Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work

SN's free version is...very limited. Almost all their cool features are in the paid version. Cool features being different editors. But even with that, their feature parity across platforms is not really great.

(Aside: you can check Notesnook (https://notesnook.com) out as an alternative. Disclaimer: I am the dev).

The web has lasted a long time with near 100% backwards compatibility. It will likely continue to last.

I really miss tomboy (not the new ng version). I used it for years and it was amazing. Rich text without having to use markdown. Razor fast responsiveness when searching. Instant hyperlinks just by typing the name of another note. Excellent keyboard shortcuts too.

I really miss it but it was no longer maintained and falling into disrepair on newer OSes due to lacking support for DPI scaling and dark modes.

I use onenote now as it comes with O365 anyway but like most things microsoft it's bloated and slow. It offers a lot more features (tomboy couldn't even do inline pictures!) But fast responsiveness means more to me.

I'd consider standard notes but there's so many of these apps around and most are not WYSIWYG editors but instead markdown with a separate preview window. I hate that. And they tend to be slow electron stuff which makes them no better than onenote.

Not sure if this one is an exception but if so I might try it.

Standard Notes is a phenomenal note taking app and one of the first to bring encryption in note taking. They take security very seriously and have multiple third party audits.

With that said, the bad outweigh the good. I don't mean to be a pessimist here (SN is inspirational) but:

1. Their free plan is extremely lacking. You can't even try out many of their editors.

2. Their pro plan mostly only offers editors. I am not sure how having 3 kinds of rich text editors is helpful but they have them.

3. They don't allow any form of account recovery. Which sounds really epic on paper but once you forget your password, you lose all your data.

4. The feature parity between their different apps across platforms is abysmal. The android app is notoriously feature lacking compared to the Web version. (They did put out an update which hopefully changes things).

5. In my extensive usage of the app, conflicts are very normal. I have no issue with that but there's no way to resolve them without creating duplicate copies of the note which clutters up the UI.

5. the UX is poor. No right click on notes, no distraction free mode, no way to collapse the huge notes list.

6. Search and organization seems like an after thought. The only way to organize is via tags. Tags are nice and all but there's not much you can do with them.

7. Their pricing seems absurd.

8. The development seems to be going no where. They are active but many of the above issues are still not addressed.

But as I said, it's not all bad. Most people won't notice the above in their initial usage. They have a solid app with okay features.

If you are a new user looking for encrypted notes and all that hosh posh or just an alternative to SN, you should also give Notesnook[1][2] a try; it solves all of the above issues in a sensible way. Do note that I am the dev so I am obviously biased. It's not perfect but I think it is a better alternative.

[1]https://notesnook.com/

[2]https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/ (it's not open source but the repo has some good FAQ that you might be interested in reading).