I’ve been on the hunt for a Google Keep replacement and the most obvious choice is Quillpad. However it can only sync with Nextcloud and that functionality is somewhat broken. For example, if I create a To Do list in Quillpad, I can of course check the boxes as items are completed. I can do the same in the Nextcloud instance under Tasks. But if I create a To Do list in Nextcloud, you cannot interact with them in Quillpad after it syncs. They’re displayed, but you can’t do anything with them.
All that said, the other choices were Zoho Notebooks (don’t trust them) and Carnet (weirdly slow on my phone) as far as similar apps. Quillpad still seems to be the best. Is there a way to get an app that only syncs with Nextcloud to sync with something else? DavX, Webdav, Caldav, etc? The reason I ask is because I wanted to like Nextcloud, but my admittedly older server (HP Microserver G8) struggles even with the optimized builds and it just has way more features than I need. I have a feeling the answer is no, but thought I’d ask anyway before I continue my hunt.
Take a look at Joplin
So, I did. And while I think its a great app generally, the mobile app is terrible. At least on Android. Can’t speak for the iOS folks. Just awful all around. The default font is way too small. And seemingly you can only change the editor font. Meaning that once the Markdown is rendered after you save a note, it’s back to the teeny tiny font. Disclosure, I just recently had to start wearing 1.25x reading glasses for looking at my phone with a rather large screen and even still, small font. The other thing I found weird is more of a nitpick: if you create a new To Do, the title field has a Checkbox in it. Presumably to differentiate a To Do from a normal note. But when you then move to the body of the new To Do, the checkboxes are gone and have to be invoked again. This happened on the MacOS and Android app. Very strange. Again, not a deal breaker but I’m also already using Obsidian and there is some significant overlap there. Unfortunately Obsidian falls short in To Do lists and tasks and I haven’t found a plugin to fix that.
I’m using the app on android, it’s maybe a little messy when you use it for the first time but when you start to use it daily, I think there is a lot of useful features all around. I understand for the font, but it’s not something that is bothering me, I can’t say anything on that. For the issue you are facing with To Do, you actually have two ways to create a To Do list:
- You can create a new Notebook and add to-dos in it and these can have a body for description purposes.
- Or you can make a note containing the to-dos using the markdown checkbox
I do love Markdown. But it is cumbersome with a mobile keyboard. And I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall it not entering a checkbox on the next line after a return. Like I said, the Windows and MacOS apps are terrific. Before I ran into the issues with the Android app I was ready to dive in then realized the files are stored in database rather than flat .md files like Obsidian (and I think Logseq, maybe Trillium too…). Part of my use case for Obsidian is as a daily journal and having the ability for my family/kids read it after I’m gone is vital to me. And a plain text file is readable with anything and requires no export of conversion process like Joplin did. On this topic though, that wouldn’t matter since its mostly To Dos and I don’t care what format those are in.
I have been battling a similar battle but landed on Obsidian. There is a community plugin called “Tasks” that fixed most of my issues. Takes some tinkering in writing the queries but it unlocked most of the functionality I missed
I’ll take a look at the plugins again. I did find one that works with todo.txt format, which is interesting but might not be exactly what I’m looking for for this purpose.
I use https://tasks.org/ and Ive no issues going back and forth between the app and nextcloud tasks.
I also use tasks.org but I’m not convinced it’s a quillpad/google keep replacement?
It does do tasks nicely though.
I’ve been testing that one as well! One of the things I had hoped a replacement would offer is either a desktop app or web portal because if I’m entering many items, id much prefer doing it from a computer with a keyboard. But I’m realizing that is a pretty tall order. Zoho notebooks has it but I’ve read some alarming things about their privacy policy that don’t sit well.
If hosting NextCloud is your problem, you can purchase a hosted instance for less than $20/year. Woelkli even has a free tier.
Not my only problem with Nextcloud. It’s just a lot more app than I need or want. Plus the quirks of using something like Quillpad with it as mentioned in my original post.
Have you tried the Notes app in Nextcloud? I moved all my keep notes to that not too long ago, and they show up as markdown files when you sync them to your desktop. There’s a Notes Android app as well.
I did actually. And unfortunately Nextcloud doesn’t run well on my hardware at all. Perhaps I’ll revisit should I upgrade down the road.
I feel like NextCloud needs some relatively capable hardware to run on, and their minimum specs are bullshit.
I’ve tried it on a relatively capable PC (with an old i7) in a docker container in WSL, and it ran like shit. I’m sure it would have run better natively, but I don’t want to devote that entire machine to NextCloud.
I’ve tried it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) and it ran like shit. People keep saying it runs on low-powered hardware, but I have yet to see it.
I have to agree with you here. I tried the official Nextcloud docker as well as the AIO container that has some performance optimization tweaks. They both ran terribly on my Microserver G8 with 16GB RAM and an upgraded CPU (Xeon E3-1265L v2). Which I realize is a bit long in the tooth tech wise, but even if I paused or stopped all other containers to try to give it even more system resources, it ran really poorly. I do have a Pi4 as well but figured why bother. I don’t need all of the features NC has. I’ve been testing Seafile for storage/sync and while it has a quirk or two, it works insanely fast. But it’s also a different beast entirely.
I’ve been on this same journey for a long time - a search for something easy like Google Keep but private and preferably self-hostable. The problem I see with a lot of the options out there is they want to be a full-blown note taking / second brain app and focus on markdown as the input method. That’s way too cumbersome for when I just want to jot down something quickly and make a quick to-do/shopping list.
The next development/feature milestone listed in the Quillpad roadmap is “General cloud syncing”, but nothing has changed on that front for a long time - seems like at least a year. I’ll happily give them money if they’d focus on fulfilling their roadmap.
I also don’t want to spin up a Nextcloud server just to sync Quillpad. I have no desire to use any other feature of Nextcloud - I’ve tried it in the past and it wasn’t for me. But I finally gave in this past weekend set it up using the linuxserver.io docker image. I removed all the plug-ins it would let me to try and get it bare-bones as possible. Not an ideal solution but it works for now.
Eh, my gen8 is chugging happily along with Nextcloud, Synapse, Jellyfin and friends, docker-mailserver, a GoToSocial instance, Home Assistant in a VM, and so on. I don’t know what else is running on your server (and, admittedly, I’ve added some RAM and stuck in a somewhat beefier Xeon CPU), but it should have no problems running a web app like Nextcloud, especially if you stay away from the more intensive stuff like office apps.
That aside, I’ve gone through a fair amount of note taking apps, and so far I like Joplin best, too bad it doesn’t seem to work out for you. Not sure when you last checked out the Android app, but I do know there’s been some changes in the editor it uses recently-ish, it might be worth it to check again.
Yeah, I upgraded my CPU and RAM as well (mentioned in another comment) and even stopped other containers and its still slow.
I tried the Joplin app again yesterday, same thing on the list/Todo view. You can change the editor font but that doesn’t help tiny font on the rendered note.
Let’s dig into performance a bit. Your gen8 server i believe is using E5-26xx CPUs which is plenty of power for speedy performance in Nextcloud. You mentioned upgrading the CPUs and RAM so should be good to go.
- Ensure application files are stored on a SSD. I have seen significantly poor performance in Nextcloud when it’s running fully from HDD storage.
- Data storage is fine to remap to HDD storage. If running with docker this is as easy as:
volumes: - /HDD_storage/nextcloud/data:/var/www/html
- Make sure to run Mariadb/MySQL for the database as opposed to SQLITE.
- Ensure REDIS is used and working. This will cache and speed up the UI.
With all of that working correctly, Nextcloud is very performant on my comparable Dell R720.
Edit, I see below you are on a microserver. I think all of the above still applies but I don’t have any experience with that hardware. I would still expect it possible to perform well on that device.
I’ve put a Xeon E3-1265v2, which was already quite the upgrade over the dual core Xeon it came with. And then added another 8GB of RAM for total of 16GB. I have 2x1TB SSDs as my cache drive pool and 3x14TB HDD as my array (1 parity). Running Unraid as the OS. I installed the official Nextcloud docker first and had the app files on the SSD as recommended by you as well as the template itself. I also attempted the official AIO docker which includes everything including “High performance backend for Nextcloud, Talk and TURN-server”. I opted out of Office, Talk, and ClamAV on the AIO install as well as disabling apps within NC that I won’t use like their garbage photos app and Deck, for example. There are a few others I just won’t use. And it still runs poorly. Perhaps we have different opinions regarding acceptable wait times for certain tasks. But I can say even just testing it with very few items synchronized, there have been several conflicts within Tasks and Notes. I’m talking a half dozen notes and tasks colliding with one another when syncing and throwing errors.
Please understand I mean no one any ill will nor am I trying to disparage Nextcloud as a solution (other than the photos app, lol). And I thought I made it clear that I understood it to be a limitation of my hardware, not the app itself. That said I’ve noticed people get weirdly defensive of Nextcloud anytime someone has any complaints about it. Not just here, but on any forum I’ve searched for solutions or options to help with performance. As if they’re personally invested in the company or something. If it works for those folks, more power to you and I wish you many happy years of service with the app and many 1s and 0s flying back and forth with speed and accuracy. It’s just way more app than I need to run.
No problem at all! I was reluctant to comment as it seemed that you weren’t interested in pursuing Nextcloud any further, but went ahead with my comment because I initially had very poor performance when using the basic container running with SQLITE.
I will admit that I had sync issues with a notes program when putting the file on Nextcloud. Some apps just aren’t compatible with that storage paradigm it would seem.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies and good luck on your search!
These tips are all solid, and reflect my setup. Database (MariaDB) and PHP files on the SSD, data storage on spinny bois. Don’t underestimate the importance of a recent enough version of PHP, OpCache, enabled, and so on.
There’s a whole chapter on performance tuning in the manual, and the “Security & setup warnings” part of the administration settings should point out some configuration issues, when it finds them.
My setup might actually take a (smallish) performance hit because I use btrfs for all my filesystems. Just don’t get roped into the whole “wsl on Windows” thing, that’s just not going to work out, it’s a kludge that MS offers to not bleed users to Linux too much, but it’s certainly not meant for server workloads.
The hardware should not be the bottleneck at all, the 1265 in OPs machine should not be significantly slower than the 1280 in mine.
Personally I use memos as a Google Keep replacement. There are mobile apps for it as well called moememos.
Check out https://usememos.com
I’ve used it off and on a bunch since I started this self hosting journal. I really like the project, but I guess it just doesn’t fit in with the way I use Keep. But man, its really cool. Had I not already picked a different method for journaling I would absolutely consider it for that. But, like Joplin, it puts the markdown files in a database that isn’t easy to export if needed.
