It’s unorganized and not sorted by my preference, tho it kind of is.

Obsidian

Obsidian is developing so fast. A year or 2 ago, it was just a shitty markdown editor with no extra features. Today, it provides tons of useful or useless features, while still maintaining it’s simple UI. It really is incredibcly mature when compared to Roam Research or Roam Research clones. The settings page, the plugin management system, and the note-editing itself, are just so seamless and bug-free (until Live Preview comes out ….), while in Roam Research and its clones, you can’t work for 5 straight minutes without encountering some bugs or serious lags, and you even have to copy paste the full js code to “install” a plugin. Compared to Obsidian, Roam Research and its clones are like kids with so much potential, but have ADHD.

The Obsidian community is also the best. They constantly produce super-useful & high-quality plugins, making Obsidian even more perfect, and they are also very helpful on the Obsidian forum. The core developers are also pretty friendly. They’ll even say thank you when you submit a new theme lol (while the Roam Research devs will consider you toxic if you don’t treat them as bishops and even report some problems or raise some concerns lmao)

VsCode & Typora

Both VsCode & Typora are solid & mature markdown editors. They have tree-style file explorer, outline pane, decent search, support latex and auto-image upload. If Obsidian isn’t a thing, I would still use them,

They even outperform Obsidian in some aspects. VsCode has far more powerful search. Pretty reasonable, as it is a full blown text editor. A most popular one, actually. Typora, on the other hand, support searching in outline pane and live-rendering. (yes Obsidian’s live preview is out now but it’s super buggy and doesn’t really provide a fully-rendered experience as it should)

Evernote Legacy

Evernote v10 is shit, but Evernote legacy still holds up. Despite its dated UIs, it remains solid and powerful. The best all-around note-taking service on the market, I would say.

What makes Evernote standout isn’t the note-taking features itself, but the ecosystem. Evernote is available on almost all platforms, including native apps on Windows, MacOs, Android, iOS, and a web version. The desktop app is the most powerful, providing incredible features like imported folders, and a databse like UX. You can sort your notes in many ways, and search them with various filters. None of the other services provide them. The Android app is a well-crafted piece of art. The UI UX is elegant, with all the powerful features, and it also has a widget, which is very useful for like quick notes or quick search.

The note-taking itself is also pretty solid. It may not have shiny new features like backlinks or block references, nor does it support markdown, but the WYGIWYS is pretty comfy and support many things that markdown don’t, for example, coloring your text, highlight or tables (unless you hardcode in html ofc). The way it handle image is also very satifying. When you double click the image, it opens in fullscreen, and you can zoom in, switch to another image, or even do some editing, which again, is the feature that none of the shiny markdown editors provide.

So, IMHO Evernote (legacy) is still not replaceable. It is not the best tool in every aspect, but it is in many aspect, which is enough for me to pay. As of my usecase, I just dump everything that I want to have quick access, or I just want to record, into it. For the real note-taking, class notes for example, I use other tools. It’s also a decent file transferring tool. For example, I may have just scanned a document or took a photo from my phone, and I want to send to my computer to perhaps file it or embed into my obsidian notes. In this case, I would just use Evernote to transfer the file, because it won’t degrade the resolution of images. Of course I can just use Telegram for that, but sending an image in original resolution isn’t as straightforward as it should be.

Roam Research clones

Worse than Roam Research but open-sourced (so they’re free and far more transparent with their developments than Roam)

Have only really tried out loqseq, but it’s pretty buggy and I hate the way it handles custom CSSs. It forces you to write all your CSS in a single codeblock, while in Roam, you can write them in as many blocks as you want, as long as they’re in roam/css, making it far easier to write your theme, like you can modularize your CSS components and turn some of them off if you suddenly dislike them.

Also, the default logseq theme is ugly af.

I’ve also tried Athens like once, but it bugged out when I’m importing my Roam Research notes into it.

Roam Research

It’s pricey, but I created my account (just) before it started monetizing, and somehow it still doesn’t charge me afterwards, so I won’t complain about it.

I love it, I used it everyday despite it being super laggy and somtimes buggy, until I checked out Obsidian again and found out what kind of monster Obsidian had become. (well actually I only started actively using Obsidian when I discovered that I could easily do my own CSS, as the default theme is very meh)

I love it for its highly customizable nature, like the fact that I can just write my own CSS, or just copy paste or write my own Js inside it and be applied immediately, just blowed my mind. In fact, having my own mesmerizing nebula-themed UI is the main factor that keeps me from leaving roam. Until Obsidian provides all of these features, with an even better way of handling CSS & Js, making it not an absolute advantage anymore. So what’s left, is the second, irreplaceable advantage to other markdown editors, the block-based nature.

I love it for being block-based. It makes taking notes so easy. Everything is a block, a bullet point, and you can easily reference other block, not the entire note, but that very block, and even embed it, so that it can be edited in another location, how crazy is that?

Obsidian does have “block” reference too, but as Obsidian is still pure markdown, “heading” reference is as far as it can get, and it can’t be edited in where it’s referenced.

To be fair, Notion is also block-based, so I don’t see any reason for this not being implemented in the future. In fact, there is a hack that provides the exact same feature, letting you reference and embed a block that can also be edited, so it will most certainly be added as an official feature in some near or maybe distant future (look how long they took to finally implement the simple table). But for some reason, Notion still does’t let you write your own CSS, or at least natively. So until both features are implemented, Roam still beats Notion in terms of pure note-taking.

Notion

Notion is a shitty note-taking service, but a decent note-managing tool with its database-like features. More than a database, actually, as you can easily arrange your notes into a kanban board or something else.

I find it most suitable for taking notes for very unstructured and atomic contents, as you can create many notes recording them and then easily navigate between them after viewing them as table or list or board. But if you want to take a long, structured, text-based notes, than it’s a hard no. It’s block-based, so the way it handles text is very uncomfortable. Moreover, it doesn’t provide a position:fixed outline pane, other than a TOC, making it very hard to jump between headings. So, for long notes, use Obsidian, Typora, VsCode or maybe HackMD, as they all provide an easily-accessible outline.

And as mentioned in the Roam Reseach part, it (as crazy as it may seems) does not provide a native way to write your own style or install plugins (yes you can use Notion Enhancer but it’s not native and I couldn’t care to try it). You are just stuck in the default ugly-af UI.

Plus it’s super slow. I can open 2 Obsidian vaults before a Notion page is loaded. (that’s not true actually)