Simplenote Forums Support Customer Update on Simplenote Customer Update on Simplenote staff-lynn · Staff · September 5, 2025 at 6:09 pm Copy link Add topic to favorites We appreciate your…
We appreciate your continued use of Simplenote and the support of our community over the years. Simplenote is no longer in active development, and while the app remains available, only its basic functionality is being maintained at this time. No new features or enhancements are planned.
What a coincidence, was just looking for a replacement of Simplenote!
With hundreds of note taking apps coming and going, is there any single performant cross-platform non-Electron app with great conflict resolution for simple notes? Just to be more useful than an overpowered code editor + a file cloud?
Checked just 2 of these conditions here (native Windows and macOS and some iOS startup benchmarks) and there is literally not a single app!!! (to be fair, not every app is likely tested, but even without those it's 6 apps)
Obsidian is great and highly performant, even though it's using Electron. Electron is a huge advantage, faster development and the option to customise it easily with plugins.
It's not highly performant, its startup time is a multiple of that of native apps. Nothing is easy about plugins, APIs you expose/maintain define that, not Electron, and those can be good/bad in any system. Electron gives easier access to UI styling, but then again, real "easily" comes from the structure/stability of your UI, otherwise your plugins would break all the time. Also, same as with APIs - e.g, Joplin is Electron, but you can only style on a desktop. Then, of course, there are plenty of Electron apps that you can't style at all and that don't support plugins.
I'm happy for devs' "faster development", but as a user I care about "faster use", which Electron blocks outright
Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc.
In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions).
I wrote a bunch more on this topic here:
Thank you for this work! I had tried Obsidian every year or so and the performance switching/opening notes drove me crazy in the past. I like it to feel instant and I'm more sensitive to UI performance than others. Just tried again, and it passes the threshold for me!
Obsidian just launched Obsidian CLI too, if that helps. And sync.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197267
I use Ticktick for my Markdown notes and todos. I can add tasks from my lockscreen. I have a single view of notes and tasks. Costs me 5 biriyanis per year, yes its localized pricing.
Been meaning to switch to an open source app out of principle, one which can handle rich notes too.
I should measure my expenses in biriyanis more.
I don't think even Simplenote was native on Windows (despite what noteapps.info says), there is no simplenote-windows repo and all signs point to simplenote-electron
yeah, unfortunately it was yet another Electron wrapper on Windows, though mobile/Mac (where it's more important) was native.
The website's idea is great, but unfortunately it's not comprehensive/reliable, otherwise finding an alternative would be much easier.
You could probably vibe code the perfect one for yourself at this point.
I can recommend Standard Notes as an alternative. https://standardnotes.com/
Works well on all paltforms, desktop and mobile. The sync works also great. It also backs up to text files on your computer, so that you can back up your files with your regular backup process and you can also easily move away if you would like to one day.
Standard Notes is in the same position as Simplenote was 10 years ago. Automattic acquired Simplenote but never really did anything with it. Standard Notes was acquired by Proton last year and development has slowed to bug fixes only. I would be wary to migrate to Standard Notes.
That‘s the notetaking app that has several "editors", isn‘t it?
So that if you want to use feature A you need a different view inside the app than if you want to use feature B. And if you use both, you constantly switch?
The illustrations on the home page are some of the most hideous slop I've ever seen. Terrible first impression, and it really doesn't inspire trust in the quality of security of the service. Eventually companies will learn. But for now, eww.
Wow, I thought you were exaggerating / being the usual AI hater, so I opened the page expecting a some product screenshots with a few too many em dashes or something like that, fully intending to tell you to calm down. But dammmn it's bad! You weren't exaggerating at all!
Its almost enjoyably bad - I especially appreciate how it gets worse as you scroll.
Do images of that low quality honestly help sell something? I'd have thought stock footage or simple icons would be more effective.
oh damn what i swear i remember their site being perfectly normal in the past, what happened
I should also add that Proton also has become somewhat tacky aesthetically over the years. Their old Alpine, sober aesthetic was really great.
After Proton acquisition, prices became exorbitant and aesthetics hideous I guess.
Weird. Although I only used it briefly in the past, I remember the home page was not that bad. What happened to them?
Wow, it is really awful. This is such a pointless misstep given that Standard Notes has been around for years, was not vibe coded, is not an AI app - but this landing page makes me immediately assume it’s slop.
GNU Emacs, which has been in active development for over 40 years, has a thriving note taking ecosystem based on Org-mode, a plaintext system for notes, documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and lots more. Ask your doctor if GNU Emacs is right for you.
Side effects may include: excessive online evangelism, endless configuration tinkering, pain and numbness in the pinkies, and smugness.
