Note Station vs. Joplin

[RonV42]

As my journey to "de-cloud" my services I have one item left to address, I have been a heavy OneNote user for years, I have been poking around with Note Station which seems to work good and then a recommendation from a peer at work was to try Joplin. I stood up a container of Joplin this weekend and started to do some comparison of the two applications. Since they seem to have mostly the same features I do like the layout of Note Station a bit better.

As I think about supporting this long term and that items like updates are backups of data. With Synology it's easy to backup with Hyper Backup, where is with Joplin I would have to shutdown take a snapshot and restart then backup the snapshot. Also the Client side applications both desktop and mobile ease of use, and how fast vulnerabilities are patched are what I am weighing in selecting the winner.

What is everyone thoughts on these two applications?

 

[Telos]

I left Note Station for Joplin, due to bugginess and incomplete features. For the most part Note Station is no longer under feature development, with only occasional bug or security updates provided. As well, there is little user technical support for Note Station to speak of. Joplin excels in those areas. You'll need to make your own decision.

Your comments about the difficulty of backing up Joplin don't line up with my experience. I ran Joplin on the NAS using WebDAV. The Joplin clients have an internal backup system, where you can regularly export your entire database, and its resources.

A huge advantage with Joplin is its portability across all types of systems, whereas Note Station is quite specific to Synology and leaving Note Station for other types of note applications is an arduous journey, not for the faint-hearted.

As I make liberal use of the web clipper, Joplin's feature is far superior than what Note Station offers.

Finally, you cannot compare either Joplin or Note Station with OneNote. They are more aligned with Evernote. Let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll try to answer.

 

[Rusty]

What is everyone thoughts on these two applications?

Just a heads up, Note Station has no dedicated development team inside Syno for years (I have that on good authority).

Regarding some other solution, I was looking towards Outline backup in the day but it had some issue that I was not comfortable with and It required too many containers to get the whole solution up and running.

Ended up using Bookstack with a compromise of not having a dedicated mobile app (but it is mobile friendly)

 

[RonV42]

Thanks for the info on Note Station. Sounds like it's on life support. I forgot that Joplin supported file systems in addition to the DB/sever. I tend to like using databases vs. file systems for applications that is why I stood up the Joplin server (says beta) and a dedicated database. Yep a bit more work to backup and maintain as I stated in my first post.

Bookstack looks interesting since you have a web interface zero client install and follows a Book, Chapter, page model along the lines of OneNote. How does one do "web clipping" in Bookstack

 

[Telos]

I agree with @Rusty. If you're migrating from OneNote, Bookstack is an excellent substitute. I'm in the process of starting that migration myself. Presently I use the NAS to store my OneNote content.

Although Bookstack has no mobile application counterpart my experience with OneNote is that the mobile application is sorely lacking.

I also found that for my use, OneNote's web clipper feature was inferior, and I ended up using copy paste for many of my web citations.

Transferring OneNote pages into Bookstack is another topic altogether. Perhaps Rusty can shed some light on his experience.

 

[Rusty]

How does one do "web clipping" in Bookstack

Unfortunately one does not. There are no extensions (browser) for this app so a classic copy-paste is what will have to happen.

Keep in mind that Bookstack is mainly a "wiki" like platform, so unlike pocket or similar it is geared towards multiple document types (depending on what you want) and supports markdown as well. Guess there is no "easy" way atm to support the development of an extension that would convert content from the web, to a suitable format.

Transferring OneNote pages into Bookstack is another topic altogether

As I never used MS OneNote I can't comment on this from a 1st hand experience.

 

[Telos]

As I never used MS OneNote I can't comment on this from a 1st hand experience.

AFAIK, it is a miserable experience.

First, you are limited with copy/paste... however "paste" (Ctrl+V) pastes a PNG file of your OneNote page into Bookstack.

Alternately, you can use Ctrl+Shift+V, which copies plain text into Bookstack, so if you have formatting, it is lost.

The only way I can make this work is to double copy/paste. For example ... paste the OneNote page into a rich text word processor. Then copy all and paste from the word processor into Bookstack.

This limitation may be browser limited, I'm not sure. Overall, it is a poor migration process.

 

[johngo54]

I used NoteStation on my old NAS for a while, then abandoned it in favor of OneNote. On my new(er) NAS, which runs Docker, I've been using Trilium Notes. It runs as a Docker container, it has a browser extension for Chrome and FireFox, enabling you to quickly add notes while browing, and it has a Windows application. All integrates very smoothly. Recommended.

 

[RonV42]

Thanks everyone for the feedback over the weekend. I have a lot to digest over the next few weeks, maybe do a bakeoff between those mentioned here. I finally got email to work in the Joplin server along with HTTPS with a public cert, bookstack is on my list and then Trilium and others.

I think the big issue will be the wife factor vs. me, she uses OneNote for projects where I use it for collecting bits and bytes and then updating documentation for my home and hobbies. Microsoft put a lot into OneNote and Office integration that will be tough to match.

 

[BobW]

I used back in the day NoteStation, but it was to buggy and slow, then I came across (docker) Standardnotes which was very good to my satisfaction until they changed everything and I had to run a “thousand” containers for just one simple notes app, and after every update something broke again.

After all these frustrations I decided to switch to Joplin and I’m very satisfied so far. Just one simple (server) container connected to my already running Postgres database. It is a breeze to maintain compared to Standardnotes!
Also the plugins are a nice welcome, they are actively developed and support is much better than the Standardnotes support.

And as for backing up, I don't find it a problem at all to back up joplin, in fact it's very simple. I have a script running via dsm task and it makes a database dump from the joplin database according to a certain schedule, I don't have to worry about it. At certain times I get a notification via telegram and/or mail that the backup is done.
And every now and then I check the backup folder if these dumps went well, that's all!