I used Standard Notes paid for over a year, and switched to Obsidian recently.
My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use.
Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it across devices just by sharing the folder. SN is a great concept, but there’s a lot of design decisions I hated while using it.
I did the exact same swap recently. Obsidian is far superior.
I even paid for the 5 year Standard Notes subscription as I believed in the project and assumed design improvements would come, but the editor experience never improved and just feels clunky.
Same here. I'm unlikely to renew. I'm now using Joplin and synchronizing it to a small Nginx WebDAV server, which I back up to Rsync.net using Borg. It's certainly "cloud" enough for me. But too involved and technical for most people.
I bought the 5 year sub and completely agree on the desktop app clunkiness, it's been so many years but there's still no right click menus. I use it once in awhile and still find myself trying to right click > archive or right click > pin or whatever.
I've liked Standard Notes. It's really nice that it's open source and encrypted. However I ran into some instances of cross-device conflicting edits which were a bit annoying, and Obsidian's UI and Second Brain features swayed me to try it. The graph view is really cool and I realized I didn't need syncing as much as I thought.
Obsidian does seem to also have a paid sync feature (no mobile app yet). For now I've been emailing myself from my phone and taking small audio memos, then typing them into Obsidian when back at my laptop. Not an ideal workflow but it's not bad and has some advantages.
I set up syncthing on my two computers and my phone. It was surprisingly simple and works pretty well (after I turned off battery optimisation on it on the phone).
using Markor as an acceptable way of making small edits and notes on my phone for fleshing out later.
Conflicts are normal in syncing. Even git has conflicts. Although SN's conflict resolution is a bit weird where it creates multiple copies of the note...I think this may be because they mark conflicted notes on the server using timestamps.
Also moved everything to Obsidian. The free plugins from developer contributors are fantastic. Sync to mobile is free with some know-how, otherwise the paid option seems fairly priced.
Maybe try Roam Research if you want cloud based notes. The fact that there's no cloud based functionality in Obsidian is one of the major reasons why I chose it though.
My experience with SN was that the editors are half fleshed out, incompatible with each other, and make it hard to use with other tools. The notes can be markdown, html, text, or other formats as well as being encrypted. This makes exporting very annoying to use.
Contrast to other tools like obsidian.. it’s just markdown. I can sync it across devices just by sharing the folder. SN is a great concept, but there’s a lot of design decisions I hated while using it.