<story><title>Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life&apos;s work</title><url>https://standardnotes.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thecodrr</author><text>Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.&lt;p&gt;With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don&amp;#x27;t mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:&lt;p&gt;1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can&amp;#x27;t even try out many of their editors.&lt;p&gt;2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.&lt;p&gt;3. They don&amp;#x27;t allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.&lt;p&gt;4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).&lt;p&gt;5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there&amp;#x27;s no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.&lt;p&gt;5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.&lt;p&gt;6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there&amp;#x27;s not much you can do with them.&lt;p&gt;7. Their pricing seems absurd.&lt;p&gt;8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.&lt;p&gt;But as I said, it&amp;#x27;s not all bad. Most people won&amp;#x27;t notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.&lt;p&gt;If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It&amp;#x27;s not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.&lt;p&gt;[1]&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;notesnook.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;notesnook.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;streetwriters&amp;#x2F;notesnook&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;streetwriters&amp;#x2F;notesnook&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; (it&amp;#x27;s not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e3bc54b2</author><text>I have tried many note-taking apps. From Evernote to Google Keep to OneNote to Standard notes yo plain old notepad to Zotero to Word and really honestly many more.&lt;p&gt;If you say this list is all over the place, then that is because requirements vary depending on purpose, not the other way around.&lt;p&gt;After almost a decade of experimenting, I have come to realise that the best note-taking tool by far is org-mode.&lt;p&gt;It is free, it is extensible, it is not going anywhere in next decade+, it let&amp;#x27;s me encrypt on my own terms, it let&amp;#x27;s me store and share on my own terms, it is as lightweight or as heavyweight as I want, it can be as pretty or as ugly as I want, I can edit it anywhere, search and organization is ridiculously advanced compared to anything else out there (or everything else is ridiculously behind).&lt;p&gt;Its biggest strength and arguably biggest weakness is its tied to Emacs. It is a horrible learning curve for beginners, which is why it took me a decade to get to org-mode in the first place, but once you have climbed that hill, you are basically on top of the world.&lt;p&gt;Everybody serious about note-taking should give org-mode a try.</text></comment>
<story><title>Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life&apos;s work</title><url>https://standardnotes.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thecodrr</author><text>Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.&lt;p&gt;With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don&amp;#x27;t mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:&lt;p&gt;1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can&amp;#x27;t even try out many of their editors.&lt;p&gt;2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.&lt;p&gt;3. They don&amp;#x27;t allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.&lt;p&gt;4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).&lt;p&gt;5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there&amp;#x27;s no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.&lt;p&gt;5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.&lt;p&gt;6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there&amp;#x27;s not much you can do with them.&lt;p&gt;7. Their pricing seems absurd.&lt;p&gt;8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.&lt;p&gt;But as I said, it&amp;#x27;s not all bad. Most people won&amp;#x27;t notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.&lt;p&gt;If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It&amp;#x27;s not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.&lt;p&gt;[1]&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;notesnook.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;notesnook.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;streetwriters&amp;#x2F;notesnook&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;streetwriters&amp;#x2F;notesnook&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; (it&amp;#x27;s not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shacklz</author><text>&amp;gt; 7. Their pricing seems absurd.&lt;p&gt;I actually really like their pricing model. You can buy years in advance, and they occasionally offer steep discounts (I think I bought two decades in advance around new year?). In a time where more and more services offer me no other way than some crappy monthly subscription that I cannot pay in advance and without auto-renewal, this is really much appreciated.&lt;p&gt;That being said, a lot of your points seem valid - I&amp;#x27;ve started using SN quite some time ago and haven&amp;#x27;t really noticed any new features since (except for some editor-improvements). Organization is indeed something that probably could use some love, the tags do suffice for me personally (especially with that one extension that lets you create folders with tags), but barely. While I appreciate their stability with regards to UX (it looks&amp;#x2F;feels the same since forever), the features you mentioned (collapsing, rightclick-menu) would not hurt.&lt;p&gt;Their &amp;#x27;lack of new features&amp;#x27; however is, as far as I understood, somewhat intentional - back when I bought it I&amp;#x27;ve read somewhere on the page that they explicitly have the philosophy to also say &amp;#x27;No&amp;#x27; to new features if they think it threatens their guarantee of long-term stability&amp;#x2F;support. Which I think is a very admirable stance these days where short-term-KPIs seem to dominate entire industries.</text></comment>