In this video, I review Notesnook, a privacy-focused note-taking app designed for users who want secure, reliable, and distraction-free note management across devices.
I explain why I switched to Notesnook, share my first impressions, and walk through key features like theming and customization, note sharing, and syncing behavior. I also break down pricing and overall value, so you can decide whether Notesnook makes sense for your workflow.
Notesnook Review
Intro
Hello and welcome back to Learn Linux TV!
In this article, I’m going to give you a quick review of Notesnook, a Notes app that I started using recently. It’s available for Windows, macOS (and of course, Linux) and I’ve been quite enjoying it. So, what I’ll be doing today is giving you some of my thoughts.
And having a good Notes app is very important to me. The thing is, I spend a considerable time each day writing. And it’s not just because I write actual books, I also spend a lot of time writing notes for the videos on this channel. I write a script for each and every video, obsessing over every detail. In addition, I also keep notes regarding the large number of Linux commands I use, and I keep track of all the different projects I’m working on. As a result, I’ve tried a bunch of notes apps over the years – and my journey has now led me to Notesnook.
Notesnook is a completely open-source solution, and it’s a competitor to apps like Joplin, Evernote, and similar tools. Just like those, you can create various notebooks for different categories, and synchronize your notes across multiple computers. The interface is very clean and effective, and it has some very useful features – such as the ability to share notes with other people, clip web content, and create reminders. Also, Notesnook protects your privacy by implementing encryption, allowing you to keep your notes safe from prying eyes. I’m really enjoying this solution so far.
I’m going to go over why I decided to make the switch to Notesnook and what makes it stand out for me. But it’s not a perfect solution though, there’s some downsides to keep in mind as well – which I’ll also cover. One thing I want to get out of the way though is that as always, I’ll give you an unbiased review – and I never allow others to screen my reviews before you guys get a chance to see them first.
In addition though, Notesnook isn’t even aware that I’m creating this video anyway – it’s just something I started using recently and I figured I’d make a video about it.
Let’s dive in!
History
First, I figured I’d spend a few moments talking about why I made the decision to switch to Notesnook, as well as what came before. I’ve actually had a somewhat complicated relationship with Notes apps, and at this point I think I’ve tried most of the solutions that are available.
The first Notes app I used full-time was Joplin. Joplin had all of the features I needed, and although the UI wasn’t amazing, it was effective enough. However, I had to stop using Joplin because it’s sync feature was constantly breaking for me. In fact, it caused me to lose work multiple times. I stuck with Joplin for a while, since other than the sync issues, it was perfect for me. But a very long time passed with none of its updates addressing sync problems, and I gave up on it – since regularly losing my work was not something I could contend with.
After that, I tried a number of other Notes apps, and eventually I settled on Standard Notes. I’ve been using Standard Notes for a while, and I also created a review for it some time back. Standard Notes checked all of the boxes for me, except one – there’s no way to share notes. For a while, this didn’t really matter to me all that much since I primarily work by myself and haven’t had anyone to share notes with anyway. Lately though, as the channel grows I find myself needing to share information more often, so I started looking at alternatives. And when my subscription to Standard Notes ran out, I decided to look at alternatives. To be fair though, I still feel that Standard Notes is a fantastic solution and I still recommend it, but for me I knew that eventually I’d start needing to share information more often.
And now, I’ve settled on Notesnook.
Notesnook Overview
And my first impression of Notesnook is that it’s a very simple and straight forward app. As you use it, you’ll create various notebooks, giving you the ability to separate your notes into categories. For example, you can create a notebook for personal notes as well as a notebook for work. You can even have notebooks within notebooks, so each notebook is more like a folder than an actual notebook. You can even have a single note be a part of multiple notebooks if you want. You can also edit multiple notes at a time by having multiple tabs open, which seems like a no-brainer but some Notes apps surprisingly lack this ability, forcing you to only open one at a time.
When it comes to actually editing a note, the interface exposes just a handful of formatting options – but it does include all of the ones that matter. You can create headings, paragraphs and lists, adjust font size, as well as formatting text with bold, italics, underlines and so on. There’s nothing truly advanced in the editing interface, with Notesnook focusing on simplicity and the things you’ll use the most.
When it comes to customization, there’s a number of colorschemes you can choose, with each one that I’ve tried being implemented very well. One of my complaints against Standard Notes is that while it also included a number of different themes, many of them seemed to be implemented in a very clumsy way. For example, some color schemes made text in the side bar hard to see. Standard Notes also has the ability to download themes made by the community, but many of them were unmaintained and barely worked. In fact, one of them was so bad that I had to remove a downloaded theme manually, as it completely broke the UI. To be fair, I’ve only just started using Notesnook, but so far I haven’t had any problems with theming. There’s a great selection of settings you can tune beyond that, such as the ability to make tweaks to the editor, the ability export and import notes – and so on.
One glaring omission with Notesnook is that it doesn’t support plugins. This is something that might represent a big downside for some of you, but I couldn’t care less personally – so long as all of the features I require are included. For me, all of the features I need are included within Notesnook, so I don’t miss plugins at all. But I wanted to mention this and get it out of the way, in case this might be important to you.
When it comes to sharing notes, Notesnook makes this very simple. If you right-click on any note, you’ll have a Publish option. This results in a URL being generated for your note, which you can then provide to others if you want them to be able to view it. For example, as I write my newest book, I can share a chapter with an editor so they can give me feedback. You can also require a password for a note to be viewed, or even go as far as to configure it to self-descruct automatically. One downside of this though is that collaboration is not implemented yet – it’s one of the highest voted features on their roadmap, so I hope they add that eventually.
Another nice feature is the fact that Notesnook keeps your notes synchronized between devices. This is a common feature that almost all of the Note solutions are able to do, but considering how bad this worked in Joplin, it’s something I look at carefully. So far, I haven’t had a single issue – it’s been working great. Perhaps over time my opinion may change if I ever encounter a problem, but for now there’s not much to say in regard to syncing – it’s been solid for me.
However, there is a downside in regard to syncing – you can’t use your own sync server. Many people prefer to sync their notes to a server they control, and that’s especially true with the homelab crowd. At this time though, sync is done through the built-in service, and you can’t point it to your own server. However, according to the roadmap, the ability to self-host a sync server is planned – so we should get this ability eventually.
And since we’re on the subject of downsides, the biggest is probably that the free plan is extremely limited. The unpaid version gives you access to only 50MB of storage, and the majority of its features are locked. There’s three paid plans – essential, pro and believer, and the cost for those plans comes out to $20, $70 and $90 a year respectively. So it’s definitely not cheap, but for me I’m keeping notes for an entire company, so the cost is worth it. For people within my audience that don’t write notes as heavily as I do, the cost may be harder to justify.
But even despite the fact that the free plan is very limited and you have to open your wallet to make full use of Notesnook, it has become my new favorite Notes app. While it doesn’t support plugins, it does have all of the features that I need, and it’s a simple app that let’s me focus on writing notes without needless distractions. The way that notebooks are presented enables me to organize my notes exactly the way I like them, and best of all it’s very easy to use so I end up spending less time figuring out how it works and more time writing.
And even though Notesnook is very simple, it has all the features that matter. You can create outlines, lists, bidirectional links, format code blocks, include images – and it even supports Markdown. You can share notes with other people, export notes in various formats, create tables, and more – basically all the things you’d ever want to do in a Notes app.
Best of all, Notesnook is cross-platform and available for just about every platform, so you can take your notes with you between any of the operating systems you use on a general basis. For us Linux users, Notesnook is available on Flathub, the Snap store, and also as an AppImage – so there’s multiple ways of installing it depending on what you prefer. Personally, I prefer Flatpak for all of my apps so I decided to use the version from Flathub.
But overall, Notesnook is my new favorite Notes app. Although it doesn’t include a ton of exclusive features you can’t get from other solutions, it does combine all of the features most people would ever need and is presented through an easy to use interface that stays out of your way. I would prefer to see the free plan opened up a bit more, and also have the ability to use our own server for syncing. That feature is coming though, but I do understand that could be a dealbreaker for some of you within my audience. If so, Notesnook may be worth a look whenever that feature lands, but for me, I’m completely comfortable with the built-in sync option. If nothing else, I do recommend Notesnook and it may be worth a shot if you’re looking for a similar solution.
