Note taking app that I can link between my laptop and phone ?
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Hey everyone, I'm trying to replace most of the private owned app I use by FOSS ones, and today i'm pointing at notion.
I just use it as a way to organize my notes and use it both on my laptop and phone, and i'm looking for something that can have that fonctionnality.
I've already looked into a bunch of foss note taking apps but I didn't see any that could do it. (maybe i didn't look hard enough tho)
I'm willing to use syncthing or smth similar if needed.
do you have any recommendations?
anyway, have a nice day and thanks to everyone making the internet/softwares more libre and accessible!
The inbuild notes in the Vivaldi browser (Markdown) are synced between Desktop and Mobile, no third party app needed.
Joplin can sync between phone and laptop with a number of network storage options
https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/sync/
or you can self-host Joplin server.
https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/packages/server/README.md
EDIT: I am going to edit this to reflect that I HAVE NOT tried Joplin 3.5 which says: "
Until I have new data I will scratch this out:
In Joplin, I have never been able to successfully use an s3 instance with two or more joplin clients. It corrupts eventually. This is using a bucket for storage directly, not WebDAV.From my research the best bet is self host, webdav, or some kind of file sync
That's weird... I've been using S3 to sync Joplin between Linux and Android without corruption issues for more than a year now.
Looks like you are lucky so far. It is still in beta and not considered a full fledged part of Joplin, they have told me as much.
I admit I havetn't tried in the last six months. I think I might, the release notes for January 2026 say they improved sync.
I also was using 3 clients, so maybe I hit it faster. Maybe 2 is ok.
yeah I use webdav on my home NAS with just one phone and one laptop. probably going to self-host serve so I can do shared notes with the Baroness.
Joplin. I use it on my phone, multiple laptops and Linux desktops.
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Do you ever regret that Joplin does not store notes in plain text? (meaning you couldn't edit your notes in a plain text editor if you wanted to)
Nope not a bit. But you mean through exporting stuff I assume(?).
If for any reason I need to move something to a text file (very rare) then I just cut/copy and paste without the MD.
I just meant like if Joplin ever stopped working or vanished overnight. I know it might seem like a contrived scenario, but I've always been a little skittish about apps that don't store files in plain text in case I want/need to use a different editor. Sounds like that hasn't been an issue for you, though, which is cool.
I also second this. Working like a charm for me over 4 different devices and 3 different Operating systems.
obsidian is not FOSS BTW
Sadly, because honestly, all the FOSS options that are mentioned in this thread don't even compare to how snappy, useful and expandable Obsidian is 😭
fully agree but the head coder is aggressively anti-foss on mastodon and I don't like that. trilium is a decent alternative but it doesn't have a phone app, and no not triliumnext.
Joplin. It’s cross platform and just works. No hassle.
notesnook
I use Joplin through some WebDAV with my cloud provider, kDrive.
Works perfectly once set up.
I don’t know if you could make it work directly from your phone to your computer though.
Notesnook should do it! It has a premium monthly subscription thing that gives you some extra functionality, but the free version does sync automatically between devices. I've been using it for a year now myself and have had no complaints.
Is there something wrong with Standard Notes that I should be aware of? It hasn't been mentioned here. It has the AES-256 encryption standard, there is a free tier, it's open source and it undergoes regular security audits.
I've never used it, but I've heard good things about Notesnook.
Been using Notesnook for almost 3 years now and it's just awesome. Highly recommend!
Anytype is nice.
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far to find anytype
Syncthing and Org Mode.
Org-mode is especially great for people who like branchy outlines as their notes. It allows to jot down a note quickly and to move them around in the tree as the heart desires. I have thousands upon thousands of notes, mostly short one- or two-sentence long.
Plus both Emacs and Orgzly allow some programmatic fiddling with the notes.
The downside is that copying anything with links or formatting out of Org requires converting its markup to Markdown or whatever.
The downside is that copying anything with links or formatting out of Org requires converting its markup to Markdown or whatever.
The upside is by default org mode can export to markdown, and with Pandoc installed you can basically export to any file type known to humanity.
Firstly, I don't need my entire four-thousand-notes file be exported to Markdown.
Secondly, that doesn't mean that if Org used Markdown, exporting would be impossible.
Copying from Org is objectively bothersome, because Org's markup format is only used in Org and nowhere else.
It objectively isn't bothersome, it only takes a handful of keystrokes to export to markdown or to any other format you want.
I am sorry complaining about Org mode's markdown format not being used elsewhere is absurd given how many extensibly options there are for Emacs built in even without adding in anything custom.
No, the org mode file format is the most extensible, open, powerful file format for primarily text based notes ever made. You are simply wrong here, I am sorry.
There are also apps that directly use the org mode file format such as Orgzly, Beorg and Orgro.
You're objectively wrong there, sorry not sorry.
https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html
There you go, maybe try reading a bit about the thing before commenting on it?
I'm using Logseq and it's the least bad of the FOSS options I tried so far.
I see Logseq recommended a lot, but does it still try to force you to use bullet lists only?
Yes, basically. Fits my workflow as I usually use bullet lists anyway. You can hide the bullet points and have it be just blocks, in the backend (MD file) it's still bullets though.
Its crazy, with a complete fresh install and 0 notes, this application takes half a gig of memory and is constantly making the CPU work, when it's just running, not even being used?
I think its wild that it hogs resources like this for a text editor 😅
Yeah, one of my issues with it. It's a browser app in a non-browser corset, like so many modern "apps"...
not (completely) open source but signal has a "note to self" function i use for that
I've set up Joplin with Syncthing and it's been working for me.
Putting in another recommendation for Notesnook.
The android app is busted for me. I've uninstalled and reinstalled and it will not let me login or load anything at all.
https://silverbullet.md/
It's like obsidian (I hear) but FOSS. I love it and it's by far the self hosted service I use most.
It stores your notes in a plain directory hierarchy of markdown files so you can just point a cron shell script at it to git add/commit/push at your desired internal and you've got history tracking/backups too
Edit: also provides a PWA so you can "install" it on your phone instead of always using a full browser.
Edit x2: includes a Lua interpreter so you can get scripty with it. I use that functionality more than I expected and I suck at Lua
Edit x3: and it auto synchs to each device when open with conflict detection. Full copy is stored local to each device, synched when possible
Lol
I just researched PWAs with this article.
Now you are telling me silverbullet(.md)
Hehe. So PWAs aren't a silver bullet but Silverbullet can be a PWA.
Is that one of those "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares" type things?
Any examples of what you're doing with scripts? I use some custom programming in Org-mode in Emacs, but curious about what other people are doing in different apps.
The two biggest things I use it for are programmatically generating "lists of lists" (lists of pages, more accurately) and as a semi-hacky way to get text colors. Semi-related, the "Treeview" plugin gives you a folder hierarchy panel off to the left (by default) which is really, really nice.
I should probably clarify that I didn't write these, I stole them from the Silverbullet community forums... also I should reiterate that I suck at Lua so take my explanations with a grain of "this person may not know what they're talking about" ; )
Lists of Lists :
I have a bad memory so I create a LOT of lists. I even have a base page named "Lists" that I then nest different types of lists under (TODOs for home, for work, for school, for projects, for selfhosting, etc). Since the table is programmatically generated, it's always up to date on each load. This first snippet relies on using
frontmatteron the respective pages along with thetagsproperty.lua ${query[[ from index.tag "todolist" order by lastModified desc select { List="[[" .. _.name .. "]]", Modified=_.lastModified } ]]}This retrieves all pages from the space index with a tag of
todolist(from thefrontmatter), orders them bylastModified, descending, and renders a table that contains thenameandlastModifieddate. This is excellent for providing a list of pages (based on tag,todolistin this case) related to a topic and ordering them by the last time they were changed. I use this in the base page for pretty much all of my "folders". Screenshot :Text Color Hack :
Since the Silverbullet markdown interpreter doesn't (currently) support plain HTML, and the way we usually color specific areas of text within Markdown is
<span style="color: #fff">white text</span>, they had to get inventive. Somebody came up with a way to provide Lua functions that will accept text as a parameter and then render it with the specified HTML color/style.In my

CONFIGpage (that is applied to the entire space) I included aspace-luacode block like :lua function Red(text) return widget.html(dom.span { style="color:#e60000; font-weight: bold;", text }) end // Also about 5 more for different colors I use, snipped for simplicity.Then, anywhere in my Silverbullet space I can use a Lua code snippet like
The following word is ${Red("red")}and it will invoke the space-lua function namedRed()on the textred, apply the styling, and render it with CSS color#e60000. Hacky? Yeah... but it works for now. Screenshot :... I've been meaning to build a generic
Colorize(text, hexColor)function (which would likely take all of 30 seconds : ) but haven't yet. Maybe tonight.EDIT: That did, in fact, take 30 seconds.
Function :
lua // This assume "color" parameter is a valid/properly formatted CSS color, meaning a known word ("red"), hex ("#ff0000"), or presumably RGB/etc but so far I've only tested color names and hex (I typically use hex) function Colorize(text, color) return widget.html(dom.span { style=string.format("color:%s; font-weight: bold;", color), text }) endUsage :
${Colorize("any text", "#00ff00")}Interesting, thanks. This Silverbullet thing turned out to be more complex than I originally imagined, I thought it's a hierarchical notes app as usual.
I'm the same way, but that led me to Org-mode with local files (synced to the phone) and loads of nested outlines, like thousands of items.
But since it's programmed in Emacs Lisp, I've made me some custom commands like logging taken medicine with the current time and date, adding an episode to the log of series watched, etc. I also plan on hacking together a brother extension that would send the page title and address to one of specific places in the outlines, but I keep putting that off.
Yeah, at the core it's just a hierarchy of directories/markdown files with a WYSIWYG/autorender web editor but then they kept adding more and more fancy stuff : )
What also works is using SyncThing. That way you can sync any app that uses files that you want. I use Obsidian for note taking which creates .MD files in a designated folder, I sync that folder with my phone.
Standard Notes
Actually, you can use Signal for this, if you have it on both your phone and laptop, and use "note to self." I prefer this because it's very straightforward and isn't bogged down with a lot of extraneous extra features that other notetaking apps I've tried tend to have.
You can self host Anytype. It looks like notion, but is FOSS and total under your control.
Isn't anytype source available
Seems to be the case:
https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme
https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-kotlin?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme
The sync server is MIT though: https://github.com/anyproto/any-sync?tab=MIT-1-ov-file#readme
Interesting.
Obsidian + Syncthing has been working prefectly for several years now for me, across Windows, Android and Linux.
Obsidian is not open-source...
Could look into self hosting an Obsidian Sync server, see this blog:
https://pinggy.io/blog/self_hosting_obsidian/
Obsidian - https://obsidian.md/
edit: And you can obviously do it without pinggy's tunnel for remote access.
I just syncthing the obsidian vault, works for me...
Honestly most of my notes are just text files describing the installation process saved together with the installation files in a folder on my NAS. Not much of a note taker outside of that. I've heard many enjoy Obsidian though. :)
That (folder with files) is pretty much what an obsidian vault is, except it's markdown files (of which text files are a subset). Should just import in with zero issues.
Ah, I should've clarified - my notes are all over the place as "README"s or "INSTALL GUIDE"s in different folders together with the files needed to do the install in question. :)
I had problems with it creating new notes all the time. Glad it worked for you but I moved to Joplin
Currently using siyuan. Just wish you could use the app with a self hosted instance.
Do you have to pay for sync?
Yeah
I'm using the web interface through VPN usually. Not optimal for offline use ofc
I use Notesnook, but as an alternative to Notion and more complex features, it's way too simple.
I use Notesnook and I'm happy with it. They have a flagship instance with free accounts if you don't want to self-host.
If you want something more lightweight and are up for using syncthing, just a bunch of markdown files synced with syncthing also works. You can encrypt them with your pgp key if you want encryption, but that doesn't encrypt metadata like file names, directory structure, or when files were last edited.
Syncthing has encryption as well. You can have a device be "untrusted" so you put in an encryption password, and data sent to and stored on that device will be encrypted.
Although this does encrypt file (and directory) names, the caveats about folder structure and modification time still apply.
I’ve been using a self-hosted Jotty instance, it’s been pretty great!
https://jotty.page/
I spun up a test, and it doesn't let you edit encrypted notes
:(. It's so nice though, I might be willing to give it up e2ee for less sensitive data.I found the best option markdown on my pc and a notepad outside.
Check out Silverbullet.md
Probably Nextcloud
Setting up nextcloud for notes is, to take a quote from the late Robin Williams, like doing chemo cause you're tired of shaving your head.
I love Nextcloud but it's such a beast to setup
Filen, German OpenSource cloud service, 10 GB for free
either you selfhost with docker.
Or you have some php webspace where you have to run an setup-nextcloud.php
In both ways it simply works. For a small instance with no special need the webinstaller is enougth. (I use it that way)
I am currently in the process of migrating my Google Keep notes over to a self hosted instance of La Suite Docs. It sounds like a big Google Docs alternative, but feels way more like a notes app.
I've been using Zettle Notes with syncthing for a few years now. It syncs with my laptop as just a directory of markdown files that I also edit with Vim (plenty of good plugins like Vim wiki).