Joplin

Joplin is a Markdown-based notes application with desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. It replaces Evernote for people who want full ownership over their notes: you choose where the sync goes, and end-to-end encryption means the sync server never sees your content in plaintext.

Sync works with WebDAV, Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, and the commercial Joplin Cloud service. For self-hosters, pointing it at a Nextcloud instance is the common setup — no extra infrastructure needed beyond what you likely already run.

The plugin ecosystem extends Joplin beyond basic note-taking: math rendering, spell check, custom themes, code formatting, and a web clipper extension that saves web pages directly into your notebook. Notes can be organised into nested notebooks and tagged for cross-cutting retrieval.

One clear limitation: Joplin is a personal notes tool, not a team collaboration platform. Notes do not support real-time co-editing, and sharing is limited to exporting or generating temporary share links. If you need team wikis or collaborative documents, BookStack or Outline serve that use case. Joplin is for your own notes, journals, research, and to-dos — stored on your terms.

With 55,000 GitHub stars and consistent development since 2017, it is one of the most mature self-hosted note-taking options available.