this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I'm very interested in OneNote alternatives. I've been using OneNote for longer than I've disliked Microsoft... and I still think it's a good app. Pretty much the only thing I don't like about OneNote is the increasingly close integration with Windows accounts. I'd rather my notes were not scanned and uploaded and processed by a US mega-corp...
Anyway, people keep suggesting stuff like Joplin. But that isn't even vaguely close to OneNote in terms of stylus and inking. For me, inking is the main core feature. And so in terms of alternatives, xournal++ is a closer fit. (xournal++ has essentially no organisational structure for notes; but it is really great for inking.)
What I'd really like is basically the organisational structure of Joplin (or whatever other alternative) + the inking power of xournal++. And ideally being able to import my vast amounts of handwritten OneNote work! -- But that last bit is probably too much to ask.
I've been using Any.type for a bit over a year, and am very happy with it, but I don't believe it has hand writing support.
There is a free tier that includes 1gb synced storage (optional).
It's open source. Somewhat similar to Obsidian, but no plugin support that I'm aware of.
I switched from OneNote a couple of years ago.
For hand writing i suggest using Rnote and for normal keyboard writing I suggest Joplin. Keep it synced using cloud provider or using Syncthing for free.
About organizational structure in Rnote I unfortunatelly recommend just saving files in a structure of folders. Rnote is the most polished alternative to hand-writing capabilities of OneNote I've found :c
About importing notes. I don't think that's possible but you can surely export them all to PDF from OneNote. I did that when I migrated.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check out Rnote sometime soon.
(As I said, I do like the writing & drawing features of xournal++; and so I've been doing a bit of basic file / folder organising with that already; but it certainly isn't as easily browseable as OneNote.)