When comparing Habitica vs Joplin, the Slant community recommends Joplin for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform task apps?” Joplin is ranked 5th while Habitica is ranked 25th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can use peer pressure to motivate
The app allows creating a party with other people and go on a quest together. Here, your actions affect not just you, but everyone else in the party as well. If you fail a task, the party loses health, if you complete a task, the party gains experience, etc.
Pro Gamifies the process to motivate
The app takes cues from role playing games by having a system that rewards certain behavior with experience points, levels, and gear upgrades. It also allows you to set custom rewards that you come up with yourself such as watching an episode of your favorite TV show.
Pro Offline access
Pro Open source
Peace of mind that there is no malicious piece of software in the app.
Pro Encryption
Pro Cross-platform
Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.
Pro Supports file attachments
Pro Supports markdown
Pro Supports tags for notes
Pro Web Clipper
Browser extension saves full pages, clean content, or screen selections to new notes.
Pro Optional CLI interface
Provides a CLI interface for terminal lovers.
Pro Supports multiple languages
English, French, and Spanish, Italian, German, Czech and many others.
Pro Active user forum with support from app creators
Support, troubleshooting, and new feature requests are easy to make at the user forum and you can contact the app creator directly.
Pro Dropbox support
Can sync using Dropbox.
Pro Nextcloud support
Pro Timed alarm reminder for to-do lists
Cons
Con Occasional bugs and laggyness
The app is still in beta and has the occasional bug to work out.
Con Can cause needless stress
As with most gamified systems it includes punishments for failures. Fear of failure can cause stress and failures can demotivate.
Con Sync issues with Android
If update on Linux then sync on Android, sometimes the Android sync will duplicate or remove some journal notes. Seems to be a bug in the Android app. The Linux app alone without sync with Android seems to work well using Dropbox. But don't expect changes you make on Android to sync properly back to Linux.
Con Sync issue under Linux
The Linux client has a bug that requires the user to click the mouse frequently in order for sync to proceed. This bug has been open for a while.
Con Gargantuan memory footprint
1GB+ of memory for taking notes.
Con Old school interface
Con Bloated
This project is suffering from feature creep and uses a lot of memory for a note-taking app.
Con App Image launches very slowly
On Linux, you can only install via App Image, which take 5+ seconds to launch. I can launch LibreOffice in under two seconds.
Con Sync issues on Windows
No way to change account settings and sync easily corrupted.
Con Weak tag searching
Joplin can currently only search for a single tag at a time. None of the boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) are available for use in searches. This greatly diminishes the usefulness of tags in Joplin.