Back in June I evaluated various note taking apps and eventually settled on Joplin. After 6 months of frequent usage I thought a full post-mortem was in order.

Usage Background

I used Joplin for about anything the average person uses their Notes app for or would want to write in a Notebook.

Eg:

• Budgeting (mostly tables entered as Markdown)
• Development notes (deep nested folders, mostly raw text with code formatting blocks)
• Running (times tracked as text (I track workouts in a separate Google Sheet))
• Video games (scratch notes usually as WYSIWG)
• Recipes (structured lists with occasional images)
• Shopping list (checkable list)

Pros

• Infinitely nest-able notebooks
  • At first I anticipated only needing 1 or 2 layers, but the extra has been nice for some additional structure
• Clean UI
• WYSIWG and Markdown support
  • A lot of note apps aimed towards developers seem to brag about not having a WYSIWG, but I actually quite like for a variety of applications since when I am making a shopping list I don't want to have to type [x]

Cons

• Syncing was buggy
  • The iOS app has no background sync. Meaning when I first opened the app on my phone I'd have to wait for a sync to complete before I could change anything. After that I had to wait for a sync to finish before I could close the app.

Going Forward

About 2 months ago, I switched from Joplin to Notion (my initial 2nd place choice). I still stand by the fact that there are minor annoyances and Notion does more than I need it to, but the inconvenience of editing via the app was enough to make Joplin a chore. I also initially needed an app that was cross platform with Linux, Mac, and iOS but I recently switched my personal laptop from a Thinkpad running Ubuntu to an M1 Mac (which I plan on covering in a post).