Evernote, Amplenote, and Obsidian
Due to the changes in the Evernote restrictions, I migrated all my Evernote content to Amplenote. Amplenote so far is quite good, the only thing I am not happy with is the web clipper. I can hardly clip the content with the format of the webpage itself. As a result, I come to Obsidian.
Unlike Amplenote, Obsidian works as a desktop application. If one wants a synchronization feature, then he/she needs to pay. If one wants to work with a free version, then one can setup other synchronization services such as Dropbox.
When migrating from Amplenote to Obsidian, it is very smooth. This is because Amplenote exports the content in Markdown format, which is compatible with Obsidian.
Though Obsidian has a web clipper feature, it doesn’t work with full-text selection on the large content page, due to the limitation of the length of the text to be passed between applications. However, copying from the webpage to Obsidian will preserve most formatting.
One of the advantages of Obsidian is that the notes are saved as files in a directory. The files can be edited by any text editor or Markdown editor. Furthermore, one can also setup a template with YAML Frontmatter to create our own metadata, and use the web clipper plugin to save the important web content to Obsidian. Compared to Amplenote, it has more flexibility.
However, I personally don’t like the auto-save feature in Obsidian. Whenever we make the changes in the note Obsidian will save the file automatically. I would prefer to save the file manually like most text editors, with Ctrl+S. However one can use an external text editor to do editing.
Another notable note-taking app is Joplin. It can be installed as a desktop application as well. I feel that Joplin is very similar to Amplenote. That’s why I choose Obsidian over Joplin.