I’ve been looking for a good note-taking application for a while now and have finally settled on Joplin.
Note-taking tools such as Roam, Notion, Obsidian, LogSeq, and others seem to be proliferating at the moment, so there are plenty of options. Joplin is not my ideal note-taking application by any means, but it delivers more of the features that I’m looking for than other tools.
End-To-End Encryption
One thing I absolutely must have in a note-taking tool is end-to-end encryption. I consider my notes extremely sensitive and do not want to risk a breach exposing my notes’ plaintext.
Joplin supports end-to-end encryption, though it is not necessarily the easiest thing to set up. Joplin is application-based, so as a user, you install the Joplin app on your phone, computer, etc. Then, notes are synced between the devices using a cloud-based file system such as Dropbox or OneDrive. Configuring end-to-end encryption, then, means generating a password-protected key that also has to be synced between the multiple devices.
It’s not that it is particularly difficult to do this–it only took me a few minutes to set it up–but this is not something that a casual user is likely to be successful at without some assistance.
Support for Images and Other Attachments
Many of the note-taking systems gaining traction today have limited or no support for adding images or other attachments to notes. I’ve used StandardNotes for years, for example, which supports end-to-end encryption very nicely but whose image/attachment support is substandard (to put it generously).
Joplin supports inline viewing of images (so the images are viewable while you’re browsing the note) and allows users to add other attachments to notes.
Other Features
Joplin also has a range of features that many other note-taking applications include, such as the ability to create notebooks (and subnotebooks), note tagging, Markdown support, full-text search, etc.
The one feature Joplin does not support that something like Roam, Obsidian, and Notion offer are backlinks that allow users to navigate their notes wiki-style. That is a feature I use and appreciate, but not an absolute must-have.