Hey Privacy people,
I am looking for a OneNote alternative for all my campaign notes for my tabletop RPGs. I was looking at Obsidian.md as an option and wondering what their data collection is like?
Fot all my personal and private notes I use standard notes but the free version is not quite roboist enougj. I can’t afford to pay premium any time soon I need a free option I can use.
Any suggestions ?
logseq
Joplin is pretty good for organizing notes.
I tried Joplin but the layout confuses me. I don’t get why there is two windows one for text and one for code ?
It’s a Markdown editor. You write markdown in one, and preview in the other. Or, you can just turn the preview off.
You can switch to the WYSIWYG Editor in the settings
Agree, and I switched over a couple of years ago. Only yesterday learned about Mermaid graphs and was impressed that Joplin does them natively.
Proton just bought Standard Notes, so keep an eye out for changes there. Otherwise, I use Obsidian but I have it sync to my home server so I can access the same data from my phone and computer.
As a proton user I am keeping my eye on this and hopeing I will get access to this.
Same.
+1 for StandardNotes. It’s been a wonderful product.
As long as it stays FOSS, you don’t need to worry. You can even self-host Standard Notes if you don’t trust their cloud service: https://standardnotes.com/help/self-hosting/getting-started
Obsidian is pretty good, it shouldn’t collect any data by default. But you can also check out Logseq, an open source Obsidian alternative.
I’ve never seen anything fishy from them, many people trust them for their work notes.
It’s all .md files you own.
Thanks for the advice
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As they are closed source no one can tell you their true privacy policy. It seems better than average from what I’ve read but you never know…
Personally I use logseq and sync the files via a Nextcloud instance. I can only recommend it, although I also recommend spending an hour to learn the tagging and linking logic and reading through their guide on what’s possible. I still only leverage a minor part of the potential myself.
One that is closer to onenote (I think, never used onenote) is Joplin.
Thanks for the advice
I use Obsidian, which is quite powerful with their vast plugin library. You can do a lot of automation, and you can check out some of Nicole van der Hoeven’s videos, who among other things use it to keep track of TTRPG campaigns, both as a player and as a game master. For example this one.
I don’t use their sync service, but have all files locally on my Nextcloud server. I sync them to my phone with Syncthing, which unfortunately means I cannot encrypt them with Cryptomator like I planned, but if you only use it on your computer, that is also something you could do. If you are paranoid about them still phoning home with your data, then you can block its network access with a firewall. I think you can install plugins manually.
I would have preferred it if it was FOSS. I have considered checking out Logseq as an alternative. But the bullet-based workflow doesn’t appeal to me, so I haven’t tried yet. I switched over from Standard Notes, and honestly it was pain to transfer because the text export from Standard Notes was all over the place, as I had used a lot of different note types. I tried to parse some of these smart notes they have, but I couldn’t quickly figure out how they were structured to automate it, so I ended up manually going through and copying over what I wanted to keep. I like the approach of keeping plain text markdown files. It is easier to export to another application in the future, although some of the content will be useless as it is explicitly written for the plugins (e.g. Dataview).
Anytype
Hit the selfhosted community, this is an on-going conversation there with pretty much every note taking app being discussed.
As an aside, while OneNote is proprietary, if you use the full app it doesn’t require OneDrive. If you only use it on a PC, it can sync locally with other PCs - I’ve used it this way for 15 years.
How about Notesnook? https://notesnook.com
Open source and end to end encrypted
I switched to Notesnook recently. Would like to see a few improvements like note archiving, but other than that it’s been great.
They ran a 75% off sale recently and I snagged a subscription. It’s $10/yr if you’re a student, $50/yr otherwise.
OrgNote. The project is still quite raw but the developer works hard and the overall idea and philosophy behind the project is perfect for me. Fully compatible with emacs org-roam, most probably compatible with logseq. There is a “fully managed” free version with PGP support or an option for a self-hosted server.
Project: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote Manifesto: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote/wiki#manifesto
I will look into this is the relates to org mode?
It is based on files in org format. But it is not related anyhow to org-agenda and planning. It is an only obsidian-like note-raking system with web+mobile+desktop and some blogging capabilities (public/private notes, etc.)
Have you looked at World Anvil? It’s been a long time and I don’t remember what the free vs. paid tier comparisons were, but I thought it was pretty slick.
Edit: Didn’t realise the community I’m in. I have no idea the privacy state of World Anvil but I’ll edit if I come across it.
I am unsure of their privacy but I find their site a bit too clunky.
I am a fan of Standard Notes, but crypt.ee is also solid as far as I know.
I will look into crypt.we thanks.
If you actually decide to give it a try at some point, I would love to hear about your experience as I do not have hands-on experience with cryptee myself.
Do be aware that they use progressive web apps (so there is no “cryptee app” in App Store or Google Play). But this is actually an active choice by them to enhance security.
If you want to take a longer deep dive into the mind of their CEO, Techlore interviewed him fairly recently.
The interview ran so long that they had to make it a two parter:
Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion
Look into a static website built with Hugo. You’ll be creating pages in markdown like obsidian. You can host it locally so there’s no privacy concerns.
If you want it externally facing then there are some options but you’ll need to find a site to host your static website and who you’re comfortable with their privacy policy.
There are many open source wiki softwares: zim, dokuwiki, etc.
