I have both on iOS and I have to say I much prefer Obsidian.

Although Joplin is FOSS, Obisian uses plain text files rather than a database which is a massive plus to me, personally.

Also, Obsidian UI is light-years ahead of Joplin's. It's interesting that (IIUC) Obsidian is also not native but it feels completely native when compared to Joplin.

Also most Obsidian plugins work fine on desktop and mobile and the ecosystem is visibly growing. I don't think Joplin's plugins are really getting a huge traction.

All in all, Obsidian replaced most other apps I used (Bear, Noteplan, Evernote). The only thing I can imagine replacing Obsidian is LogSeq if they get their mobile app right.

Do you have any tips for making Obsidian function like Noteplan? I'm out of the iOS/Mac ecosystem but love how it works.

I use a few plugins to manage tasks:

- "Calendar" to organise daily notes (my "inbox")

- "Tasks" and "Rollover Daily Todos"

- "Checklist" for a unified todo view

"Day Planner" seems cool, but I haven't played with it.

Unfortunately Obsidian cannot replace apps like Agenda or noteplan for me, because it doesn't sync with external calendars. I still use it for most stuff though.

Thank you! These look great, will tinker with these over the weekend.

This post may be of interest: https://axle.design/why-and-how-to-use-obsidian-and-noteplan...

Appreciate it, thank you! I'm looking for Obsidian to be more of a replacement to Noteplan though.

I used it for a while and switched to obsidian.

Some reasons:

- Joplin doesn’t save plain Markdown, you can‘t just edit/view your files with alternative editors easily

- Creating and organizing notes feels less smooth for me

- navigating between notes is not so easy

- you can’t write #tags inside your text and it just works

- plug-ins and configuration is stored inside the vault, if you sync the vault, you have all the plugins everywhere

What I liked better in Joplin:

- 2 Levels (or panels) of organizing notes, instead of just one tree view in obsidian. Like every email client or file manager does it (one panel with folder tree, another panel with all elements inside)

- possibility to custom order inside notebooks (but I didn’t work well)

> Joplin doesn’t save plain Markdown, you can‘t just edit/view your files with alternative editors easily

It saves files to Markdown, and on right click, you can 'external edit' with your favorite text editor, which you have configured ahead of time in the settings.

It works. But it’s not easy to use.

After finishing the edit, you need to press another button inside Joplin, to import the changes you made. Doesn’t work automatically.

You can only edit single files like that. If the file contains links to other notes, they are not resolvable.

It is not possible to just create some Md files and let Joplin index them and watch them for updates.

There is a hotfolder plug-in, but it only imports those files and then deletes them.

Yeah, I've used both. I think the main things that Obsidian does better are its UI (which is pretty good, some annoyances around creating new notes and managing folder structure), and the fact that its notes are one-to-one with actual .md files on disk.

In comparison, Joplin keeps its notes in a more opaque format, where the notes database is a bunch of files with garbage filenames and so on... and the UI is, er... functional.

I've been trying to switch away from Obsidian to Joplin though, because Obsidian is payware (with add-on subscription services available too!) and Joplin is simply open source.

The website says it’s free for personal use. Is there a bait-and-switch somewhere?

Just to clarify the license:

- The desktop, mobile, cli apps and clipper are open source. They can all sync for free with any of the supported services - Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, Nextcloud, WevDAV and the file system (some people use SyncThing). All this will always be free and open source.

- Joplin Server is free for personal use, so you can self host it. It was MIT originally, but I had to change to a more restrictive license because companies were selling access to it and I don't think it was fair that I do the work for free, and all they have to do is run `docker-compose start` and sit there and make a profit. But if it's for yourself, family or friends then it's free and will remain so.

They are just selling their own sync option. Since Obsidian store all the notes as plain markdown files on disk you can just use another sync option like Dropbox or even git.

Or SyncThing (but download SyncTrayzor to make using SyncThing easy)

I’m looking for a note taking app that does iOS<—>Linux syncing. Joplin seems to be able to do it via Dropbox.

No. Joplin can sync using different ways and backend (webdav etc). It has also crypto and wysiwyg editor AND versioning. It's the definitive personal wiki on all platform. It has also a terminal gui LOL

not as far as I know. I've been using it for over a year and think that there's a free way to do everything on your own, and the devs and mods even help out on Discord for people to set it up. You can pay for the Sync or hosting service, but everything is optional since there are plenty of other options.

After what feels like trying every note tool under the sun. I’ve been using Joplin 3 years now and won’t leave if I can help it. Why pay Obsidian $4/month, when Joplin is free and open source, can sync, has a desktop App for every OS, has a mobile app, encryption at rest, and I can contribute to it?

It's only $4 a month if you want to use their sync, there is a plugin for using github to sync (if that is your thing) or I just use syncthing and have my obsidian folder there.

Edit: Actually, I guess that won't work with mobile

It works fine with mobile if you're on Android. I use Nextcloud to sync as well as git for versioning.

But syncthing would probably be the easiest option for this!

There's Syncthing for Android if you look in F-Droid, at least. Plus a fork with some Android specific tweaks

If obsidian really hits it off, maybe there will be an open source clone once, that is compatible with Obsidian’s plugin ecosystem.

I tried both and went with Joplin - it was a while ago and I can't remember exactly why, sorry. Import from EverNote would have been a factor (Obsidian may have this too?) as well as being FOSS. I use my notes as a personal knowledge base more than note taking so I have a lot of clipped web pages and linked notes so it could be that Joplin just suits my use case better. Obsidian didn't leave me with strong negative feelings just didn't fit what I wanted to do. Hope this helps.

I’ve used Joplin for obsessive note taking for a couple years now and am happy with it (after trying every other tool I could find). It lets me sync with my standard sync tools and being FOSS I know it won’t end up being a paid app down the track or get bought out and ruined.

Obsidian does have a slightly nicer UI and some nice features Joplin doesn’t have but I think the former points are way more important.

I am a big fan of Joplin and a plugin advocate for enabling features like Backlinks. The best plugin IMHO is the Rich Markdown plugin.

Here's a list in case anyone is curious what is available. https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-list/17671

I tried both and stuck with Joplin. I like the database since I can write tooling for it more easily, and have written an exporter to create a static site for my Joplin notes:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/

I also like how it easily syncs with NextCloud and works well.

I stuck with Joplin, because it is FOSS and not much worse than Obsidian.

I actually like Obsidian more and I would be glad to pay the price. My problem is that it now runs well, uses compatibile formats, is actively maintained - but who knows how will it be 10 years from now? Having the whole of my bibliography locked in in Mendeley was not a great experience.

I started using it - not bad since it stores the data in .md files + offers various export formats. Works fine on Linux and Android. My wishlist would be a more polished Android client, ability to synchronize immediately using iNotify and ability to designate a notebook/page as "main"/"default" and a button to jump to that from anywhere.

I've been using Joplin heavily for a few months. That is likely to come to an end, though, as it hasn't been syncing to OneDrive properly. Some notes simply will not sync even if I click the button manually. Then there's the web clipper that has stopped working. And a variety of other small issues. I was really happy with it for a while.

I has been using Joplin for a while with OneDrive syncing. The only way I found to keep Joplin synced with OneDrive is set the folder in your computer to keep it local as possible. Right click the folder (the Joplin folder) in OneDrive and click "Always keep on this device". So this way it will be less sync issues.

With this option enabled, it kept my Joplin synced across five devices without issues and all of them have this option enabled. My Joplin have 5-seconds delay of syncing between devices. I have about 100 notes/subnotes, I'm not sure if the amount of notes is a factor of syncing issues.

I wonder if Obsidian allows sharing of particular (folders of) notes. Joplin does not (you can only share, by syncing, your whole database, but I just want to share some notes. Can't find any reference with either tool right now to sharing.

With Joplin Server you can publish a note to a URL, or share notebooks with other users on the server. It works with Joplin Server, which can be self-hosted, or the upcoming Joplin Cloud, which is essentially a managed hosting version of Joplin Server.

I used to use Joplin, nothing wrong with it, but I found Obsidian via HN a while back, and it just kinda clicked for me.

With the plugins and bits now, its really quite nice - and personally I find the UI much nicer than Joplin

Lost data with Joplin from weird sync and encryption issues so tried Obsidian.

Within a few days I'd paid for VIP and now subscribe to sync too.

It's fantastic especially with the plug-ins.

Does allows you to Visualize the links between notes? That's one powerful feature where Obsidian seems to be clearly dominating.

For Joplin, the Link Graph plugin does this - https://github.com/treymo/joplin-link-graph#link-graph-ui-fo...