I've been searching for a good note taking solution for some time now. I tried Standard Notes a while ago and it didn't really "stick" for a few reasons. I've come back to Standard Notes and it seems to have improved significantly.

Requirements

In searching for a good note taking app, the following factors were important to me:

• Data portability - The ability to own my data. I don't want to tie important data up in a product that might disappear in future. Plain text is king here!

• Sync - I work on more than 1 device. I expect to be able to access my notes across all of them.

• Privacy - I do not have anything particularly sensitive in my notes, but I do value privacy. I do not want others to be able to access my notes.

• Accessibility - I need my notes to be usable and accessable at all times - even when offline.

• Discoverability - I want to be able to find my notes after I've written them. Searching, tagging, etc.

Standard notes ticks all of the boxes.

Alternatives

Some apps come close but miss out on some key features.

Google keep works well but extracting notes (portability) to plain text is fiddly. Offline access is mobile only. Privacy...well the less said about that the better!!

Obsidian is a brilliant app. More functions than standard notes. May even suit some people better. For me I found sync frustrating. I didn't want to pay just for obsidian sync so relied on syncthing. I'd prefer not to have to worry about syncing.

Standard notes strengths

Standard notes strikes a good balance between features and simplicity. The free version allows for the creation of plaintext notes, and the use of tags. The paid version offers more note types, nested tags and file storage.

Sync is as close to perfect as you'll find on any app and in my view is the killer feature. All notes sync quickly, encrypted, between all instances of apps.

Backups are about as straightforward as you can get with multiple options including encrypted, unencrypted, email and local storage.

Standard notes weaknesses

Standard notes is not perfect yet. However, with the promising pace of development I'm confident that it will get there. Some of my main frustrations are:

• Other file types - Text is great. Other file types just don't work very well on mobile. Not great for a paid extra feature. Thankfully I quite like plain text so not a showstopper.

• Keyboard shortcuts - cmon!! Let me Ctrl+f!

Overall verdict

Despite a few shortcomings Standard Notes is the best option out there for me.