Last year Evernote proceeded with some top-notch corporate nonsense by changing their usage policies. All of a sudden, free users would be limited to 50 notes and one notebook. I’d been using Evernote since 2008, so clearly I had way more than that saved in Evernote. And they weren’t going to make it easy to move because every notebook had to exported one-by-one. Yes, truly: a company that been around for 15 years had no way for users to export the entire account in one go. Last month they decided to cut the limit of allowed devices for free users from two to one.

I struggled about where to move my data to. Anytype? Not far enough along in development. Obsidian? Woo boy, just… too much. Notion? Meh. Not for my usage. I settled on Joplin. It was relatively simple and very much text-forward, providing an experience similar to Evernote. Because its base is Markdown, though, content is easy to move around. They offer Cloud Storage, but I preferred the idea of just using my existing cloud storage and with Joplin, that was possible.

I wrote on Mastodon a little while later with a few wishlist items. Those items are still outstanding and I’ve got a few more thoughts, so I figured I’d share some after almost a year of using Joplin.

The good stuff about Joplin:

  • Feels similar to Evernote.
  • Imported Evernote’s exported enex files pretty well (I had better luck as HTML than MD, but see the second feature request below for a caveat).
  • Relatively speedy with 500-600 notes.
  • Stores locally/on your own cloud service (but also offers paid cloud space if you need it) (another caveat here with the third bullet point in the next section).
  • Expandable via plugins.

Not-as-good stuff:

  • UI feels a bit plain and missing normal stuff like “favorites” (though I found a plugin to handle this, it’s only on the desktop version).
  • Could use some more customization options out of the box, particularly with the sidebar and per-notebook/per-tag options.
  • Not the most user-friendly setting up sync across devices if you’re not on Joplin Cloud. I struggled a bit and I’m not a dummy with this stuff.
  • Using the desktop and mobile app can be a little shaky in terms of sync. I find myself having to manually delete the lock file on my mobile device periodically otherwise it gets stuck, can’t connect, and everything gets out of sync. I have lost some data this way when it eventually does sync.

Some features I’d like to see them add to the core product:

  • Add last modified date in the index list of notes (a la Evernote) (though this can be solved with a plugin).
  • Convert HTML to Markdown on a per-note level. I imported Evernote as HTML for more accuracy, but some I’d like to convert selected notes to Markdown. Current process is: copy HTML, go to an HTML-to-Markdown converter, create new note with the Markdown, and delete/hide the old HTML version. Messy.
  • WYSIWYG editor option on mobile. It’s bad enough doing Markdown on my phone but jfc, editing an HTML-imported doc? Forget it. This is by far the most irritating aspect about Joplin so far.

Overall, I’m happy with Joplin and don’t mind that still it still feels like a young-ish product. The community (what I’ve seen of it, at least) seems healthy and active and I love the fact that even if Joplin were to disappear one day, I’d still have all my notes sitting here safely on my cloud storage.