logseq

Joplin is pretty good for organizing notes.

Proton just bought Standard Notes, so keep an eye out for changes there. Otherwise, I use Obsidian but I have it sync to my home server so I can access the same data from my phone and computer.

Obsidian is pretty good, it shouldn’t collect any data by default. But you can also check out Logseq, an open source Obsidian alternative.

As they are closed source no one can tell you their true privacy policy. It seems better than average from what I’ve read but you never know…

Personally I use logseq and sync the files via a Nextcloud instance. I can only recommend it, although I also recommend spending an hour to learn the tagging and linking logic and reading through their guide on what’s possible. I still only leverage a minor part of the potential myself.

One that is closer to onenote (I think, never used onenote) is Joplin.

Since you’re specifically looking to replace OneNote, you might want to take a look at BookStack. It has similar organizational concepts, and I think it’s FOSS.

Logseq or Orgzly Revived

I use Obsidian, which is quite powerful with their vast plugin library. You can do a lot of automation, and you can check out some of Nicole van der Hoeven’s videos, who among other things use it to keep track of TTRPG campaigns, both as a player and as a game master. For example this one.

I don’t use their sync service, but have all files locally on my Nextcloud server. I sync them to my phone with Syncthing, which unfortunately means I cannot encrypt them with Cryptomator like I planned, but if you only use it on your computer, that is also something you could do. If you are paranoid about them still phoning home with your data, then you can block its network access with a firewall. I think you can install plugins manually.

I would have preferred it if it was FOSS. I have considered checking out Logseq as an alternative. But the bullet-based workflow doesn’t appeal to me, so I haven’t tried yet. I switched over from Standard Notes, and honestly it was pain to transfer because the text export from Standard Notes was all over the place, as I had used a lot of different note types. I tried to parse some of these smart notes they have, but I couldn’t quickly figure out how they were structured to automate it, so I ended up manually going through and copying over what I wanted to keep. I like the approach of keeping plain text markdown files. It is easier to export to another application in the future, although some of the content will be useless as it is explicitly written for the plugins (e.g. Dataview).

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Hit the selfhosted community, this is an on-going conversation there with pretty much every note taking app being discussed.

As an aside, while OneNote is proprietary, if you use the full app it doesn’t require OneDrive. If you only use it on a PC, it can sync locally with other PCs - I’ve used it this way for 15 years.

Anytype

OrgNote. The project is still quite raw but the developer works hard and the overall idea and philosophy behind the project is perfect for me. Fully compatible with emacs org-roam, most probably compatible with logseq. There is a “fully managed” free version with PGP support or an option for a self-hosted server.

Project: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote Manifesto: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote/wiki#manifesto

Eidos – Offline alternative to Notion

Have you looked at World Anvil? It’s been a long time and I don’t remember what the free vs. paid tier comparisons were, but I thought it was pretty slick.

Edit: Didn’t realise the community I’m in. I have no idea the privacy state of World Anvil but I’ll edit if I come across it.

You can read Obsidian’s privacy policy. Basically, everything remains on your device unless you pay to use the Obsidian Sync. I switched from Standard Notes to Obsidian last year and I haven’t looked back ever since. You can use Syncthing to synchronize your Obsidian Vault across multiple devices. All you need to do is add the Vault directory to Syncthing, that means you need to first make a dedicated folder in your filesystem for the Obsidian Vault which you will be required to do anyway while setting up Obsidian.