And if there is a migration tool from onenote to the alternative that would be even better.
I’ll definitely check it out. I saw someone made a onenote export tool for it too.
I use Joplin. Have for several years. I sync it through my Nexcloud instance. Joplin is probably what you want. I looked at a lot of stuff.
The other software I love is the Zim desktop wiki. I have that on my main system for many thousands of notes. It has a hierarchical structure which means it scales better. It also can handle multiple notebooks too like Joplin. I find with Zim I need to split into notebooks just for speed when the collection is too far above 5000 notes.
Joplin is great. It can’t do the handwritten notes like onenote as far as I know, but otherwise I think it’s got pretty good feature parity. You can sync it using an existing nextcloud, WebDAV, or even onedrive or dropbox if you don’t want to deal with the hassle of self-hosting at all.
I see Joplin being recommended a lot and with some onenote migration tools I think I’m leaning towards it. I use onenote to copy paste images and then type in notes, but also use a drawing tablet to write some short notes on images and highlight stuff; sometimes mouse if I’m too lazy to connect the tablet. Is Joplin able to do that? I don’t do like entire pages of handwritten notes.
Since Joplin got a shoutout here, i feel like Notesnook should be mentioned as well – feels more polished and is potentially a good e2ee Evernote alternative. Not sure about OneNote tho
I use Obsidian. It is simple and easy to use but very feature filled. It uses Markdown and stores files locally.
Not everybody will mind but Obsidian isn’t FOSS unfortunately. That said I think their business model is very reasonable and import/export is super easy because everything is markdown. Some FOSS alternatives are Trillium and Logseq.
I’ve been very happy with logseq and use org as the file format since I also use emacs and orgmode. But having logseq being a dedicated notes solution on desktop and mobile has been great.
I know that OP isn’t interested in syncing, but another FOSS application I use in conjuction is Syncthing. I use it to sync between my devices, while still being local (to my own devices).
Xournal++ is the most similar in intention I believe.
I personally use a combination of logseq (FOSS) and obsidian (not FOSS, freemium I think). Obsidian is currently better on the tablet due to some particularly well put together plugins and a recent feature update but I’d like to move completely to logseq long term. However, if you’re looking for a touch centric experience it’s hard to deny that obsidian is the best in the ecosystem.
Of those options which would you recommend for a desktop user where majority of interfacing will be with keyboard and mouse? Particularly if I’m looking to migrate over lot of data from onenote to it.
Looks like exporting from OneNote to markdown is not ideal, so if you’re not willing to go the copy-paste route or manual entry you may want to look elsewhere. That said I think it’s a toss up between logseq and obsidian. Of course one is FOSS and one is not so keep that in mind if it’s a dealbreaker. They take slightly different approaches to the minimum size of a piece of content. Obsidian uses a page format (like joplin) while logseq is indexing on something closer in spirit to a paragraph (though these can be of arbitrary length). This has a couple of unique benefits like being able to automate the creation of flashcards and similar review tools. Both have vibrant plugin communities.
