I’m a little late to the party, but I was fairly pleased a couple of weeks ago to see news that Proton was teaming up with Standard Notes to expand the repertoire of the Proton suite. After initially starting off with just email, Proton first evolved to make itself a more fully featured communication suite with offerings like contacts and calendar that are basically a requirement. Then they started offering up VPN service and, most recently, a password manager.
While most of these were developed in-house, Proton has also slowly started to develop some partnerships with other companies that offer privacy-focused SaaS that can offer things Proton currently can’t. A great example when Proton teamed up with SimpleLogin to allow users to quickly and easily create email aliases when signing up for different services. It’s something I’ve started making heavy use of so that I don’t have to give my real email address — or even any of my real aliases within Proton Mail — to services when I don’t want to.
Now Proton is at it again with Standard Notes joining Proton. You can read the official announcements from Proton and Standard Notes. I think this is awesome because, to be honest, notes are shockingly difficult to get right. Having encrypted notes that I can access from any platform would be a huge boom to me. In fact, just earlier today I happened to be having a question about note-taking apps with some friends of mine after I shared this meme:
Ancient History
I’ve been through dozens of apps for notes over the years. Way back in the day, prior to when the free tier was gutted, I was a huge fan of Evernote. Their push for profitability unfortunately combined an unreasonable price with an absolute massacre of the free tier, making it something I sadly abandoned. Since the prices have only become more unreasonable over the years, I feel like I made the right decision.
After that, it was the Dark Ages of note-taking for me as I ended up using OneNote. The only good thing I can say about OneNote is that purple is a great color for an icon. Other than that, the whole platform is an abysmal mess. I know people who absolutely live and die by OneNote, and I don’t understand how since it’s bad at literally everything. This was back when I was working as a sysadmin managing Office 365, so operating in the Microsoft ecosystem made sense for me, but even then I was frustrated with what a bad experience OneNote was. Keeping notes organizing was impossible, and the editor for creating notes was painful to work with at best. When I pasted something into it, it was a total crap shoot what it would end up looking like. What finally ended up being too much, though, was when Microsoft killed the “legacy” Windows app in favor of a “modern” app that was all around inferior from a performance and UI perspective.
After this I went fairly rapid-fire through a variety of apps and platforms, being equally disappointed with all of them and moving on quickly. Nothing was particularly note-worthy (no pun intended) until Obsidian. It was nearly everything I wanted in a note-taking app. I could write my content in Markdown, easily link between notes, and under the hood it was literally just Markdown on my filesystem that I could easily back up and move elsewhere. My problem was that this setup didn’t particularly lend itself to being accessible on other devices. While it was perfect on my MacBook that I used for work as my main computing device, I couldn’t access it on my phone or my personal laptop. At one point I needed to reference a note on my personal laptop (running Linux, so not connected to the iCloud account of my work machine), and I ended up having to go to iCloud’s web interface and pulling up the raw Markdown. This was enough to convince me that I should keep looking.
At the time we had recently started using Confluence at work, so I experimented with using an Atlassian instance of my own for my personal notes. Being web-based meant that I could easily use it from my work and personal laptops, and I could use the Confluence app on my iPhone and iPad. This was honestly one of the better experiences I had, and I used my own Confluence instance for a couple of years. The Confluence web UI is a little on the clunky side, though, and I’ve recently found myself wanting to be able to pull up my notes more easily.
Since I’ve just recently resubscribed to Apple One and have a bunch of iCloud storage, I’ve revisited the idea of using Apple Notes. Obviously the native app works really well in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I previously shied away from this solution, though, because I didn’t have a good way to access those notes outside of the Apple ecosystem (e.g. on my Fedora Linux laptop.) However, the recently revamped iCloud web interface includes Notes and honestly works pretty well. In fact, I’m writing this blog post from Fedora using notes I have in iCloud. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for me to feel like I don’t need to mess with anything else; the previously linked meme had come true for me.
The one giant player in the space that I haven’t tried is Notion. I’ve heard that it has a bit of a learning curve and some effort is involved in setting it up, so I didn’t feel particularly motivated to go through that effort when I have something I’m happy enough with. On the other hand, I heard people say the same thing about Obsidian and it was honestly a simple, streamlined process, so I could potentially be putting too much weight in those rumors.
The Future
All of that being said, I’m certainly interested in using Standard Notes now that they’ve joined with Proton. I actually already had a Standard Notes account, but I hadn’t actually used it for anything. This was literally all I had in my account:
Along with the web interface, it has apps for macOS, Linux, iOS, and iPadOS. That’s all terrific, but I’m limited in what I can do with Standard Notes (and hence why I never got any further than what’s seen in the screenshot above) because free accounts can only use plaintext for notes. Using any kind of formatting requires the note to be the Super type, which is only available for paid users:
This is where it’ll be interesting to see how Standard Notes being a part of Proton plays out. Today, paid SimpleLogin features are available to me when I log in with my Proton account, for example. Right now, there’s nothing special in Standard Notes with my Proton subscription. In fact, there’s currently still no link between the two platforms:
Contrast that with Simple Login, which allows me to simply access it with Proton:
Is paying for Standard Notes worthwhile so that I can access formatting, something that’s a must for my note-taking? Not particularly when I already have something that works well enough in iCloud. Is Standard Notes worth using if I can access some of those advanced features as part of my existing Proton subscription? 100%. It’s only been a few weeks since Standard Notes joined Proton, so I don’t expect to see anything overly soon. But if there’s going to be integration between the two, I’ll certainly look forward to taking advantage of another terrific aspect of my Proton account. For the time being, this is what Proton has to say, and I’m excited to see what’s over the horizon:
Both Proton and Standard Notes share a strong commitment to our communities, so Standard Notes will remain open source, freely available, and fully supported. Prices are not changing, and if you have a current subscription to Standard Notes, it will continue to be honored. Proton aspires to do the right thing and be a responsible home for open-source projects, and just as we did with SimpleLogin, we are committed to preserving what makes Standard Notes special and much loved.
In the coming months, we hope to find ways to make Standard Notes more easily accessible to the Proton community. This way, in addition to protecting your email, calendar, files, passwords, and online activity, you can also protect your notes.
https://proton.me/blog/proton-standard-notes-join-forces