When comparing Piggydb 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 Piggydb is ranked 58th. 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 Creativity
Piggydb is a knowledge building application. You can think of it as a mix of notetaking, outliner and concept map all together, but with the flexibility to do more than that. Its non-linear system and bottom-up or heuristic approach gives you the possibility of creativity to discover new concepts and ideas based on your input. There is no wrong way of using Piggydb. It helps you to elaborate your own knowledge.
Pro Free
Pro Hierarchical tags
Hierarchy for tags gives more flexibility than folders for classifying and structuring your content. It even allows to have parallel hierarchies for the same content using the same tags, connecting your notes together, but in different order. It is up to your needs and creativity.
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 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.