Evernote is forcing AI on people and as a result more than tripling its price when people's subscriptions come up for renewal. For those of us who have been using it as a second brain for many years, this is a painful move.
I personally understand hardly any of this tech vocab below, but a summary of casual chats on it in the Signal group is as follows:
Obsidian: Free, markdown files, local-first approach. Not open source . Plenty of plug ins. Can be used for research and notes. Can do a lot of what Notion does. Good web clipper. Bases (Each base can have several views with different layouts such as tables and cards). For a solo user that doesn’t need collaboration features, it works. You can pay for their sync feature using Google Drive or Apple iCloud. You can also use Syncthing to mirror devices. But this does not allow for collaboration. Highly customizable. The entire catalog is in markdown file format and would be easy to integrate into another system if you want to move your notes one day.
Be aware of scammers targeting users through LinkedIn/Telegram to open new shared vaults, so be aware of this and be circumspect about interactions on social media.
Joplin: Free and open source. A core plugin that lets you create database-like views of your notes. Using a base you can view, edit, sort, and filter files and their properties. Bases can help you organize everything from projects to travel plans, reading lists, and more.
Notion: "an AI Everywhere brand". App works on its own but you can sync either to their or self hosted cloud server. There is a forum post on the self host instance a while ago.
Zettlr is FOSS (no mobile app, you can use Syncthing to sync the folder all notes are in, and view/edit on Android phone with Markor (FOSS and iirc available on F-Droid). All stays 100% local. Backup solution??
Anytype (anytype.io). Similar to Obsidian and Notion but local/offline (I think this is the same thing?) but someone has "had some success with storing it on Apple iCloud" so potential to figure out self-hosting. They have a free tier as well as paid tiers, and collaboration is possible as well (not sure if collaboration free or paid).
Microsoft OneNote works well but Microsoft 365 has regular subscription increases, though less than Evernote is planning to charge. And there may be a need to check if it scrapes your data for AI training and whether there is an opt out. And whether this is a private enough service to satisfy people.
LogSec?
Standard Notes?
Markdown?
Workflowy?
No idea what I will go with, I basically just want something that works just like Evernote and will sync across Android and desktop, though I would be happy with it only syncing when I am at home. Hopefully people will continue to discuss here.
