Joplin vs Paste

Joplin is an open-source note-taking app with offline access and support for notes containing images, videos, PDFs and audio. It runs on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and the web, with a Chrome extension and API also listed. A web clipper for Chrome and Firefox saves pages or screenshots as notes. Notes can sync through Joplin Cloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, S3, WebDAV or a local filesystem. Joplin uses end-to-end encryption, and shared notebooks can be set to editable or read-only. Basic costs €2.99 a month, with 2 GB of storage and a 10 MB limit per note or attachment. Pro costs €5.99 a month for 30 GB and a 200 MB per-note or attachment limit; Pro 100 GB costs €9.99 a month. Teams costs €7.99 a month per user, with a minimum of two users, and includes 50 GB of storage. Plans include a 14-day free trial. Students and teachers can receive a 50% discount for one year, renewable while in education.

Paste is a private notepad and clipboard for syncing text, links, and code snippets across macOS, Linux, and Windows. Notes may be plain text, Markdown, or code, and users can pin frequently used items. It works offline and merges changes automatically after devices reconnect. The site says local search can find items in under 30 ms across 10,000 entries. Pairing uses a QR scan, short code, or recovery phrase, and each device receives a revocable signing key. Paste says it encrypts content on the device with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before storage or syncing, deriving keys from the recovery phrase. Optional relays store encrypted blocks and can see network metadata, but cannot read note contents or keys. The encryption envelope, sync engine, relay client, and verifier are open source; Paste also includes a verifier and standalone CLI. Desktop versions run through the Pear runtime, which installers require. On Windows, the first launch fetches the app peer-to-peer and may take about one minute. iOS and Android are in development. Paste is free and requires no account; it does not provide anonymity or provable physical deletion of ciphertext retained on third-party disks.