I recently wanted to move away from Apple’s Notes app, since it doesn’t allow storing the actual notes anywhere als than iCloud. So I started a journey regarding self-hosting my notes …
Goals
I had some goals, since coming from an app from Apple usually means good UI and thoughtful overall design and capabilities.
- An editor with actual live editing capabilities, not only writing plain markdown, since this is not nice on a smartphone
- A good looking UI
- A portable format for notes without vendor lock-in
- The actual capability to write whole articles right within the app, not only short form notes
- Decent mobile experience
The options
Checking out selfhst.sh regarding note-taking apps, there were quite a few. Many just didn’t work for me or didn’t align with my goals, but there were I few I was actually using a reasonable amount of time.
Joplin
From the feature set, Joplin is without a doubt a very good solution. It can properly manage notes and even has a native iOS app. From UI standpoint though, I was a little bit dissatisfied.
Poznote
Poznote can work with mardown and HTML files, the latter via an interactive editor. The UI is not the best for me, but it works. It is a relatively new project, but the developer is very responsive.
Trilium Notes
Trilium Notes had all the features I needed, but I couldn’t get warm with the UI. To me, it looked a little bit old.
Zen Notes
For me, Zen Notes had the best UI, as it was very similar to Apple Notes before the Liquid Glass update in macOS 26. The downside was that I needed to explicitly enable the edit mode before I could edit a note – and was required to write markdown with it.
And the winner is …
… Poznote 🎉
While the UI looks similar to Trilium Notes, as I just noted while writing this, it just feels better for me. Also, it can work with markdown as well as an HTML editor. And especially the developer is very responsive and already added some features I requested – e.g. allowing to load custom CSS to adjust the UI. This way, I ended up with one that looks a little bit like Apple’s Notes app or Zen Notes.
Leave a Reply