Obsidian vs. Joplin vs. Notion vs. Evernote vs. OneNote vs. Apple Notes

In this "unscripted" LowEndBoxTV episiode, @raindog308 makes an in-depth comparison of these popular personal information management tools.
Learn
- Why he loves Notion...and cried when he had to let it go
- Why some products feel more future-proof than the others
- Which product's logo he has on a T-shirt
- Which product may have been named after a secret order of intelligence operatives (but actually...or is it allegedly?!?...was not)
Special guest star: Steve Martin's stunt double.
Shout out to From Sergio and his Obsidian content:
• Why you NEED to learn ...
Enjoy this episode, and if you do, please remember to subscribe!
www.lowendbox.com
www.lowendtalk.com

[@papisabroso9774]

I tried all these options, and the final chose was Apple Pages (yes, the equivalent to Microsoft World or LibreOffice Write). Because is more friendly to make a personalized page and put notes, audio, videos, etc. Is not perfect, of course, but can be sync with other dispositive and event the web. And the equivalen to 'link' documents is the 'bookmark' option so I make one page with quickly and very resumed version of a topic, and in other page put a complete an detailed explanation of the same topic. Very useful to study and make study cards

[@francoismongeau2687]

My first time on your channel. Thanks for sharing this great video !

[@jean-marcvilarroya8026]

very good presentation. It has been vey useful for me. I was hesitant between Obsidian and Joplin. I am going for Obsidian. Thank you.

[@anispinner]

The only part I didn't like was the overlapping music. It's distracting. Other than that, thank you.

[@davefink2326]

Evernote is like the cushy Cadillac, loaded with accessories, yet can’t make it out of the garage.

[@NathanYount]

I would agree I was very disappointed with the features and had sync issues, limited functionality, and spent way too much time setting it up based on many limitations.

[@alexandrumacedon291]

I tried all, i chose onenote, i use it for a year now, i like that i can put my text wherever i want, put images where i want, nothing has to be alligned to left or whatever, you can make a box of text where you want, use whatever font you want colors and lots of stuff. stored locally, you can always move them to other pc's. it's just easier to take notes instead of focusing on markdown, or the fact that u cant arrange things as you want, like in obsidian where everything goes line by line. you cant have text on the left and picture on the right.

[@John7No]

how do you export notes? the infinite plane of Onenote make it easy to. put everything everywhere , but when I try to export something I end up spending hours and hours to rearrange things in order to be able to export them somehow. That is one of my problems with Onenote and why I stopped using it. Also no export in a decent format to share with someone else that does not have Onenote.

[@alexandrumacedon291]

@@John7No i dont know about what infinite plane you are talking about. i copy the folder where i have my notes to whatever computer i need then after installing onenote i point it to that direction in settings where it asks u for your notebook location. there is one more setting u have to change, the one for your quick notes, and thats it. at least how i did it

[@John7No]

@@alexandrumacedon291 I mean that Onenote does not restrict how much is the length or width of the note "page". It is not restricted like other note app, eg you have a specific width of the page and then you scroll down. It has a "canvas" that you can place notes etc however you like, and there seems to not be any limits to its width and length. The export was how do you do it when you want to share it with people that don't have Onenote.

[@alexandrumacedon291]

@@John7No i see what you mean, yeah, you can arrange things how you want in onenote yeah, one of the things i like a lot. you can export the whole notebook or individual pages as pdf. you can also export as single file web page but when i tried it now it doesnt show the pictures. but pdf works fine u can open a pdf with ur browser so anyone should be able to see it

[@mikael5743]

I love this video format

[@mayurraja8479]

Really good presentation. Thank you.

[@thisplayer01]

thanks for the clear positioning info and valuable insights - helpful for me!

[@furkanozcan77]

Thanks for the comparison, just enough coverage and narrated in a grownup yet non-boring fashion

[@jonbiloh5888]

Very informative!

[@user-ue4ye3ge6w]

Whoa - Greatly appreciated! Evernote just proces themselves out of a user and I'm going to try the Obsidian path it appears! Thanks for your review if the products you touched on . Seems like I have a project at hand to move a lot (TONS) of notes. 😊

[@alexander_skachkov5432]

Thanks for the video! I was just thinking of trying Joplin and wanted to find out what there is and which one is better. About obsidian, only one thing is confusing, it's a pity that there is no portable version, but I would try it. So I'll try to get used to joplin.

[@b_____d]

Thanks! Your video helped me choose. Finally!

[@b.c.2177]

My Favorite of all times was Evernote - easy to paste any info, easy to find anything, easy to share any note. Sharing is the best, just switch it on, copy the ling and send it. I could share any note on Facebook or with my collegs at work. But now, I can not use the free version any more, it is limited to 1 notebook and 50 notes :( So, I have to move to something else..

[@GabrielAngelfire]

Man, great video, I'm always on the lookout. I was always skeptical about Notion, I love it but yes, you're locked in it. Also, since you don't use Windows you wouldn't know, but OneNote is free in Windows 10. It's in the Metro style (some may prefer it though, for the simplicity) not desktop style (the desktop style comes with 365 paid), but you have the app for free. Would love seeing your take on Logseq, I tried it, I know it's a different world, but unless you need web access, it works. Cheers

[@Rome.]

Thanks for this educational upload. I've been using Joplin for years, but like the Obsidian interface and versatility with the plugins. I think Joplin also has quite the choice of plugins, but I'm not a super user, so only installed a few.

[@AarshMiniStar]

very usefull information.I used Joplin before watching this video.But Wow.Obsidian has nice features.specially graphs and plugins for RTL texts !! Thank you bro 😅

[@QuinCarter]

Can someone acknowledge he said "octothorpe" lol great video! Thanks for the information!

[@borr33tube]

Yep, octothorpe was indeed in the monologue.

[@cheery-hex]

I acknowledge and approve

[@xila8861]

My only problem with Obsidian is when I need a photo or a file quickly. It makes go and look for it in the Attachment filed ,but joplin you just download it or click it as save as. That one thing really bothers me with Obsidian ,then the sync. I tried local syncing ,but It is not practical really unless you had a NAS for that.

[@user-xs5kh8hf6e]

هل أستطيع أن أكتب بخط الايد بالقلم بحرية على Obsidian كما أفعل على onenote ؟

[@robosergTV]

what about logseq?

[@Twoface227]

It's funny that you mentioned the "going through a tunnel" aspect, as where I live, that is literally my biggest issue while trying to be productive while on my commute, www

[@brianwitter3271]

I used Evernote after Catch died. I mostly liked it for years. The clipper seemed to work well. Nested tags are great for things that you'd like to group but, really belong in different folders. With the reboot, things went downhill for me. The web clipper that they've bragged about for years, many of those pages were trashed in the move to the new code. I'll come back to "clipping" in a bit. Then the new pricing. Boolean search was great while I had it. It served well to narrow down what I was try to find. Now that is the highest tier and I'm not paying that price for what evernote is now. Search now presents a huge list for any search and still misses the note I'm looking for. I worked with Nimbus Note for a while in my quest to leave EN. Backup and Migration turned out to be a deal breaker, speed is also a problem. This is where I saw that clipped notes imported from EN were trashed. Looked in the new Evernote, trashed there to. Now I copy and paste stuff. OneNote still doesn't clip as well as EN, and I'd say Nimbus clips better than both, still I don't depend on clipping anymore unless I'm just after a visual bookmark. I am now moving everything to OneNote. The structure is not quite as limited as stated. Notebook (haven't found a limit on how many can be open) >Section Groups (many levels)>Sections>Pages (3 levels). Local backup is good. Export to PDF, Word, XPS, and .MHT. Attachment export is a pain if you haven't inserted as print out. But I don't think Evernote was better. I use an add on for tagging to supplement the built in tags. I also use the OneTastic macro add on for feature MS hasn't got around to. Internote linking could be better for sure, it works for me so far. MS is slow, the push to Store app was a wasted detour that now will take time to merge back to desktop/mobile. PDF handling is clunky, but I did usually just open them in a reader anyway, so not huge. I need to share some notebooks with my daughter, some with my wife, some with both. OneNote beats EN and Nimbus when you consider price there.

[@brianwitter3271]

OneNote Batch seems to make attachment export a breeze. In limited testing it worked great. ONB is a third party program from the folks that make the GEM addons. If I needed to switch again, Obsidian looks like the one at this point. I don't care for how Joplin names things, seems to kind of wipeout the benefits of just having files on your disc. Obsidian seems like you could carefully name your files and still see the relation of attachments to note if Obsidian went away. At this point I don't see enough advantage to Obsidian over OneNote. You gain much better linking but give up a lot in the bargain.

[@CommanDOH-JKU]

I was an Evernote user and was told it would be free forever, then they started charging, so I left that platform. Wound up on Onenote, but Being a Mac User, using a Micro$oft product left a bad taste in my mouth. I moved to Notion but didn't like it to much. I just found Obsidian and love it. I already knew some Markdown, so writing in it was a lot easier. And with Obsidian there are a ton of plug-ins that really allow me to set it up the way I need to use it. Add the fact that All my data is MY data on MY machine/cloud. I never need to worry about it being copped or taken from me... Obsidian for the win...

[@cheery-hex]

love Joplin!

[@jewittm]

Notion as export to csv, markdown, and PDF fyi

[@mrebholz]

OneNote is older than Evernote, if I remember well. Evernote started as a desktop program and initially I was mad when they moved fully cloud - same reason, you distrust notion. I switched back as my other web clippers got discontinued and started to love the tagging and established a GTD tagging system, I also loved the proceedings with the handwriting and text in picture recognition. Then I lost it because I was more a OneNote guy, meaning, the books and pages and mainly the stylus integration was it for me. They lost me with Windows 8 that disrupted the wacom pen integration in favour of their own stupid one the inherited from intrigue, all the nice Windows pen integration went down the drain, InkSeine almost had better pen integration than OneNote. And I was always a fan of TheBrain and was hoping for a better integration of OneNote, which never happened. Obsidian is the latest and gives me high hopes, because it has some similarities with TheBrain.

[@digitalsublime]

The sync in Obsidian from PC to Android is a hassle, dosn't work well

[@saito4422]

onenote is free even the desktop full version, its works grate in the ms eco system. anyway Obsidian will my choise for Future because of linking, embeding, presention and bind all together in a Tool with nice Plugins by Community to extent...

[@torq21]

When I found Joplin earlier this year I was very excited, I had been using Simplenote and I found myself missing Evernote's features. Now that I have been using Joplin for the last 6 months or so I am starting to become weary of some of its shortcomings. I am not a fan of Markdown so a reliable WYSIWYG editor is a must and that can't be said of Joplin. There are a number basic functions that don't work well with Joplin's desktop editor. Another huge downside is that the mobile app is fairly lackluster and for the most part lacks any of the BASIC WySIWyG editing features that I expect. Its difficult to just make a simple checklist. I think my biggest disappointment is that many of the issues that I have with the software have been brought up many times by the community in the past so it doesn't seem likely that the software will improve anytime soon. With that, I am starting to look at Obsidian. I think I should start by looking at the app to see how its editor compares.

[@SparxNet]

There are plugins like cMenu and Live Preview is now an upcoming experimental feature in the core Obsidian feature set. Obsidian itself isn't FOSS but at least the data format is.

[@torq21]

​@@SparxNetI'm already quite pleased with Obsidian and the editor plugins that I have found. The android app is light years beyond Joplins. The main drawback for the android app is that its very slow to load for simple note taking... I might have to look at segmenting my Vaults more to see if that improves performance.

[@thalesfm]

I think you might be confused about what "WYSIWYG" actually means. WYSIWYG stands for "What You See is What You Get"; If you're using a WYSIWYG editor to write Markdown files you should _expect_ to see Markdown syntax, not the other way around. So if you want to edit a Markdown file without having to worry about the syntax you should probably look for an editor with a live-preview mode. AFAIK Obsidian uses live-preview by default, but you could just as easily enable live-preview in Joplin.

[@ishworrana5769]

Onenote user! 🤚, tried notion, evernote, obsidian. Onenote is easy and simple and free with microsoft support backed!

[@robosergTV]

try logseq