AKakyuu·May 11, 2026Submission
Notesnook: An end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote
3 points · Open discussionstreetwriters
notesnook
TypeScript2021–2026
streetwriters / notesnook
notesnook
A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote.
9Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
14.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year15 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-04-01 19:09:23 UTC to 2026-05-11 16:38:47 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
15 sourcesHello everyone!
After around 2 years, we are back on HN with a massive update for Notesnook. But before that, here's a short introduction:
Notesnook is an end-to-end encrypted, 100% open source [0] note taking app that prioritizes user privacy.
v3 brings a lot of really radical changes, such as:
- Migration to SQLite
- At rest encryption
- Note linking
- Nested notebooks
- App lock on all platforms
You can read more about all these here: https://blog.notesnook.com/introducing-notesnook-v3/
Our goal with Notesnook has always been to make privacy simpler to adopt for normal users who don't have time to think about privacy. We do that by making privacy that "default" everywhere in the app. We recently crossed 100K registered users with over 4 million notes created on our platform.
If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer.
[0]: http
Read the rest
The home page title has the word zero knowledge, I guess?
Their GitHub has slightly more info regarding this, but I agree that stuff like this should have at least a page dedicated for it that explains how they've implemented their security.
> Notesnook is a free (as in speech) & open-source note-taking app focused on user privacy & ease of use. To ensure zero knowledge principles, Notesnook encrypts everything on your device using XChaCha20-Poly1305 & Argon2.
https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
In Notesnook – open-source and zero knowledge private note taking appThese guys also tried to submit PRs on the Notesnook[0] repository. The PRs are really good but there's no way to talk to the actual developer working behind those PRs. They have a single central account named "gitstart" and all PRs that any of their user works on falls under that account. Of course, we couldn't accept PRs from them because they don't follow DCO[1] i.e., DCO requires that the committer MUST NOT be an organization.
I talked to them about this and they said they'd work on it etc. etc. Not sure if anything has changed in that regard or not.
[0] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
[1] https://developercertificate.org/
In Launch HN: GitStart (YC S19) – Remote junior devs working on production PRsor Notesnook[1], which is also open-source, and E2E. I find it better and more reliable than SN.
[1] https://notesnook.com [2] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
In Beaver Notes: A Privacy-Focused Open-Source Note-Taking AppUnless I'm missing something very obvious, the source repository https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook only includes the client apps and not the server, and the parent organization "streetwriters" doesn't seem to have any other repositories for the server. How are you supposed to run your own instance without that?
There's also a lot of marketing-speak in the repository documentation and little to no documentation on how to actually deploy it. Overall this leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
Compare this for example to Bookstack, which gets right to the point for how to install and deploy, with no marketing nonsense. https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack
In A fully open-source and end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to EvernoteA fully open-source and end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote
169 points · Open discussionShow HN: Open Sourcing Notesnook – an end to end encrypted private notes app
10 points · Open discussionThe author posted this in a recent discussion on GitHub [0]. Thought I'd share it to get more opinions on the matter.
Personally speaking it irks me a little when different terms are made ownership by someone. OSI is doing great work but is it considered an authority when it comes to defining what open source is? In other words, can open source exist without OSI? I certainly think so.
For example, what does it mean when Sentry says their licensing scheme is not acceptable by OSI [1]? Does it change the meaning of open source?
It's really confusing.
[0] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/discussions/747#d...
[1] https://open.sentry.io/licensing/
In Why the term "open source" is importantNotesnook (encrypted notes app) is going open source
4 points · Open discussionI have been using Notesnook[0] for over a year (mostly because its encrypted and private) and it has helped me tremendously. Obsidian is too text-editor-esque for me. I haven't tried Logseq or Dendron though.
I actually like how Notesnook forces you to keep your organization at 2 levels. Restricting at first it helped me simplify my workflow a lot and finding things is a breeze since I know it can't be more than 2 levels deep. For some reason I can't wrap my head around interlinking; hierarchy based organization is good enough for me.
Taking notes doesn't need anything else.
Aside: the recent news about Notesnook going open source[1] has gotten me really excited. This might actually turn out to be a notes app I stick to. Let's see where the winds blow...
[0] https://notesnook.com/
[1] https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
In After Obsidian and Logseq, I give Dendron a try> Thanks for posting! It checks most of the boxes for me.
That's awesome. I am glad you liked it!
> Looking forward to the desktop apps and possibly offline support!
The desktop apps are coming soon. You can track our roadmap on Github: https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook/blob/main/ROADMAP...
In Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's workStandard 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
Read the rest
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).
The Standard Notes clients, server, and extensions are open source (AGPLv3 license):
https://github.com/standardnotes
There is an empty repo for Notesnook:
https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook
Will Notesnook also become open source, or will it remain proprietary?
In Show HN: Notesnook – A cross-platform privacy focused zero-knowledge notes app