Note-taking apps don't need to be complex to be useful, and Joplin embraces that philosophy. At its heart, this open-source app is simply a place to write and organize your notes. It's available for free and can easily save everything to local storage. Notes you take in Joplin are yours the same way those you take in a paper notebook are. If you do need syncing and collaboration abilities, however, Joplin offers those features for a reasonable subscription price. You might need to install some plug-ins for extra capabilities, such as optical character recognition (OCR) and sketching, but Joplin is still an Editors' Choice winner thanks to its ease of use and focused design.
Joplin is completely free to download and use. As mentioned, it stores files on your local device by default, though you can optionally sync between devices using a cloud platform of your choice, such as Dropbox or OneDrive. The free tier is very generous. Among note-taking apps we've reviewed, only Obsidian offers an equivalent combination of unlimited local storage and support for third-party syncing.
Joplin also offers a paid syncing service called Joplin Cloud, with plans starting at 28.69 euros per year (roughly $32 as of this writing) for the Basic plan. It allows you to collaborate on notes with other Joplin users and upload up to 10MB of data per note for up to 2GB of total storage space. The most expensive plan, called Teams, costs 80.28 euros per year (roughly $91). It supports 200MB of data per note and up to 50GB of total storage space. Joplin offers a 50% discount for students and teachers, which you can request by emailing the company from a .edu email address.
Joplin Cloud's pricing is competitive. Obsidian charges $48 per year for direct, device-to-device syncing with no cloud storage. Evernote charges $129.99 per year for the ability to upload a total of 10GB per month, with no ceiling on the overall storage space. Joplin Cloud, on balance, is likely a better deal than those two options for most people. Microsoft's OneNote, however, gives you 100GB of storage as part of a Microsoft 365 Basic plan ($19.99 per year). OneNote is clearly a better deal for syncing notes because it offers more space with fewer restrictions (along with access to a whole suite of top-notch Office apps).
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Joplin has desktop applications for linux, macOS, and Windows, along with mobile apps for Android and iOS. However, no web version is available, unlike with OneNote and others. You can download Joplin and start using it right away—you don't even need to set up an account.
Joplin's desktop interface consists of three panels. The left panel shows a list of notebooks and tags, the center panel shows a list of the notes in the current notebook, and the right panel shows the currently open note. You can create as many notebooks as you like and even nest notebooks inside each other. You can also optionally give each notebook an emoji or custom icon to help it stand out in the sidebar.
With Joplin, you can switch between Markdown language and rich text at any time. If you don't know what Markdown is and don't want to learn, don't worry; just use the rich text option (the standard WYSIWYG text editor most people are familiar with). Joplin is more flexible than Obsidian in this aspect, which essentially forces you to learn Markdown.
Markdown language, for the uninitiated, is a lightweight set of codes that you use to apply formatting and styling instead of selecting text and choosing a button. For example, instead of highlighting text and choosing to apply bold, you could instead put two asterisks around a word. Some people prefer Markdown because it's precise. You know exactly where bold, italic, and other formatting options start and end.
Joplin has a two-pane interface for Markdown. You can type in the left pane and see how it looks on the right. You can turn off the preview pane or even open notes using a dedicated Markdown editor. I love how flexible it is.
Joplin can import notebooks from Evernote. The process can take a while, however, since you have to do it one at a time. You can't connect the two services and pipe everything in the way you can with Notion or Zoho Notebook. The results are pretty good, though: attachments, images, tags, and titles all come over without any problem. You can decide whether to import to simplified markdown files (ideal for simple notes) or as HTML files (better for clipped notes from websites and preserving formatting). Note properties, including creation date and URLs, also transfer over, which is a nice touch. Joplin lets you add location information when you create a note as well.
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Importing is much easier if your source files use Markdown formatting. I tested this process by importing four years' worth of journal entries from Obsidian; it worked nearly instantaneously.
You can export your notes to HTML, Markdown, or a PDF document, which is good if you ever decide to stop using Joplin. I tested the Markdown option by exporting a set of notebooks and opening them in Obsidian—it worked seamlessly.
As mentioned, you can sync your notes using the paid Joplin Cloud service or by using another cloud service, such as Dropbox or OneDrive. You can even sync using Amazon S3 (beta), Netcloud, WebDAV, or your file system (including network drives). It's also possible to set up a self-hosted Joplin server (in beta). The process of configuring the latter is outside the scope of this review.
For this review, I tried syncing with both Joplin Cloud and Dropbox. With Joplin Cloud, the process is simple. Joplin regularly syncs changes you make to the cloud and, from there, to your other devices. It also enables you to share notebooks with other Joplin Cloud users. When you share a notebook, any changes other users make sync via Joplin Cloud. The cloud service also makes an email-to-Joplin feature possible, in which you forward messages to an email address to add them to a notebook.
Syncing with Dropbox doesn't give you access to any collaboration or sharing features, but it works well enough. In testing, I needed to click a link, authorize Joplin to connect to Dropbox, and then copy an API code into the application. Joplin connects to Dropbox directly without using the desktop app, meaning it doesn't affect Dropbox's three-device limit for the free version.
Most note-taking apps include a web clipper, a browser extension for grabbing articles and other content from the web and instantly sending them to a notebook. Joplin has a clipper for Chromium browsers and Firefox, though the user interface is in need of an update: It's an unattractive box that lets you choose how to clip a web page and which notebook it should end up in. You can grab the complete page or manually clip a selection or screenshot. You can also clip a simplified version of whatever you're reading without things like ads and sidebars; this worked very well.
The one caveat with the web clipper is that you can't preview what you're clipping before sending it to Joplin. This means that you won't know if there is a problem until you head back to the app. OneNote, by contrast, shows you what the clipped note looks like and even lets you use a highlighter before you clip it. Obsidian’s web clipper lets you clip just the text you highlight.
Joplin lacks OCR capabilities, meaning you can't search or copy text from images and PDFs. Bear, Evernote, and Google Keep all have OCR features. Joplin also doesn't have any kind of drawing, PDF annotation, or scanning tools, which OneNote and Evernote offer. Whether those omissions are a big deal depends on your note-taking habits.
There is a workaround, though: plug-ins. Available via the settings section, these third-party add-ons bring features such as OCR and scanning to Joplin. However, the process of setting up and enabling these plug-ins is confusing, and the features don't work as you might expect. After installing the OCR plug-in, for example, I needed to type in a code for my language preference in the settings, something I had to find on another website. That's unnecessarily difficult. Using the OCR feature isn't seamless, either: I had to navigate a series of windows and noticeably wait for the processing to happen. This is all to say that Joplin's plug-in system is a bit more typical of what you might expect from an open-source app than the rest of it.
By contrast, Obsidian's add-on ecosystem is significantly more robust and usable. I recommend that app if you really want to tweak your note-taking system. Still, I like that Joplin offers plug-ins at all, unlike Bear, Evernote, and OneNote.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joplin)
Joplin
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
All too often, open-source applications are cumbersome for the average person. Joplin isn't like that. It's a near-perfect note-taking app that happens to be open-source (and free). We like its straightforward operations and local-by-default storage, while its available syncing options are simple to set up and use. The process of installing and using plug-ins could be smoother, though Joplin still easily earns our Editors' Choice award for its simplicity. If you want more advanced handwriting, OCR, and voice note features, or if you prefer a syncing-by-default approach, OneNote is the app to use and our other Editors' Choice winner.
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About Justin Pot
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