I came across Standard Notes a few days ago and I have the say I’m quite impressed. The app is very minimal and clean. The free version is very basic, but by upgrading, you get access to a bunch or extensions or add-ons. These extensions drastically improve the functionality of the app and allow you to do much more. The app is also open-source and 100% private. Your notes are encrypted, you can set up two-factor authentication, password-protected notes, etc. On the other side, it doesn’t support dates or zooming. The way you create folders is by activating the folders extension and creating a tag where the tag itself is the actual folder. You can, however, nest a tag within a tag within a tag, etc. There isn’t an official web clipper, but an SN user created his own web clipper which is available via github. It seems to work pretty well.
I’d love to hear your opinions since I’m seriously considering switching over. You can try the demo version without creating an account. The demo already has all of the themes, extensions or add-ons available to you so you can play around and get the full experience.
At first blush, I really like their dedication to end-to-end encryption while also allowing you to sync across devices. The many different types of editors is really nice too, and I love its support for nesting tags into folders.
It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t support linking between notes, though, and their help doc specifically says that it’s a philosophical issue and they may never choose to implement it. That’s a showstopper for me.
I noticed that too. It’s quite disappointed… I got used to linking in Dynalist so suddenly not being able to do it would be frustrating.
I also don’t like the fact I can only tag a note and not the content of a note. Although, you can still search for specific expressions mentioned in a note.
On the plus side, they support smart tags so you can create custom filters.
Standard Notes are superb and I’ve recently purchased their 5-year subscription.
I use Dynalist and Standard Notes in conjunction. To me, they complement each other excellently, but I don’t believe either of them can replace the other.
Specifically, I use Dynalist for my drafts, whereas I use Standard Notes to produce the final versions of my articles, or “serious writing”.
I need the HTML code of my articles for transfer to WordPress, which is something Dynalist cannot provide. On the other hand, Standard Notes are unwieldy and, really, a behemoth for jotting down preliminary ideas and outlines of my articles, for quickly moving/swapping paragrahs/fragments of text around the article, etc. That’s where Dynalist shines.
I’m perfectly fine with using this combo of apps instead of only a single app.
Similar thoughts on Standard Notes. I have the 5 year premium plan and use it as my file cabinet, a purpose Evernote used to serve. Only the most important and most peranent things go in there. It is much better for long form writing as well. I’m trying the free tier of Dynalist right now as my daily note taker and seeing if it can replace Todoist as well. Dynalist is too expensive in my mind but if it can save me $24 a year on the Todoist subscription as well I may go premium.
Then again, swapping paragraphs in Standard Notes is a chore… while swapping them in Dynalist is a breeze. So, for the articles I write, Dynalist seems perfect for drafts (at a stage where you might still be rearranging the order of paragraphs, and such), and I only transfer everything to Standard Notes when I’m about to produce the final version of an article.
I think that Standard Notes is good for the synchronization and ecncryption.
But today there have lost of note taking apps with much more features: OneNote, Joplin, Obsidian, SimpleNote, logseq, Notion, and Evernote.
They aren’t really comparable in terms of the feature set. For example, mentioning Standard Notes in the same breath with SimpleNote is absurd. It’s like comparing a bicycle with a race-car.
