Update: I have given Standard Notes another try and changed my mind about it
The search for the perfect encrypted notes app has led me, as many others, to Standard Notes. The promise of the app is great: full-end to-end encryption, cross platform support, slick interface, multiple editors to suit your needs. I really really really wanted it to work between us, but it didn’t.
Then I found Joplin. I had found it before of course, but always turned it down quickly because (superficial me…) it’s ugly, at least on mobile. Yet it turned out to be the love of my life. Here’s why Joplin is better than Standard Notes in (almost) every way.
Encryption
Let’s start with the one thing Standard Notes excels at: encryption. “Find out what it feels like to write with total privacy,” their website says. Encryption is one of the app’s main selling points and for good reason. I tend to jot down a lot of very, very personal thoughts and SN was the first place where doing so actually felt totally safe. The notes are encrypted everywhere; even locally, and are only decrypted within the app. Considering this level of encryption, you have to appreciate what the makers of the app managed to achieve.
Joplin does a really great job at it too; encrypting the files one by one, syncing them with a cloud provider of choice and leaving one in charge of his own encryption keys. However, locally the notes are stored decrypted in an sqlite file. That doesn’t have to be a problem when you make sure your devices are well protected (which you should), but it doesn’t level with the out-of-the-box safety of Standard Notes.
Editing
One of the main attractions of (the paid version of) Standard Notes is the option to choose between multiple editors and extensions. There are multiple markdown editors, several rich text (html) editors, a vim-like environment and even spreadsheets. However I found myself switching between all the markdown editors, never finding one that was just right. I’m probably spoiled, but with excellent editors like iA writer and extendable editors like VS Code around, SN’s editors just didn’t quite get it for me. One simple example: I keep a lot of lists using markdown checkboxes. Even if an editor rendered those correctly, there was never a quick way to toggle them.
Joplin has only one simple editor which (amazingly) does the trick most of the time (including toggling checkboxes). However, it comes with one very simple but extremely useful option that makes it stand out: to ‘watch’ a file while editing it in an external editor, thus allowing me to use iA or VS Code all I like, safely saving the file back to Joplin in the end.
Slugs and bugs
One of the main annoyances of Standard Notes are its general sluggishness and bugginess. Electron apps can be really good these days (Joplin is one too actually), but Standard Notes really proves naysayers right. The desktop app feels like little more than a wrapped website. It responds slowly, or sometimes not at all, and it lacks basic desktop-controls like selecting and editing multiple files, right click, drag-and-drop and keyboard controls. I’ll get more into organization later, but a notes app has to be snappy, Standard Notes is not.
Also, the overall experience is just buggy. Very simple things like selecting text with shift + arrows often didn’t work as expected, jumping lines or getting stuck. And while working offline on my iPad, every typed character would result in a terribly distracting blinking warning that the note couldn’t be synced.
A notes app has to be snappy, Standard Notes is not
The contrast with Joplin couldn’t be bigger. Even though Joplin is an Electron app, it feels native in every way. It’s fast, has great keyboard support and does what you expect when clicking things.
I should add that this doesn’t go for Joplin’s mobile app. It’s slower and feels way more like a wrapped website. As I do most of my work on my computer, and use the mobile app mostly for browsing and quick typing, it’s not a deal breaker. But there’s definitely room for improvement there.
Organization
Organizing notes in Standard Notes is a mess. There’s no way to select, move or tag multiple notes. There are no shortcut keys. There’s a hacky batch editor, but it does little more than batch deleting. Coming from a system with over a thousand markdown files, it took me ages to get it all sorted out.
Once again, this is very basic stuff that a notes app should just get right. Joplin does. Importing my files was a breeze. Sorting them in folders too. Quick tagging, keyboard shortcuts, it’s all there.
Also, I prefer the distinction Joplin makes between (nested) folders and tags. Folders are for organizing, tags are for topics. This allows me to sort journal entries, quotes and articles in their respective folders, while being able to easily find all kind of entries grouped around a topic. Standard Notes only has tags. Even though a similar effect can be achieved by nesting them (using an extension) it doesn’t provide the same level and ease of organization.
Navigating
Organizing notes is one thing, navigating them another. For me it’s very important to know ‘what’s where’; to be able to find what I’m looking for quickly. Standard Notes does have great full-text database search, but — ridiculously — no in-text search. There’s no way to find a word within the file you’re editing. Also, there’s no way to link from one note to another.
Joplin once again has it all. There’s a way to link to notes, even though it uses a UID for that (I prefer the vim-wiki-like, though less reliable, way of using relative paths: [link](/path/to/note)). Joplin has full-text search, in-text search and a Sublime-like Quick Find function (using ctrl+G).
TL;DR
Standard Notes still excels when it comes to out-of-the-box security. There’s one solid notes database that’s decrypted only locally within the app and not saved anywhere else. In very basic ways however, it fails as a notes app. It’s buggy, slow and it lacks very basic options for organization and navigation.
Joplin does a very descent job at encrypting notes and what’s more: it doesn’t suck.
Technosopher 
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