, which is why it took me a decade to get to org-mode in the first place, but once you have climbed that hill, you are basically on top of the world.
Everybody serious about note-taking should give org-mode a try.
1. Can I embed images and more specifically can I embed animated GIF files?
2. Can I embed MP3s and play them within the note?
3. Does it support rich text editor functionality including the ability to insert tables easily from programs like Microsoft excel?
4. Can I use multiple fonts in the same individual note including monospaced ones and broad support for Unicode?
5. Can I easily sync and edit the data on my iPad, then on my android phone without having to worry about where the data is stored?
6. Will it automatically OCR embedded images and allow me to do text searches across my entire set of notes based on that text?
If the answer to most of these questions is no, then it doesn't sound like org-note is the best note taking editor as you claim, it just sounds like it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria which does not apply to all notetakers. And that's the problem with trying to narrow down the best note editing tool, it's such a broad area that every notetaker will have their own idiosyncratic needs and priorities.
As for me, I have also experimented with a great deal of note editing utilities and the only one that has reasonably met most of my requirements is Evernote.
EDIT: of course if the answer is yes, then I may just have a new favorite note editor.
2. Same as above, except playback will require a plugin.
3. Absolutely! Tables are fully supported, with automatic formatting and formulae and lots more. This is one of the strong areas of org-mode.
4. You can get bold, italic, monospaced varieties inline, with minimal markdown-like syntax. If you are asking for rich text mixing two different fonts, then no.
5. Yes! Since everything is stored in text files, you can syc them via any means you deem fit. I personally have multiple Syncthing nodes (desktop, laptop and phones) and it works flawlessly.
>it's the best editor for your specific set of criteria
You are right. Perhaps better description would be org-mode is the worst note-taking tool, except all others.
Why I would deem it best is because after decade of experimenting, I've cone to realise that plaintext is the king. Rich editors with inline images, media and fancy fonts are nice and necessary when you're preparing presentations or impressing someone, but when time comes to actual utility when talking about years upon years of notes and other documents, everything else falls short very quickly.
Images and videos cannot be grepped, searching through formatted documents like Word where search program has rk ignore all the formatting is inherently slow and ultimately inaccurate. Compressing and encrypting and sharing plaintext is a breeze. Plaintext can be read thoroughly or skimmed through as needed. While writing plaintext, I don't have to worry about messing up formatting of whole document by entering right character at wrong place and then fiddling about it for hours.
Rich text is nice for when your notes are small. They are nice to feel. But when you are rummaging about a mountain (which everyone eventually builds up if they document anything seriously), nothing matches sheer speed and utility of plaintext.
Which leaves either dumb text or markdown. Markdown is nice, but org-mode is markdown in steroids. Even the simple act of being able to collapse sections with single key is a huge huge QoL improvement. Then there or org-babel for inline programming like Jupyter, org-roam for back links, org-ref for bibliography, pdf-tools with org roam for inline PDF annotation, and you can still grep everything mentioned here.
Ultimately the purpose of notes (for me, goes without saying) is to preserve and eventually refer to, information. And plaintext, in my personal anecdotal opinion and experience, beats every other medium for storing, transferring, modifying and analyzing information.
I'm still shopping for a good vim-based note taking solution.
It is also the only note taking system I have seen that will let you link to an email. If you want to add a todo entry deep in some meeting notes reminding you to checkup on that email in 3 weeks, you can. And those todos will then show up in your agenda view.
Unfortunately this doesn't work if you don't already use Emacs as your email client, which I guess you don't if you aren't also using org-mode.
While actually editing, org-roam has simple double-bracket syntax that auto-completes existing filenames. If filename doesn't exist, it is created when the link is accessed first time automatically.
Hierarchy gets established automatically as I track back links, or via org-roam graph view. But really, once I started linking notes extensively (because its so easy with org-roam), I realised that my structure ended up mostly as a graph rather than tree. However, org-mode itself has excellent tree style syntax within individual file, which comes in handy.
Searching/analyzing can be done either from withing Emacs via elisp or externally via ripgrep/fd (I'm still noon at elisp)/
But for that little editing, Orgzly all from f-droid is pretty great. As a side bonus, it handles TODOs from my org-agenda to generate Android notifications! Very handy and very private.
I'm not sure of Syncthing story on iOS as I don't have an apple device, but you can always store your notes on dropbox/icloud/whathaveyou. Unfortunately I lack any experience to be helpful with Apple devices otherwise.
I've never felt like rich text editor's have gotten in my way, I can start immediately typing into a note in Evernote without ever feeling like the rich text somehow hinders my ability to be able to quickly transfer my thoughts.
For you, as you've said, you don't see the utility of rich text outside of presentations. But when I'm drawing up and working on new projects I like to have embedded imagery for my flow charts, when I'm working on music I like to include snippets of melodies, and I like to be able to easily take screenshots of things I'm working on and transfer them and embed them easily.
I like the ability to be able to copy code blocks from programs like visual studio and web storm knowing that I can preserve the color scheme and monospaced font. It makes readability great.
When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
I am not a casual user at this point as I have about 5000 notes with folders and tags associated with them. I've been building this note store for the last 10 years in Evernote after switching from One Note. And at least for me the search capabilities are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. Evernote in particular does have a few minor issues with the inability to be able to do regex searches or partial word versus whole word searches but they're minor and don't really impact my daily experience.
Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use, it took me less than five minutes to understand how Evernote worked and to have it syncing and searchable across my Macbook, my PC, my android and my iPad.
I do think you make strong points but fundamentally we have very different workflows and that's what makes our requirements so vastly different.
You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it. If it has limitations with regard to notetaking I certainly haven't encountered them - of course as a safety measure I also make weekly back ups of my Evernote store as a series of exported HTML files. To me this is the biggest shortcoming, ultimately I don't control the central repository, if I ever found an Evernote competitor with comparable features that could connect to an s3, FTP or even dropbox i would switch in a heartbeat.
org-babel allows this, with added ability to (optionally) execute and see and interact with output inline.
> Evernote also lets me link notes to each other and can even do some interesting auto related suggestions for notes that are similar in context as well as allowing me to tag notes in addition to putting them in a traditional folder like hierarchy.
Fully supported via org-roam, with added bonus of backlinks.
> When I want to make a note about remembering how to perform some complicated task in Photoshop (for example) I might make a quick animation as a gif file and I want to see it animated and embedded in the note.
This is a pretty nifty workflow, and I admit a useful one. I am not sure if gifs can be viewed inline withing Emacs, but so far I haven't seen nor tried, so this is a definite shortcoming.
> Another key priority for me is set up and ease-of-use,
Emacs is absolute horrific experience here. It is a terrible match for anyone looking to setup and start in under 5 minutes, especially because it is wildly different from anything you might have come across.
> You said that you used Evernote in the past, I'm honestly curious why you abandoned it
Evernote, way when I used it was still pretty cool. It allowed saving whole webpages directly, and linking them inside notes. But for a broke student from not-so-rich country, its free tier of 60MB ran out very very quickly. Paid tiers were prohibively expensive as $1 meant a day's sustenance or more. I also had a crappy laptop and Evernote wasn't the fastest thing around. It also forced me to think in terms of Notebooks and hierarchy. The notes and notebooks are also not so easily greppable. The UI of Evernote, its biggest strength during on boarding, became crippling for me. As for why kicked it for me in the end is, as you mentioned, single commerical entity ultimately controlling my collected knowledge and its structure. I am personally not comfortable putting thousands of hours of work so someone else can control it. I also write my journal in org-mode, with detailed analysis of social interactions (I'm not good at people, if its not clear by now :)) and I don't want anybody but me taking a peek.
Fortunately, Evernote works for you! And thanks to detailed requirements, someone might refer this conversation in future and make an informed decision based on it, as I once did :)
This would use a lot of resources and quickly burden Standards Notes' servers. If it means we can't add images and Standard Notes is free because of that, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults.
Building notes on top feels almost too straightforward to monetize. (For that matter: 1password, any number of small-scale B2C things, ...)
"What's emacs?" that's what a your every day Joe is going to ask you. The very reason note apps/platforms exist is to simplify the on boarding process. Of course that's a two edged sword. You give normal users an easy way out but now pro users get frustrated because they can't use their favorite tool.
I am sure org-mode is as good as you say though.
One more factor hindering Emacs adaptability is its very unique nature. There nothing else like it out there, nobody encounters it before they explicitly start off on it with clear intent.
In this folder I categorise with subfolders and use simple markdown files to write down stuff and todo.txt for when I need tasklists. A dedicated file in root is used for collecting random stuff before there get sorted and another to collect all links that I wanna bookmark.
This works very well on different types of devices at the same time. On android Markor is a good editor for it, on desktop/macs I recommend typora for the nice interface and obsidian.md for the nice navigation between files, if you don't have already have setup a favourite editor. Also works well with vim/emacs/vscode or anything else that handles plain text files.
I once waivered between markdown and org-mode. But the ecosystem of Emacs packages that build on top of org-mode is mindblowing. Tables with formulae, inline programming (in your language of choice), back links, PDF annotations, bibliography, automatic conversion to HTML/PDF/LaTeX, still unmatched repetitive tasks in TODOs, even simple text collapsing, and so much more. And none of this weighs down your particular setup because you just ignore what you don't use and it never loads!
I personally realised that I'm never going todo any serious editing on my phones so Orgro/Orgzly work very well on Android. And since everything is plaintext, any org file can be opened in any editor and edited normally. I have a simple editor app from f-droid which works very well.
Can you pull it up on your phone when you're out and need to jot something down? (Honestly wondering, I've always toyed with org mode, but half my notes are taken on the run.)
I actually really like their pricing model. You can buy years in advance, and they occasionally offer steep discounts (I think I bought two decades in advance around new year?). In a time where more and more services offer me no other way than some crappy monthly subscription that I cannot pay in advance and without auto-renewal, this is really much appreciated.
That being said, a lot of your points seem valid - I've started using SN quite some time ago and haven't really noticed any new features since (except for some editor-improvements). Organization is indeed something that probably could use some love, the tags do suffice for me personally (especially with that one extension that lets you create folders with tags), but barely. While I appreciate their stability with regards to UX (it looks/feels the same since forever), the features you mentioned (collapsing, rightclick-menu) would not hurt.
Their 'lack of new features' however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional - back when I bought it I've read somewhere on the page that they explicitly have the philosophy to also say 'No' to new features if they think it threatens their guarantee of long-term stability/support. Which I think is a very admirable stance these days where short-term-KPIs seem to dominate entire industries.
Um that sounds great but I don't see how a simple thing like a "right-click menu" endangers longevity? All their talk of simplicity and yet they allow you to add a whole spreadsheet editor? I suppose adding editors is simple stuff that's why they have so many. Maybe longevity = less work?
Features are not bad. Some features are necessary. Some features enhance the general user experience and even make things simpler. Stagnation is not longevity, it's just slow death.
As for pricing: sure, the long term plan is appealing but they ask $9/mo? Which is the most expensive note taking app out there, I think.
You buy for 5 years or 20 years but what if nothing in the service changes in 20 years but your situation/use case changes drastically as is normal? What do you do of the additional money you paid? You can't get it back.
I don't think 5 year commitment speaks of longevity, that's just marketing. Longevity would be them taking the money after 5 years, not before.
I personally love monthly models because I spend exactly the amount I need and I can stop/pause when I want and start it again when I want. Its freedom and there's no commitment. That's why I added only 1 monthly plan in Notesnook.
A service should ask you to commit long term because the risk is always too high. Instead it should allow for multiple ways to get your data out in case it ever goes down. And if it goes down, you can be sure that you lose only 1 month of fees.
Maybe I don’t do edits as intensely as you do.
The free plan was perfectly adequate for the first year, then I explored the editors in the paid plan but found I got used to plain text much more so switched off all the add-ons. Was happy to compensate developers for a great app.
Forgotten password recovery is very simple:
Export an unencrypted backup on one device, delete the account from everywhere, recreate the account, reimport the backup.
Search in a single big list worked absolutely fine for me but maybe it’s just the way my brain works :-)
I didn’t notice much feature disparity but then again maybe I just like minimalism.
Same about the UI - it’s perfect. Very fast and no clutter.
Not sure what is absurd about their pricing. I paid the 5 year plan mainly as a token of thanks, because the app is absolutely perfect for my taste and use.
For example, as you detailed, there is a way to recover your password but you have to do all the steps manually (although I still don't know how you are going to delete your account without your password...).
> Same about the UI - it’s perfect.
I am curious as to how no context menu for notes makes for a perfect UI for you.
The point is of course there are workarounds and ways to make things work for you and that's okay for a free app. If you pay for a service, you want that service to do every thing you want because that's the whole point.
Context menu? Not sure what would I be using it for. But then again it’s my mode of operation.
I also have Simplenote, which also works well, but the e2e encryption (and lack of account recovery!) is what attracts me to standard note.
About the plan. The point is: the free plan is absolutely perfect for me, and I choose to pay just to say thanks for a great product.
The only thing missing for me is ability to see multiple accounts merged in a single UI - that would allow very easy sharing of notes.
For that I use iCloud or simplenote.
The refund process is not automatic either, be prepared for a back-and-forth with customer support if you want to cancel a subscription.
I mean, why should privacy be at such a huge risk to users' data?
For the tech savy, Notesnook offers account recovery by giving the user option (actual kind of forcing) to save the encryption key someplace safe. Not ideal, of course, but better than nothing.
> had they not saved it somewhere safe?
I had to delete 2 user accounts because they hadn't saved the key at all. All others had saved and were able to recover access. However, most didn't even realize they had saved it until I asked them to check their phone storage. A normal user would do anything to get past dialogs and popups, including clicking on random buttons.
1. Either the key is only as secure as what ever random online service you have it backed up on (in which case, it might as well be stored at SN and save the user all kinds of headaches)
2. The key isn't backed up, and this won't be realized until the worst possible time.
2. True but there are a couple of things you can do: i) regularly remind the user via email and in-app notification to backup their recovery key. ii) force the user to download/copy the recovery key on login/signup.
By force, I really do mean force. Don't let the user use the app until they click the download recovery key button.
> They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
You can't have both. If the service has account recovery after you lose your password or encryption keys, it can only mean that there is no any meaningful encryption. Just don't lose your passwords, it's quite simple these days with passwords managers.
Incorrect. Check Notesnook[1]. It solves both of those things.
Since the encryption key is basically derived from your password, Notesnook allows you to backup the encryption key.
This encryption key + a random salt is used to encrypt all the data client-side.
In case you forget your password but have the encryption key somewhere safe, you can easily use the encryption key to have your data decrypted.
Notesnook does the above by sending a recovery link to your email. After you click on the email, it authenticates you for a short period of time (30m) and shows the recovery UI. You can put your recovery key in the input. The app downloads the encrypted data from the server, decrypts using the key you gave, and if successful, asks you for a new password. Once you give the new password, it re-encrypts everything using the new encryption key.
All this happens in 2 steps. You can try it out yourself.
As I've said, you can't have both meaningful encryption (as in service operators can't decrypt data by themselves) and account recovery (as in you've lost credentials necessary to access account).
Uh...what? I think you misunderstood. You use the "password" to access your account, encryption key to decrypt the data. You lose the password, you lose access to your account and your data. However, server has the ability to grant you access to your account without the password. BUT Access is not equal to decryption of data.
The key that you have is used to decrypt your data on your device. The "service operator" is never involved in the decryption step; only the access step.
This is the only way to recover account access + data for zero knowledge apps. It is similar to the [backup data -> delete account -> create new account -> restore backup] process but it's automated and much more secure.
Oh so you need a safely stored key and your own device to decrypt data. Lol. Why do you say we need to use that service, if all is done on user's device?
but being serious, everything you say just proves my point, yet, somehow, you refuse to see it.
I actually like this. It's not a misfeature, but a feature. Too often email is a single point of failure and it's how the bulk of account takeover attacks happen. Compromise an email account, and you compromise every account attached to that email. Just don't forget your password to Standard Notes. Can't be hard right?
It's inconvenient and unnecessary. I don't get what can be so hard about just giving the user the encryption key. In the recovery flow you can just ask the user for the recovery key to decrypt the data and reset the password. That's how Notesnook does it. The email can never become a single point of failure like this.
If you can lose the password, what prevents you losing both the password and this secondary key at the same time? If you store them in separate places, then just store two copies of the original password in those two places.
1. Since it is longer, the user is forced to store it in a file or some other place
2. The message behind "recovery key" is different to the "password" so users react different to it. Giving it more value and attention.
3. Encryption keys are still rare in clients so it stands out and the user again gives it more attention.
With that said, it is entirely possible that the user won't save the key or lose it. In which case, nothing can be done.
It isn't an ideal solution to account recovery problem but so far I have found this to be the only solution if you are going the zero-knowledge route.
The link on your website under the end-to-end heading leads to the Privacy Policy, that only mentions "XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF & Argon2" which is far from enough details, especially for a closed source app with no audits.
From the names it sounds like you use libsodium, which is good, but it doesn't make rolling your own protocol safe.
I'll write up a doc on how encryption + syncing works though. And I have full plans to open source the security related parts of the app.
But yes, it would be nice to have a better rich text editor.
Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
That's awesome. I am glad you liked it!
> Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
The desktop apps are coming soon. You can track our roadmap on Github: https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/blob/main/ROADMAP...
What platform are you using Simplenote on? On macOS at least, you can write in Markdown and preview it with Cmd+Shift+P. Spellcheck also seems to work for me, but maybe that's a macOS thing and not specifically a Simplenote thing.
Disclosure: I work at Automattic, but not on Simplenote.
With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:
1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors.
2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.
3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.
4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).
5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there's no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.
5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.
6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there's not much you can do with them.
7. Their pricing seems absurd.
8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.
But as I said, it's not all bad. Most people won't notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.
If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It's not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.
[1]https://notesnook.com/
[2]https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/ (it's not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).