I am a paid subscriber but I am not happy with this at all. The mobile phone app is a pretty buggy, when I start typing in 1 place the cursor jumps to another. Copy/paste has also given me problems.
I do like that it encrypts locally on disk like it does in the cloud. Several other apps I've looked at has said at rest encryption isn't worth it, I guess arguing that users could use veracrypt or some other solution.
If I had to write a one sentence summary of Standard Notes it would be "An E2E encryption app first, a note taking app third".
In total agreement with this, the mobile app is another buggy victim of React Native. Plus I've had data loss on sync at least once, which has shattered my faith that their sync backend is reliable. It might have happened many more times and I'd have no way of knowing. I'm only subscribed at this point because I got an 80% discount a couple years ago. Do not use them if you value your data.
Exactly this. I use SN but I'm always looking for an alternative.
The mobile apps are very buggy and while the team tries to resolve issues, basic things should not be breaking occasionally. I want a notes app to just work.
Locally-encrypted, cloud-synced is sort of the sweet spot I find for Standard Notes, so I am a paid subscriber.
It is easy to use across different devices and operating systems, and they do a good job of continuing to give me access to my own information. (E.g. encrypted backups, ability to export notes).
I don't really use the myriad editor features, because if they do matter much, I'm using Emacs. So I suppose a decent small-Emacs type mode would be nice, like if there was the equivalent of Zile or something.
I would also love to be able to link across notes, wiki or Zettelkasten-style, but that has not been a priority of theirs to date. (I asked.) Too bad, that.
Man, there are like 1000 of these notes apps - they are all the same Notion-Roam-Evernote clone, they've all got dumbass startup logos plastered everywhere, 'made at MIT', youtube influencer quote cancer, and they all run the same shitty as fuck Electron.
My main issue is that they look ugly. They look like what I would get if I spent 3 minutes getting some robots from DALL-E without caring much about the result or refining the prompt.
No, they do not. They would have been much better without any images at all. The longer AI-generated images are around, the easier they are to spot, and the uglier they appear.
I would prefer to just see screenshots of the app instead of the AI generated art. It just feels like they had empty space to fill so they put some futuristic looking AI generated art.
For anyone using Standard Notes, how confident are you that syncing will always work and your data won't get lost?
I keep trying out new note apps and I keep coming back to Google Keep and Notion for exactly one reason: deleted data caused by bad syncing on buggy mobile apps.
Latest one I tried was Taskade, and I spent hours copying over all my notes. Then one app update later and the dreaded self-deleting data hits.
So I'm back to Notion again and very wary of wasting time trying out another notes app.
The reason I want to switch: Notion does too much and is slow on mobile. Google Keep is... Google. Plus it's missing a few features I want. Taskade was a great middle ground for me.
I have had data loss in the past, so "not confident at all" is my response.
The problem was I hadn't found any alternative that "just works", as in stores and syncs notes across all my devices without any hassle. I looked into Obsidian but their sync is a separate product that was a bit pricey at $96 a year. (I got a Standard Notes 5-year plan for $90 as part of a sale in 2019.) Might just move off at this point since I use SN every day by now and I can't stand the numerous UX issues anymore.
Note that with Obsidian you can roll your own sync. I set it up with Syncthing. However it's tricky to set up on Android and when I got a new phone I decided it wasn't worth the hassle to set up again.
When it did work though, it worked well. Maybe I should have another go.
At least standard notes produce conflicting copies when collisions occur. Obsidian simply overwrites the old with the new, which makes it completely unusable to me. This is a non-issue if you always have reliable internet connection, but that's not always the case in practice. I don't like the way standard notes handles it, but at least I've never lost any notes with them.
If you don’t mind it very simple, I’ve found SimpleNote to be pretty good over >10 years of use. However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss.
I have also had a couple instances of data loss in Notion, coming back from periods offline.
> However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss
Exactly the problem I'm talking about. I'll never use another note app that has this issue.
One of the main purposes of note taking apps is to quickly take down notes. If they can't handle that without losing data then the entire app is a failure, no matter how good the rest of it is.
It's like saying "yeah it's a great word processing app, the only problem is that it doesn't accept keyboard input".
It has daily email backups even in the free tier, that's good enough for me to soothe that particular anxiety. I've been using it for over a year with no issues (apart from the buggy mobile client as mentioned on another comment).
The issue with Taskade (and another similar app I tried a few years ago, the name escapes me) was that it tries to sync while I am creating a new note and then deletes everything I've just typed.
This only happens on the mobile app but it's exactly the same problem with two separate apps so I guess it must be common.
Someone below just mentioned that Simple Notes has the same issue, so that's 3 examples.
Obsidian has been my local editor of choice for a while, as more-or-less the closest thing to what Ulysses used to be before it got turned into a subscription app and nigh-abandoned at the same time.
Yes, Obsidian seemed quite good, but after trying it for a while, I found the text formatting too clumsy for handy use. I'm trying out Trilium now, and really like it. Especially good is really easy text/table/formula formatting, that it really is local, and local encryption, with cloud services optional (which Obsidian also has).
I asked once about this - there's IIRC an alternative editor that supports this on desktop, but I'd like it generally.
I think some of this comes from some people making really long notes, and some people not - I remember a precursor note-taking app having a broken in-note search function as well, and when I reported it the developer said something to the effect that it's not a valid use case...
I hope they figure it out eventually - pasting notes into sublime text just to do a search is a bit silly ...
(The developers generally are pretty helpful and earnest about their app, I've been a paying customer for a few years now and am happy with the app for the largest part)
Same. I got into the workflow of copy/pasting long notes into TextEdit so I could ctrl-F normally. It began to feel so outrageous that I was paying for a text editor and had to resort to a workflow involving a second text editor for a fundamental text editor function that I finally came to my senses, exported my notes, imported them into Obsidian, deleted Standard Notes and never looked back.
While I agree with you on the price hike, you can always ask Standard Notes for a discounted subscription if you mail them directly or see my username.
Readit News
I do like that it encrypts locally on disk like it does in the cloud. Several other apps I've looked at has said at rest encryption isn't worth it, I guess arguing that users could use veracrypt or some other solution.
If I had to write a one sentence summary of Standard Notes it would be "An E2E encryption app first, a note taking app third".
Don’t leave us hanging on the second!
…Is it written in a cross platform framework?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197613
The mobile apps are very buggy and while the team tries to resolve issues, basic things should not be breaking occasionally. I want a notes app to just work.
It is easy to use across different devices and operating systems, and they do a good job of continuing to give me access to my own information. (E.g. encrypted backups, ability to export notes).
I don't really use the myriad editor features, because if they do matter much, I'm using Emacs. So I suppose a decent small-Emacs type mode would be nice, like if there was the equivalent of Zile or something.
I would also love to be able to link across notes, wiki or Zettelkasten-style, but that has not been a priority of theirs to date. (I asked.) Too bad, that.
Make it stop.
Deleted Comment
I keep trying out new note apps and I keep coming back to Google Keep and Notion for exactly one reason: deleted data caused by bad syncing on buggy mobile apps.
Latest one I tried was Taskade, and I spent hours copying over all my notes. Then one app update later and the dreaded self-deleting data hits.
So I'm back to Notion again and very wary of wasting time trying out another notes app.
The reason I want to switch: Notion does too much and is slow on mobile. Google Keep is... Google. Plus it's missing a few features I want. Taskade was a great middle ground for me.
The problem was I hadn't found any alternative that "just works", as in stores and syncs notes across all my devices without any hassle. I looked into Obsidian but their sync is a separate product that was a bit pricey at $96 a year. (I got a Standard Notes 5-year plan for $90 as part of a sale in 2019.) Might just move off at this point since I use SN every day by now and I can't stand the numerous UX issues anymore.
When it did work though, it worked well. Maybe I should have another go.
I have also had a couple instances of data loss in Notion, coming back from periods offline.
Exactly the problem I'm talking about. I'll never use another note app that has this issue.
One of the main purposes of note taking apps is to quickly take down notes. If they can't handle that without losing data then the entire app is a failure, no matter how good the rest of it is.
It's like saying "yeah it's a great word processing app, the only problem is that it doesn't accept keyboard input".
This only happens on the mobile app but it's exactly the same problem with two separate apps so I guess it must be common.
Someone below just mentioned that Simple Notes has the same issue, so that's 3 examples.
I think some of this comes from some people making really long notes, and some people not - I remember a precursor note-taking app having a broken in-note search function as well, and when I reported it the developer said something to the effect that it's not a valid use case...
I hope they figure it out eventually - pasting notes into sublime text just to do a search is a bit silly ...
(The developers generally are pretty helpful and earnest about their app, I've been a paying customer for a few years now and am happy with the app for the largest part)
For simple notes, bold, underline, and monospaced styles might be enough (think Apple Notes or even simpler).