SiYuan

As a paid user and donor who has been using the software for half a year, I do not recommend its usage. Certain features of the software require account registration. However, the developers manage accounts arbitrarily, unilaterally changing account usage rules temporarily, and exercising speech control within the forum, directly altering or deleting posts that question their actions. You might consider using Obsidian or Logseq instead.

My main writing app. Siyuan has all the features I need, it's extendable, and it works. I deduct one star because the desktop application is Electron-based, which I am extremely against, and they ask users to pay in order to sync their notes. I self-host my own, so I don't have to deal with either of those issues.

Version 3 has great additions to an already awesome app. General availability of databases and we can now set any LLM that is openAI or Azure compatible. I use ollama to serve Mixtral locally and use it in Siyuan.

All my attempts to leave Notion were unsuccessful, but it was this program (with the connected API key for AI) that allowed me to replace note-taking with images. The Notion site itself did not work very well with long notes in which I added around 1000 images, but this program displays them well. I really like the dual scrolling - the small one shows the actual size of the note, as the large one will be incorrect when there are many images with lazy-loading.

Disastrous usability and aesthetic appeal, infrequent updates, no free synchronization quota, all of which are indeed dissatisfying. But in terms of functionality, it's almost impeccable, and flawless coupled with the plugins.