Why I Keep Going Back to Joplin
I've cycled through Obsidian, Notion, Apple Notes, and about a dozen other tools over the past decade. Joplin sits on my desktop right now and I use it every day. It's not pretty. It hasn't won any design awards. But it does exactly what a notes app should do without trying to be something else. The Markdown support is solid. Real Markdown, not the watered-down version some apps ship with. Headers, lists, code blocks with syntax highlighting, task lists that actually work. I've got notebooks full of technical documentation, personal reference material, and project notes all written in standard Markdown that imports and exports cleanly.
The Joplin Review Is This Opensource Notetaking App The Hidden Gem Powering Your Productivity
Here's the thing most people miss when they're looking at Joplin. It's not really a note-taking app. It's a synchronizable database with a Markdown frontend. That distinction matters because it explains why the search works the way it does and why the folder structure behaves differently than you might expect from a traditional app. Joplin stores everything in a local SQLite database. Your notes, folders, tags, metadata, everything. That's why switching between client and desktop versions syncs instantly once the database lands on your machine. The web clipper saves pages directly into it. Mobile apps read and write to the same database through whatever sync backend you're using. For sync, you've got choices. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Nextcloud, S3, WebDAV. I run my own Nextcloud instance and Joplin connects to it without any middleware. One year ago I tried syncing through Google Drive just to test it. The first sync took about forty minutes across roughly three thousand notes. After that, incremental updates were under three seconds. Don't bother with Google Drive long-term though. The OAuth flow breaks occasionally and the retry logic isn't great. Nextcloud or WebDAV is much more reliable for daily use.
The biggest advantage nobody talks about is data ownership. Your notes live in a SQLite file on your computer. You can copy it, back it up, query it directly with sqlite3 if you want to run custom searches, or point another tool at it. When Notion throttles your workspace or changes pricing, you're stuck. With Joplin you export everything in ten minutes and move on. Here's where it gets tricky for newcomers. The resource attachment system is separate from the note content. Images, PDFs, audio files all get stored as separate database records with foreign keys pointing back to their parent note. This works fine until you try to move a note with fifty embedded screenshots to a different sync target and hit a timeout. The workaround I use is running the built-in cleanup command before major sync operations. It recalculates resource references and fixes any orphaned files that accumulate after repeated edits. Installation and setup
Download the app from joplinapp.org. There's a desktop version for Windows, Mac, and Linux, plus iOS and Android clients. The install process is straightforward. After launch, go to Tools > Options and set up your sync target before you import anything. If you start taking notes and only configure sync later, you'll end up with duplicate resources and confused folder hierarchies.
Get the Full Details
I import notes from other apps by exporting to JEX format or Markdown files. The import wizard handles both. JEX preserves tags and attachments. Plain Markdown imports lose attachments unless they're in the same directory. Plan your migration accordingly. The mobile apps are functional but rough around the edges. The Android version handles large notebooks well. The iOS app occasionally drops unsynced changes if you switch apps too quickly. I keep a buffer of five minutes between writing on phone and opening another app. It sounds petty but it prevents lost content that doesn't sync back on the next connection attempt. One advanced nuance that saves a lot of headaches: the notebook stack system. Joplin lets you group notebooks into stacks visually, but this is purely a UI organization layer. It doesn't affect search scope, sync behavior, or permissions. People treat stack grouping like a real hierarchy and then get confused when global search returns results from outside their visible stack. Keep stacks for display only. Use tags for actual filtering.
Another counter-intuitive point about Markdown rendering. Joplin uses its own renderer, not a standard one like Marked or Obsidian's. Tables render differently. Some GitHub-flavored extensions don't apply. If you're pulling in notes from other tools, expect to spend a couple hours fixing formatting quirks rather than assuming a clean transfer. The plugin ecosystem is small compared to Obsidian but growing. Custom color themes, additional export formats, and a few workflow automations are available through the plugins page. I run a single plugin that adds Zotero integration for academic notes. It saves me from manually copying citations but the configuration file can break between Joplin updates. Keep a backup of plugins.json before upgrading.
What Joplin Can't Do
It doesn't have real-time collaboration. Sharing a notebook means exporting or setting up read-only access through a sync backend. If you need multiple people editing simultaneously, use something else. The web clipper is decent but slow on JavaScript-heavy pages. Articles that rely heavily on dynamic content often clip as blank pages or incomplete snippets. I fall back to saving the URL and clipping later when I have time to deal with whatever the page rendered wrong. There's no native formula editor or diagramming tool. If your notes include complex math or architecture diagrams, you'll need to embed images or use external tools and reference them.
Performance degrades noticeably with very large media-heavy notebooks. My primary database sits at about 2.1 gigabytes with mostly text. Search is still fast. If you're storing high-resolution images or audio recordings at scale, expect longer indexing times during sync and slightly slower note opening on older hardware. For most people I recommend Joplin. The data portability, local-first architecture, and zero subscription cost make it a sensible default. If you need team features or heavy visual customization, explore alternatives before committing months of notes into a system that won't let you leave easily.
