When comparing TagSpaces vs Zim, the Slant community recommends Zim for most people. In the question“What is the best cross-platform note-taking app?” Zim is ranked 3rd while TagSpaces is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose Zim is:
Notes can contain links to other notes, allowing you to reference important information when needed. This way the user can connect and reference many different pages in the app, keeping things clean and structured, unlike Evernote, which makes this a good Evernote alternative.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Open source
TagSpaces is free and open source making it easily extendable with the help of extensions.
Pro Your can choose your cloud file storage
Using only files and no databases let's you make the decision with which cloud file sync service to use, making sure your notes are made available on other devices and platforms. It works great with Owncloud, Nextcloud, Dropbox or Google Drive.
Pro No web service or database lock in
The backend is simply the directory and file structure on your harddrive.
Pro No cloud
TagSpaces is running completely offline, sending no data to any cloud based service, unlike many Evernote alternatives.
Pro Allows for organized, wiki-style navigation
Notes can contain links to other notes, allowing you to reference important information when needed. This way the user can connect and reference many different pages in the app, keeping things clean and structured, unlike Evernote, which makes this a good Evernote alternative.
Pro Plain text data format rather than proprietary
If/when the app is no longer developed (or if the user simply decides to no longer use the application or view/edit it on a non-supported platform), this can still be done with any plain-text editor.
Pro Automatically manages files and folders
Zim will automatically create a folder structure that fits your page hierarchy and adds/removes files such as images to/from appropriate folders.
Pro Good export options
Zim supports HTML, LaTeX, Pandoc Markdown, and RST. This allows ones documents to be easily used in a wide selection of other apps.
Pro Support for multiple platforms
Windows, Linux, and BSD are supported with their own clients. This is nice for those that use multiple operating systems but still want to use the same app on each.
Cons
Con It renames your files in order to tag them
The positive side of this drawback is that this way the tags are easily transferred to other platforms by simply syncing them.
Con Setup could be more user-friendly
Con No mobile app support
This is a desktop app and there are no mobile versions available. This can make it more difficult to use on-the-go if using cloud storage to store files from the app, as there is no mobile app version to access those files.
Con No native sync support
Zim notes don't automatically synchronize with other devices or offer built-in cloud sync support. Of course the user can add the files to Dropbox, or something similar, to then open them on another device with the app installed. But this is more of a work-around than a built-in solution.
Con Looks ancient
Zim has a very plain and outdated interface.