In his book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte outlines the four powerful characteristics/capabilities of a note-taking application; the ability to handle multimedia, informality, open-endedness, and to be action oriented.

He suggests several note-taking applications that provide those abilities. Evernote is mentioned, and that is one I used for many years. However, I have moved on to Joplin, which also provides those functionalities. I will discuss my observations of each as they apply to my use cases.

As an Evernote user, I grew increasingly frustrated with restrictions on the free tier and their inescapable limits on how I control my data. I also found that some of the advanced features available as part of an Evernote subscription weren’t as useful to me as I had hoped. As a result, I decided to search for an alternative that better suited my needs and privacy concerns out of the box. That’s when I discovered Joplin, a newer, open-source tool that is completely free to use and focuses on privacy and data control.

Evernote and Joplin are both note-taking and organization tools that allow users to save and organize notes, lists, images, and other types of content in a digital format. However, they have some key differences in terms of features, pricing, and user experience. Both Evernote and Joplin offer the ability to create and organize notes, add attachments, and access your notes from any device. They both also have a powerful search function.

I’m assuming you are aware of Evernote and are interested in learning more about Joplin. My comparison is by no means exhaustive and is somewhat biased towards the features I tend to like and use. Therefore, it is more of a reflection of my own experience. I clearly favor Joplin over Evernote for my use cases, which is why I switched. I hope my experience provides some insight to others.

Comparison of Features

Evernote is a subscription-based service with plans starting at $7.99 per month or $69.99 per year. It offers a wide range of features, including real-time collaboration and the ability to set reminders. However, Evernote only allows users to store their notes in Evernote cloud storage, and there have been some security and privacy concerns about user data in the past.

Joplin is a versatile note-taking application that allows users to store their data on various third-party cloud storage options¹Amazon S3, Box, OneDrive, and WebDav-compatible storage, including self-hosting with Nextcloud or ownCloud. For those who are interested in the self-hosted option, Joplin also offers a Docker-based dedicated Joplin Server that provides much faster syncing than WebDav² I have been using Joplin Server for over a year now. While Joplin Server may not be ideal for everyone, I enjoy the faster syncing compared to WebDav. If you already have Docker running on a host in your network, setting up Joplin Server only takes a few minutes and is well worth the effort if you are a regular note-takerReview of Joplin Sync Server.

Joplin is a note-taking application that supports markdown and many extended markdown features, such as Mermaid diagrams and the interpretation of a subset of HTML tags. It also offers vim and emacs key bindings and integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio Code as an external editor. This integration allows users to review their notes stored in Joplin without leaving VSCode. These features suggest that Joplin is geared towards a more technical audience than other note-taking applications like Evernote.

If you are already using Evernote and would like to explore the functionality of Joplin, this is easy and low-risk; Joplin has the ability to import Evernote data. This is a good way to trial Joplin without migrating away from Evernote and, like me, you may never look back.

Joplin has several built-in toggles for various markdown options. Many are enabled by default³Mermaid, Linkify, footnotes, table of contents, etc. however there are others⁴eg. subscript, superscript, markdown emojis, and Fountain syntax that can be enabled if needed. As mentioned in my previous article that included a discussion about Joplin, while these options can be useful if you are keeping your notes within Joplin, they can make your notes less portable to other editors that may not have the ability to recognise the extra formatting.

Outside of configuration settings, Joplin has a substantial and growing repository of plugins. While Joplin tends to use a little less storage and memory than Evernote, it’s worth considering that the plugins you install may flip this. I have not needed or used Joplin plugins so far, but if this changes I may review a few Joplin plugins in future posts.

Conclusion

Both Evernote and Joplin are useful note-taking and organisation tools, but each caters for a different type of user.

Evernote is a well-established commercial tool with a range of advanced collaboration features and a large user community. Its feature-set is geared for business-use. There is a limited free-tier that is enough for many users. However, you may find you need features via paid subscription, even so, Evernote locks you into their own storage option. There have also been some privacy concerns in the past with Evernote.

Joplin is a newer, open-source tool that is completely free to use and offers a focus on privacy and control over data. Meanwhile, the Joplin feature-set appears to be strongly geared toward technical users, providing technical integrations and options that are unavailable in Evernote, and because of this Joplin might be considered by some to have a somewhat steeper learning curve than Evernote, though this can depend on your background. I would not recommend Joplin to general users. It really is strongly geared for people engaging with a significant evergreen technical skillset.

In my personal experience, I found Joplin to be a better note-taking application for my use-cases due to its more technical feature-set, the focus on privacy and control over data, and its open-source nature and ability to integrate with Visual Studio Code, and broad selection of available plugins. However, Evernote may still be the better choice for users who need a more general purpose feature set geared towards team collaboration, and/or who are willing to pay for a subscription.