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 ?
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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).
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 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
+1 for StandardNotes. It’s been a wonderful product.
As a proton user I am keeping my eye on this and hopeing I will get access to this.
Same.
Joplin is pretty good for organizing notes.
Agree, and I switched over a couple of years ago. Only yesterday learned about Mermaid graphs and was impressed that Joplin does them natively.
I tried Joplin but the layout confuses me. I don’t get why there is two windows one for text and one for code ?
You can switch to the WYSIWYG Editor in the settings
It’s a Markdown editor. You write markdown in one, and preview in the other. Or, you can just turn the preview off.
logseq
Unless you need specific functionality that silver bullet doesn’t provide, i’d start there. It’s very similar to logseq, but doesn’t have a bunch of questionable design choices based around a paid sync monetization scheme. Silverbullet is self hosted and has a web app. Logseq is a webapp, packaged for Android and desktop, but only allowed file access for your data so you can’t self host sync… Because they charge for that. It’s a mess.
I just use syncthing with logseq and it works fine…
I do too. My point is there’s already a web app you can self host, but you can’t store your data on your server. The web app uses the local file access framework, which is just dumb. There’s no reason for this except to be able to monetize sync, and that’s also dumb because as you said, sync thing works fine. But they’re making a bad choice to explicitly remove functionality, and that doesn’t make me feel confident about the future of the project.
For this exact reason I switched to Trilium, I can acces on all my devices. I’m very expectant of the new fork Trilium Next.
I don’t know, they have to monetise somehow. Paying for the convenience of sync seems like a valid path especially given there’s fully functional alternative syncs available for free.
I don’t disagree. My problem is not with their choice of monetizing sync. My problem is with their choice to package a web app for Android and desktop, provide that same web app for self hosting, but not allow you to store the data in the web app. In the discussions on GitHub they claim it’s just something they can’t tackle right now, or whatever. No. It’s functionality that was specifically stripped because that’s how every other self hosted web app works and the local storage framework they use is obviously bolted on and not well supported by browsers. In other words, they’re manufacturing problems to sell you a solution. And again, that’s their decision to make. It just doesn’t seem like they make good decisions, and we’re talking about an app you put a lot of work and data into.
I haven’t tried yet (because I’m not a very organized person) but pushbullet.md
Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion
Plain text files.
Don’t count standard notes out just yet!
They offer discounted plans upon request!
https://standardnotes.com/help/56/what-if-i-can-t-afford-the-price-of-extended
I use Docbase, which apparently has been archived on GitHub.
https://opensource.appbase.io/Docbase/
https://github.com/appbaseio/Docbase
It’s not strictly privacy-focused but The Goblin’s Notebook is designed exactly for your use-case. It has markdown, object connections, every object has a player visible setting, so your players can access known content while you keep secrets hidden. There’s a free tier, a mid tier at $1.50 and an unlimited tier at $3 dollars a month (managed via their patreon).
Obsidian and logseq
For taking campaign notes, bookstack might be an option. It is specifically organized in a book, chapter, page hierarchy.
I also use it for my journal and to do list just because I already used it. Probably not as full featured as obsidian though
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.
This is what I landed on, really happy with it. Sync super fast, keeps adding features, clean UI, great WYSIWYG rich text, and dead simple imports. Plus they regularly do discounts, so even the low cost gets lower. Way better than the headache of SN or whatever else is out there
I’m using Trilium notes. it’s simple enough and does what i need. Used to use Obsidian but wanted something open source, and with Trilium you can self-host the sync server for free (even comes with a handy web-ui).
Note that it is much simpler than obsidian, but for me it’s plenty. It was easy to import my obsidian vault into it, and it allows exporting as .md files which work fine back in obsidian too.
Recently the dev said he’s putting it into maintenance mode, so no new features will come to Trilium. There’s a community around Trilium Next that wants to keep expanding it, but personally i hope Trilium stays as it is and is maintained for a long time.
I had this exact problem a whole ago, trying to find an alternative to OneNote. I went through many of the other suggestions in this thread but settled on Trilium.
Super easy to setup in a docker container. Self hosted so I control my data and access. Can by accessed via reverse proxy when I’m out and about.
Notes can be a mixture of text, pictures, code (with formatting based on language)
They are arranged in a directory structure with notes inside other notes under chosen topics down the left, and open notes are in tabs along the top, much like One Note.
The chrome extension allows me to quickly snip and send back screenshots or Urls of sites I’m on, and the android app let’s me make quick notes which are filed away by date for later organisation (when I get round to it…)
The only thing it doesnt support, that I wish it did, is multiple users. I don’t see why you couldn’t just make another container for each user, just not very practical if you have a lot of users.