Joplin Reviews

Joplin mostly works, but has a cumbersome UI and is full of annoying bugs which demonstrate a lack of ability or willingness on the part of the developer to properly test Joplin . Examples include inserting multiple new lines when you hit enter once, deleting the wrong character, messing up indentation and capitalization, graphical glitches, inserting images into the wrong place, etc. You can’t tap the end of a line without it selecting the last word on the line for no reason. If you select a block of text and perform some operation on that selection, like turning into a bullet list, Joplin will change what you have selected and perform that operation on what you didn’t even have selected. There is no way to undo, so hopefully it didn’t ruin your document. Sometimes the controls will simply disappear for no apparent reason and you’ll need to restart Joplin to get them back. The date format is day/month/year regardless of the device’s date locale settings. Also, the export function just fails silently. Most of these bugs can be reproduced every single time, so the only possible explanations are that the developer never bothered testing Joplin or simply doesn't care enough to fix them

Joplin is very difficult to use as it doesn’t follow normal iOS ways of doing things.

I tried to set up WebDav sync, and it took several tries because I didn’t notice that the little icon next to the settings title needed to be hit to save my changes. Really? iOS standards are to automatically save stuff like that do users don’t have to deal with it.

I created a single notebook with a single note. No idea where they are because they don’t appear in Joplin . Maybe there was some little save icon I missed seeing. They did get saved to my WebDav server, so it somehow managed to save the data but I can’t access it in Joplin .

Oh, and the file names on the WebDav server are hash values rather than anything like the title of the note or notebook, so when looking at the WebDav file system, it’s impossible to locate your note without searching the text. It would be so much better if the file name at least had some relationship to the note title

The basic feature of any FOSS data organizer / note taker app is data portability. Whatever data you put into it, you should be able to export out without any data loss.

And that’s where this app fails. By design. Every attachment, every photo, every PDF you put in it is automatically renamed with some gibberish ID string and the original filename is forever lost. If you put years worth of records in it, and then decide to use some other app, you end up with hundreds or thousands of attachment files with names that make no sense.
This is a horrible design choice.

I love the syncing features, but the interface for entering text is so buggy, Joplin is pretty much unusable, except for reading notes entered elsewhere. Sometimes when I type, everything randomly comes out all-caps. Auto-correct does not work at all, and predictive text sees each letter as a separate word. Using dictation works - but only one word at a time. : /

This is the only app I’ve ever encountered on the iPhone that has such a remarkably troubled interface for simply entering text. Right now the only way to use it is to enter text in Apple Notes (or any other app, really), copy it, and paste it into this app.

I hope this improves, but for now, I’ll need to use another app.

I will start by saying that I am a longtime this app user and huge fan. Unfortunately, one of the recent updates broke Joplin for iPhone 13 Pro (at least my phone) Sharing to this app now puts the webpage address in the title when it used to leave it blank, so now an extra step is needed to first delete the title and then paste or type the correct one. Worse yet, Joplin consistently freezes often. I find that I have to force close Joplin after 3 or four article shares. I think (but can’t remember exactly) that this issue developed before the latest update.

this app is staring to lose its polish. Literally not being able to edit notes on mobile for months because you can’t scroll is absurd, the most basic functionality of Joplin is broken.

Lots of glaring bugs even a cursory test of Joplin would uncover introduced in recent updates and no new version to address them in almost two months.

this app being a free app and having good platform support and existing goodwill (which is quickly being burned) still merits a few stars.

this app is amazing on Desktop, but the mobile version is behind. It has improved a bit over the last couple of years, but I wish it were more of a mobile-first project.

Syncing works very well with NextCloud. It would be nice if there font options for the rendered view. Dark mode doesn't look right on iPhone 11 Max. There are random white squares at the top and bottom. Overall just feels a bit wonky still and not polished.

The beta editor is bizarre. The rendered view goes away and is replaced with a tiny preview window and difficult to use shortcut buttons. I wish there was simply edit/view/WYSIWYG views you could switch between and just add the shortcut buttons to the markdown editor view.

this app could take some UI/UX cues from the Notebooks app. This might come down to this app being react native vs an actual iOS app. Notebooks is superior in experience, but this app is superior in privacy/security, sync, and web clipping/API features. I'm stuck between the two!

Joplin is incredible. I’ve been able to consolidate from Apples Notes and several others to just this one app.

I’ve only found one bug so far: at one point I tried to share a link from safari into this app. Ever since then every time I open this app, it recreates a new note with that link as the title. Almost like there is some stale sharing state lingering in Joplin .

Thank you very much for this wonderful app! I use it all the time. But I just discovered a small bug that I hope you can fix. The search feature (running Joplin on an iPhone) will not pick up a word or phrase which is enclosed in quotes: the quotes seem to make those words invisible to the search function.

It would be great if you could fix us! Thank you very much for a great app!

Joplin together with Dropbox has some serious potential to kick Evernote and Standard Notes to the curb, if you want an app with native markdown support, cross-platform support, and end-to-end encryption, give this app a try.

If the iOS user interface was on par with the Windows interface, and you could share files to and from this app in iOS, it would eclipse other markup-based note taking applications.

If this iOS experience were on par with Windows, I would give it 5 stars.

I used this and the basic this app Cloud for much better security, and it came with no problems. It simply works, including for being transferred (remember to give it time to sync) or printing from a computer, and it's formatted nicely on at least mobile devices. Though it does its job perfectly, I reassessed the options and switched back to apple notes, which I feel encrypts my data more reliably and cheaply with my settings.

I was looking for a tool that I could use to organize and access my burgeoning collection of notes, and Joplin is ideal for me. I can use Markdown within my notes to easily create tables, etc. I can easily add jpegs and pngs to my notes. I can easily create links from within one note to another. I can easily rearrange my notebooks and move notes around without breaking links between them. I can easily access and work on my notes on my MacBook Pro, my iPad Pro, my iPad Mini, and my iPhone. I decided to try Joplin ‘s reasonably priced this app Cloud, and it’s working beautifully. I‘ve got end-to-end encryption that is nearly invisible, in terms of how long it takes for things to sync and open. Did I mention the healthy community of plugins available, or how much I enjoy being able to also call up this app and run it from the command line when I‘m programming? When I was first setting up Joplin , I had to work through a couple of glitches, which was made much easier byte developer’s responsiveness and Joplin ‘s active discussion boards. Right now I’ve got 482 notes in 42 folders, revised 1,024 times (?!). Some are quite short and others are vey long. Joplin has never choked or lagged, and searches are very fast. I love Joplin and use it all day, every day.

As a long-time user of Evernote I finally got fed up with price increases and their business practices since the acquisition. This is the first app I’ve found that allows easy import of Evernote data. For a free app it works well and allows easy access across many devices. Not as feature rich as others, but it just gets the job done.

I'm using it with Nextcloud on my iPhone and Macbook...it's awesome. I've run into a couple bugs and the GUI could be a little nicer but this app honestly has all the features that I was looking for. If you take privacy seriously and want a full-featured, cross-platform notes app this is for you.

Feature Request: The web clipper extension is one of my favorite features on desktop and I would love to see it implemented on IOS. If I could save web pages to this app on my phone I wouldn't need Pocket anymore.

Joplin allows you to easily take notes on almost any computer or mobile device while also having features that many paid apps don’t have such as: end to end encryption, tagging AND folder structure, and offline sync that works on iOS + Linux. Plus it is open source software that focuses on privacy, security, and functional design. It may not be as aesthetic as some other apps, but you will get work done in this app instead of staring at white space or trying to figure out how to use it.

Ten years ago I discovered Evernote, and loved how much it allowed me to do - for free.
After several years, I decided to go to the paying plan, mostly because it would allow me to put my many notebooks into folders.
Then, a couple years ago, I noticed the prices climbing - bad sign. According to Moore’s law, tech is an industry runs on deflation. (Planned obsolescence is manipulating the market to increase activity.) But Evernote was undergoing inflation.
Then I heard about this app, a free app that could take the place of Evernote.
It has worked very well, being designed ingeniously.
Two little things I wish were improved:
1. A slightly more conspicuous way to donate for users who don’t get the membership
2. A folder menu that took up more of the screen, so I can read the folder names and not just the names of the notes on the current folder

I’ve been trying to make Joplin my go-to for notes and to-do lists, and it’s going really great. There’s one function that I would love to see implemented in mobile sooner rather than later, tho: lists auto-adding the appropriate markup for the next line when I hit enter. right now it doesn’t continue the list which isn’t really a problem for simple bullets but for checkboxes (four, five extra characters) it’s too much of a hassle to be useable at this point.

However I’m working around it and am enjoying Joplin a lot. Thanks for the work you’re doing!

I am a 10+ year Evernote user. I have tried close to a dozen apps. I’ve been following a this app for a couple years and it is making definite strides. Still lacking a few things but it is moving forward and I’m starting to use it more regularly. The syncing options are fantastic! I’m really in love with this project to have an open source note taking app that is multi platform and leaves you as the owner of your material. I’m on the edge of fully embracing this app as my primary productivity app in place of Evernote that has gotten buggy, slow and expensive.

The name says it all. I grew tired of Evernote and wanted to switch to a FOSS alternative that I could self host. It doesn’t match Evernote feature for feature but in terms of my core needs, I have no complaints. Pleasant interface, cross platform, nested notebooks and tags, end to end encryption, multimedia notes, decent search. Importing from Evernote was very easy.

The things I miss about Evernote are the OCR to search within PDFs, the better polish around their search UI and smarter search in general, and the ability to share notes via the web app (this app doesn’t have a web UI). All in all, I can live with these trade offs considering that Joplin is completely free and I own all of my own data.

I gave it some stars because I'm so grateful for a nice Evernote alternative. But it immediately crashes on my iOS 9 iPad. It is my first install and I'm still getting familiar. But I reinstalled anyway, and it still immediately crashes. It may be the last straw to get me to upgrade to iOS 12 (final iOS for my iPad). But I don't wanna so I'll wait for a fix for a bit.