I want to reach out and give you a shout-out because 2025 has for me been “ the year of Joplin”. It is the year I rediscovered Joplin. My journey started about ten years ago as an Evernote user. After that, I switched to DS Notes on Synology, used OneNote, and tried Obsidian along with other note-taking apps like Toodledo. I have certainly been on quite a journey. At the beginning of 2025, during a period of disability, I had time to rethink my strategy and rediscover Joplin. What a luck to have been in an unlucky period.
I can honestly say Joplin has become an indispensable tool for my daily life, both privately and business-wise. The organization capabilities are overwhelmingly good; it has become the backbone of my memory, my to-do lists, and my interactions with others. Finally, the information I need is at my fingertips with just a click.
The system has proven to be stable and useful across several devices, including my desktops, laptop, and mobile. Your cloud service works exactly as intended, and knowing the system is portable to other platforms adds great value.
A big thank you! Please know that you are doing a great job, and I truly appreciate supporting you as a company and a system.
the PDF exporter is really good, the file size created by Joplin is 100 times smaller than the one exported by MarkText, 123KB compared to 13MB, great job Joplin!
I love joplin for many reasons. I love how it can be integrated with my pc file system’s folders. I love the webdav. I love the search and plugins. Mermaid, katex… The firefox search integration… Everything!
Use case: I have two Desktops, one for work, and one media workstation. One laptop, a smartphone and tablet, both on android. Tablet is used with keyboard and 5G while on the road. I’m a heavy user with sometimes 50 tot 60 changes a day. I do intensive notetaking while in meeting with a client, and journaling on every phonecall also.
And what I appreciate is that Joplin works very stable for this use case with 5 devices nonetheless.
For avoiding sync issues, or conflicts, there are a few points to take care of:
Settings in Android. In “configuration” “advanced”, you set sync interval 5min, download= auto.
Upon a first launch in Android and having thousands of notes, you really have to give Joplin plenty of time to finish the first sync. I use Caffeïne to keep my screen on during that time.
Upon daily launching in Android, you better wait a for Joplin to have synced first. If you daily use Joplin on the device it will take 5 secs. If you leave Joplin alone for a week or so (it happens on my phone, given the tablet that I use more) it will take half a minute or so.
I did try Joplin with a Webdav client on my Synology. Iirc this worked well also. I can try other scenarios (have a proxmox server coming), but… changing away from Joplin cloud is not on my todo list. It works just fine, and I support the team, so why change?
@jutuiz , I like your post and your effort to give a positive feedback - unasked! When I read that you use it for private and professional affairs, I’m interested to know how you manage your to-dos with Joplin. I would really love to be able to use it for private topics as a to-do manager, but I always failed till now. Would you describe your method with Joplin in one or two sentences?
That's my experience as well. A 'desktop first' scenario is ok for managing to-dos and reminders, but as Joplin is not primarily a cloud service, reminders set on desktop late at night won't get you a push notification on your mobile device in the morning (only after opening the app).
For this and other usability reasons I've switched to CalDAV tasks for my to-dos, a standard protocol compatible with Nextcloud, Thunderbird, iOS Reminders, Android's DAVx and other apps. These tasks (basically consisting of header and body, just like a note) have also become my favourite place for quick note-taking. I'd really love to use Joplin for both notes and tasks, but in the latter job it's less than perfect IMHO.
True, former_evernotist, I understand that Joplin was not built for that so for me this is an accepted weakness. Nevertheless, I’m looking for a good solution I could override that weakness for my personal usage .
It is more or less my belief that a note keeping system is not a task manager. And vice versa. Ofcourse I tried almost everything over the last decades from Evernote, Wunderlist, Toodledo (for a very long time), Trello, Excel, paper, Google, Todoist, adapted Outlook tasks, etc etc… I have far too long used full fledged task systems like Toodledo to know that they don’t work in my case. Maintaining the system takes a dayjob in itself. I have also tried to use Evernote as task keeping system. It never worked. I have also tried those modern flashy Trello things, and found them to be far too Fisher Price like. Wow… cards that you can drag and drop. Good for doing groceries on steroids would be my guess.
In my specific situation now I don’t do extensive taskkeeping for the main part of my business. Because I have the luxury to have an employee that follows my files. So we ended up doing both the same taskkeeping, what seemed a terrible waste of time. Knowing that we typically have like 800 outstanding tasks (let’s say 100 clients with current issues, with each 8 subtasks is not uncommon in our business), so it is a hell of a job to keep track, and to maintain. We are also mainly Outlook classic based, turning mails into tasks is easy, categorized by client as a custom field is the way it works in our case.
But… I do have worked out a system in Joplin, that is mostly abandoned now for the professional part of my life, I do keep it for my private life.
I don’t use tasks as a form of note,
I use the Inline Todo plugin, which allows me to write down todo’s as a line in a note. Each note is based on a canvas where todo’s reside under a heading on top of the note (using outline plugin is easy for this).
I also use slash commands plugin to insert in the todo-line things like @todo and date and times. Entering // followed by date makes a “Due” tag. Entering @andsomething adds a tag. These data make sense for the TodoSummary note that is generated automatically.
I extract the TodoSummary note to Excel like once in a week to determine the todo list for that week
Also:
I use a Para method for notekeeping. I mainly stick to GTD, reviewing the professional tasks and todo’s twice a week (with my colleague).
I use a simple piece of paper to note down the 5 main todo’s for today and stick with them. Mostly for focusing reasons. Paper is easy, and does not distract, and is easy to follow top-down. Eating the frog in the morning.
I review my notes (my journals) twice a day to extract professional todo’s from them and communicate them via mail, and add private todo’s in one the many notes. Those last tasks eventually end up in the TodoSummary note.
I don’t care about notifications on Smartphone (for the obvious reason: there are just too many)
thank you @jutuiz for taking the time for a long answer, especially during the holiday season! I’ll check your method for me and will try to learn from it for my own needs!
That's a habit I can't get rid of as well. It's good to hear however that different tools can coexist peacefully with one another: Joplin, Excel, task management with CalDAV or pen and paper.
I think Apple's Notes, Reminders and Calendar apps come closest to a unified system. As I don't want to be locked in their ecosystem, I won't follow that path however.
One of the great things about Joplin is the fact that it's platform-agnostic, so I think that it would profit a lot from better mobile usability, just like Apple does.
I agree. I understand that Joplin started with a clear desktop focus. I also think the mobile application is crucial for Joplins future success and I really appreciate that the developing team around Laurant was able to make some improvements to the mobile apps lately - showing that they read the signs as well.
As platforms more and more harmonise mobile apps, web apps and desktop applications -e.g. look at Microsofts Outlook or Apples latest iPad OS - it will be interesting to see how Joplin will evolve in the future.
In fact I never intended to make a desktop app. The goal was always to have a mobile app and CLI client so that I can have my notes on my phone and computer, and desktop app came later by popular demand
Oh! Thanks for that reply! I don‘t know why I thought that desktop was the main focus instead of a mobile app. Perhaps it's because the desktop app appears to be more advanced and equipped with additional features, whereas the development of the mobile app had not kept pace – a situation that now seems to be changing. Especially the mobile UI is still something I struggle with (without being an expert, just a user), but I know, capacity is limited.
.