After years of loyal user of Standard Notes, I have decided to migrate to Obsidian. Just to be fair, this decision is not born out of dissatisfaction with Standard Notes as product. It remains solid, reliable and privacy respecting tool that has served me exceptionally well.

A brief overview

Standard Notes is a privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted note-taking application that has been my trusted companion for many years. It offers a clean, distraction-free environment for capturing thoughts, ideas, and important information. With its strong emphasis on security and simplicity, it provides a safe vault for personal notes across multiple devices.

Obsidian, on the other hand, is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. It allows users to create links between notes, build complex networks of interconnected ideas, and extend functionality through a vast ecosystem of community plugins. The data remains fully under the user’s control, stored locally as standard Markdown files. It also supports sync, where you can pay for the default Obsidian service (the way I’m using) or find a community plugins to sync using your own server (supports webdav, sftp, ssh, and different protocols).

The reason for the change

The primary driver behind this migration is that my workflow has evolved and become more complex over the time. I now require:

  • Note Linking and Knowledge graphing - the hability to connect ideas and visualise relationships between concepts has become essencial to me.
  • Journal / Diary notes - It’s possible to achieve this with Standard Notes, but the process works much better in Obsidian
  • Plugin extensibility - Obsidian boasts a thriving plugin ecosystem that enables me to customise the application exactly to my requirements. Task management, Kanban boards, drawing, or advanced formatting, the available plugins are excellent and helps with a more complex workflow.

I have also noticed that Standard Notes appears to have slowed in development since the Proton acquisition. The interface, while functional, feels outdated, and new features have been rarely implemented. However, I want to emphasise that this is an observation rather than a criticism. Standard Notes is not a bad tool, it simply was designed with a different philosophy and use case in mind, but served me very well over the past years.

I also evaluated Logseq, an application I have used in the past. While it offers note linking, graph visualisation, and other advanced features, it still lacks the level of flexibility that Obsidian provides, in special with sync to multiple devices.