// the find
streetwriters/notesnook
A fully open source & end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote.
Notesnook is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking app covering web, desktop (Electron), and mobile (React Native) from a single TypeScript monorepo. Encryption uses XChaCha20-Poly1305 with Argon2 for key derivation — both solid choices. It's aimed at privacy-conscious users who want a Evernote replacement they can actually audit.
The cryptography stack is credible: XChaCha20-Poly1305 and Argon2 are current best practice, and they've built Vericrypt so you can independently verify the encryption claims rather than just trusting their word. The monorepo shares a single @notesnook/core across all platforms, which means sync logic and data models don't drift between web, desktop, and mobile — a real operational win. Active CI coverage spans Android, iOS, desktop, web, and the editor separately, with Playwright-based E2E tests on the desktop app. The repo ships a web clipper extension alongside the main clients, which removes a major friction point for migrating away from Evernote.
Self-hosting is listed as a topic but the server-side code isn't in this repo — you get clients only, so 'self-hosted' means running their official server infra or navigating an underdocumented third-party setup. Electron for desktop means the binary is large and memory-hungry; they haven't gone the Tauri route, so you're shipping a full Chromium for a notes app. The monorepo uses plain NPM, which with this many packages means slow installs and occasional peer-dep conflicts that workspace-aware tools handle better. Mobile still has Java files alongside Kotlin in the Android layer — the migration is visibly incomplete and that kind of split tends to accumulate technical debt quietly.