Saturday 13 Apr 2024 at 06:54

Today I am having a mental battle of the note takers.

In the red corner is Obsidian, a heavy hitter with more plugins than you can shake a stick at.

In the blue corner is Standard notes, an end-to-end encrypted note taker.

Which one will win the title as my go-to note taker, let the battle commence.

Round 1: User interface

Although at first both are quite the confusing interface. It took me longer to figure out the navigation in Obsidian than it did in Standard Notes, but once I had I found obsidian is easier to navigate while having a lot more options for personalisation. The daily notes button being great for writing a journal.

Standard Notes UI comes across a little plain and I think I prefer the side bar of Obsidian that pops in and out as I want it so that I can have more writing real estate. Not that it matters much as the text is taking up the middle of the screen anyway, whereas Standard Notes uses the entire width of the screen. I’m not sure which of those options I like more.

Overall, I would say Obsidian has a more polished interface so Obsidian wins round 1.

Round 2: Encryption

This may seem like a simple winner for Simple Notes, and I think it probably is. It is end-to-end encrypted. Obsidian does have end-to-end encryption when syncing files in their paid sync option but since I only use iCloud for obsidian I don’t really have a need to use it. That would be a great option for people who use multiple OS’s as I would imagine apple doesn’t make syncing that simple.

My Obsidian vault is stored on the iCloud which is encrypted too, nowadays. So technically I am getting end-to-end encryption with Obsidian.

For me at least, obsidian does sync across devices faster than Standard Notes but the difference is negligible.

Round 2 winner: draw

Round 3: Pricing

Obsidian wins this one again I’m afraid. £119 per year from Standard Notes for the features I can get for free on Obsidian.

Winner

It looks like Obsidian wins overall, so I will probably keep using that while keeping an eye on what happens with Standard Notes over the next few months since they have joined forces with Proton. I have a proton subscription and they might provide a better tier for the subscribed users.

Watch this space.