A couple months back, I decided to start using Notesnook. It always interested me as a newer note taking tool that supports End-to-end encryption.

I ended up signing up for the free trial. Giving it a whirl, and then subscribing for a year after my trial period was up. Since it was a first time subscription, they were offering a discount of 50% off, so I got the year for $25.

However, I am now two months into using Notesnook, and I finally made the decision to move everything over to Obsidian. The last few weeks have seen Notesnook starting to bug out and cause issues for me. Not to mention, the limitations of the Notebook/Topic/Note structure was starting to cause issues.

Issues I faced

First, I started to notice syncing issues. One of the main things I used Notesnook for was for syncing my notes between my work machine and my personal device. Initially, it worked wonders. However, over the last couple of weeks, syncing kept failing, and if I didn't notice it when I closed out the application, when I go to open Notesnook on my other device, it would not be updated, and I would spend 5-10 minutes figuring out if the issue was that my current computer wasn't pulling down notes, or if my notes never synced up to the cloud from my other computer.

Second, Markdown syntax was starting to bug out. I have long used Markdown, and prefer it to using keyboard shortcuts whenever possible. Notesnook advertises that they have Markdown support, so I was happy to be able to use Markdown when writing Notes.

However, over the last month, I have been getting periodic failures where the editor will not convert my Markdown syntax, and instead would force me to remove the markdown, highlight the word, and hit the keyboard shortcut to bold/italicize/underline/etc.

It was getting frustrating to the point where sometimes it would throw me off, and cause me to start making typing errors when I was "in the groove" of taking notes on something.

The Markdown issues alone have caused me to make the decision to move to Obsidian. Although I'm not a huge fan of Obsidian being closed source, I do know that their Markdown support is infinitely better, and I can better organize my notes within Obsidian. The only thing I am not looking forward too is either paying $96 a year for note syncing, or figuring out a different way to sync notes between my work laptop and my personal laptop...

Do I recommend Notesnook?

I think Notesnook would be great if you are coming from something like OneNote, Apple Notes, or other more basic note taking apps.

It provides a "good enough" feature set that will get you by, and it also provides E2EE, which is wonderful.

However, if you are looking for something more powerful, like Notion or Obsidian, then I would say use those instead, as Notesnook may lead you to be disappointed.

One final thing to mention is that Notesnook development is slow. Which makes sense as it is a small 3 person team that handles it. But, the Markdown issue was reported nearly 3 weeks ago, and I provided a video showcasing the issue, to which the dev's still labeled it as Can't reproduce and never fixed it (I wasn't the only one having the issue).

As a heavy Markdown user, this was a huge negative for me, and I just couldn't take it anymore.