Selfhosted

Syncthing is fantastic... once you get it set up.

First, the rough stuff. Syncthing is not user friendly to set up and use. If you want to sync something, you have to go to every device you want to share with and enable the share... for every folder. You can get through this by doing the Dropbox method of just sharing a single folder, but that will have it's own challenges if you want to only share certain files with certain devices or apply different versioning methodologies. All in all, it can get cumbersome.

Secondly, it's a dumb sync tool, meaning that it's not content aware. In your "editing the same note" example, Syncthing will fail. You'll get a conflict notification and be prompted to to pick which version is correct... and even that will be buried in Syncthing's interface that you'll have to go looking for. That specific scenario isn't what it was designed for.

Lastly, Syncthing will occasionally get hung up on syncing a file and clearing the error isn't straight forward.

Alright now for the good stuff. Once you get through all the above stuff, it just works. I throw it on every computer, phone and tablet I own, and I get (mostly) worry-free backups of all my important files synced to my NAS. And it has saved me MANY times.

There are multiple versioning methods, so you can be sure that if you accidentally delete something, it'll be there for you. You can set it to encrypt files on specific destinations, so if you wanted to sync to a VPC, you can ensure your folders are protected from prying eyes. You can exclude files, so those annoying .DS_Store files that macOS throws around don't end up on your other devices.

I use it to backup my Obsidian vault, but I don't use it to sync my vault to other computers. I pay for Obsidian Sync for that.

I use Joplin (hosted on my home Nextcloud server) and its very good, so far. I haven't had it long. Nextcloud also has a native Notes app that is decent but not very featureful. Joplin works well for me, as I already had a Nextcloud instance.

Syncthing has been much more reliable for me. It syncs extremely fast, picks up changes nearly instantly, and just works so well I never really even think about it.

Nextcloud has caused outright data loss once for me (all of my data was corrupted by nextcloud and then synced to my devices, had to completely recover from a backup), and broken due to updates several other times. It's overall very slow, and a pain to maintain through updates.

what if I edit the same note from both places without internet and then both get connected to a network…

Syncthing will handle duplicates by renaming the older copy, and also has modes for versioning and deleted file recovery that you can enable and customized how you want to.

A self hosted Joplin sync server is also pretty nice.

I use syncthing, it works fine, but sometimes it doesnt sync, I have to open syncthing on my phone and also on PC to triger sync. If I open same file on both devices it just creates copy so you end up with 2 files Edit: I use obsidian for notes

Logseq and syncthing

I use these for both work and personal life - and you can edit on multiple devices...

Now, the caveat there is, it's not entirely realtime editing ...

logseq updates the display when the underlying markdown file changes, so you can edit on multiple devices if you let them sync which takes a second or so (setup that syncthing folder to watch the filesystem, instead of periodic)

So, I edit a note on my phone, walk ovee to a laptop then see the changes come in and edit some more... pick up the phone, unlock it, probably ready to edit again...

If I leave the house, syncthing could sync over the internet, but I've not aet that up... so in the unlikely chance that someone edits the file(s) on my laptop AND I edit on my phone, then syncthing would give me 2 files which others have explained well.

BeyondCompare or meld or... vim... can do simple comparisons in these cases.

Been doing this for a while...Just my 2p

I use syncthing for personal and work, and it's great. Having said that I've found it struggles with versioning i.e. editing a document from multiple devices.

Look into something like Standard Notes for cross platform markdown editing. It's e2e encrypted, works great, the dev is very responsive. Ymmv but I really like it, have it on every device I own and use it daily.

I've also just used a private git repo for editing docs from multiple devices. Once you get it set up it's effortless, and most ide's are extremely fun to use as text editors.

I have used both, and syncthing is the most stable in my opinion. But you will get sync conflicts/ duplicates if you work on the same file

For working on markdown files you should additionally look into https://silverbullet.md , it's great 🙂. It has offline mode. But it will also generate duplicates if you edit the same file offline

I've never used syncthing, but nextcloud has become a major part of my life in part because of the notes app, which I use for my work log, as well as nextcloud news, which lets me read news from any device and which articles I've read are tracked so my news feed is actually news. A third thing that's neat is I keep my windows user folders in my nextcloud folder so my computers have the same synchronized user folders -- if I download a file on my main PC it shows up on my travel laptop and vice versa, and if windows crashes I don't lose the files in my user folders, I just resync.

Git

Then git pull rebase and commit. Done

Nextcloud doesn't sync in the background iirc, but there are 3rd party apps you can use that will. It's great other than that.

I am not sure if syncthing syncs in the background or not, but worth testing. Nextcloud is probably the more complete package but it depends on if you need or want anything of its other features.

Since I use obsidian.md I installed a community plugin to sync to onedrive.

For other stuff I use syncthing.

Personally I'd just use something like trilium and call it a day.

Don't take my opinion for notes, I don't use any of the notes features. However, I can say Nextcloud is just a pain to maintain, even their docker containers. It's bulky, it's weirdly built, you're constantly modifying php config files. So, that may weigh in on your decision.