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!
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!
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).
Probably Nextcloud
I love Nextcloud but it’s such a beast to setup
Filen, German OpenSource cloud service, 10 GB for free
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.
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: "
More reliable syncing and sharing
Syncing and sharing have been made more robust in everyday use. Joplin now handles repeated syncs more efficiently, avoids unnecessary data usage, and is better at detecting and syncing all changes, particularly when using WebDAV and S3 sync targets."
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.
I’ve been using a self-hosted Jotty instance, it’s been pretty great!
Anytype is nice.
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to find anytype
not (completely) open source but signal has a “note to self” function i use for that
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.
notesnook
You can self host Anytype. It looks like notion, but is FOSS and total under your control.
Isn’t anytype source available
I found the best option markdown on my pc and a notepad outside.
Check out Silverbullet.md
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.
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.
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.
At some point you might want to print your notes, publish them on the web, or share them with people not using Org. Org can convert and export documents to a variety of other formats while retaining as much structure (see Document Structure) and markup (see Markup for Rich Contents) as possible.
The libraries responsible for translating Org files to other formats are called backends. Org ships with support for the following backends:
ascii (ASCII format)
beamer (LaTeX Beamer format)
html (HTML format)
icalendar (iCalendar format)
latex (LaTeX format)
md (Markdown format) odt (OpenDocument Text format) org (Org format) texinfo (Texinfo format) man (Man page format)
Users can install libraries for additional formats from the Emacs packaging system. For easy discovery, these packages have a common naming scheme: ox-NAME, where NAME is a format. For example, ox-koma-letter for koma-letter backend. More libraries can be found in the ‘org-contrib’ repository (see Installation).
Org only loads backends for the following formats by default: ASCII, HTML, iCalendar, LaTeX, and ODT. Additional backends can be loaded in either of two ways: by configuring the org-export-backends variable, or by requiring libraries in the Emacs init file. For example, to load the Markdown backend, add this to your Emacs config:
(require 'ox-md)
https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html
There you go, maybe try reading a bit about the thing before commenting on it?
It’s remarkable how you continue to trudge ahead while being objectively wrong about everything. Your opinion is absurd, and everything you cited is incongruous to the discussion. Try saying anything in any way relevant next time. Again, not sorry in the slightest.
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.
