TiddlyWiki vs Zim

No commercial interests, no ads, no registration, no nonsense. You own your notes 100%.

This is a major aim and point with TiddlyWiki; people can relatively easily modify it to fit their particular application needs.

It's a single file and all your notes will be "accessible even in 25 years" because they can be seen in plain html text.

All content is stored within the same html file as the interface.

Mature software, active community with members from all over the world.

Allows for relational links and lists between notes to keep things organized.

Basic users can start with simple note-taking, progressively discover predefined features and existing plugins, then start using more fancy features (like filters, widgets, macros), in order to adapt their wiki to their needs.

The list of possible usages is practically infinite in TW, and more importantly it lets the user define their own method of dealing with their content.

Low barrier of entry for the non IT knowledgeable.

Follow the link back-and-forth.

Variety of settings, and community themes & plugins, available from built-in marketplace (CPL library). Every community plugin is open-source which means you can learn from it and develop your own. Some plugin don't require programming knowledge (written using WikiText), and is very easy to learn.

Suit for programmer, writer, Notion style WYSIWYG editor lover, and HTML UI designer.

Everything is stored in your device. You can back them up, encrypt and process however you want to. Works completely offline. Read your notes anytime, anywhere, in any platform, and sync between without cost.

Every card can link to other card, and other card will see the way it's linked to. Use Tag for nesting and build folder structure. Tags are tree shaped, and count of tag is limitless. Backlink can be automatically generated or selectively generated using advanced filter.

Renames titles in "Tags" and "List" fields by default. Relink plugin updates titles in all links automatically.

You can use the TiddlyWiki saver to save your TiddlyWiki file directly to your github repository. If you also use GitHub pages, then you can load your file wherever you happen to be, make changes, and update.

The official support forum is at talk.tiddlywiki.org. It's frequented by a large number of knowledgeable TiddlyWiki enthusiasts. You rarely see a question go unanswered more than 2 or 3 days, and in most cases questions are answered within minutes. For harder questions, the developer himself frequently wades in to add information.

You can create lists of anything inside TiddlyWiki like tags, title structure, date, custom fields and present it as links, checkboxes, tables or whatever structure you need using a few lines of wikitext (a markdown-like language with powerful widget ability built-in).

The official CodeMirror plugins allow you to close brackets, close tags, auto-complete, use VIM, Sublime or Emacs keybindings, and edit CSS, HTML, XML or Javascript text.

In cross-platform desktop APP TidGi and Android App Tiddloid you can create as much wiki workspace as you want, they are free forever.

In TiddlyWiki tags aren't some kludgey text-based add-on -- they're built into the design from the first. Tags can contain spaces and non-Latin characters. Tags are available at the top of each note. Click on a tag and you instantly see all the other notes that share that tag. You can then change the order of that list simply by dragging and dropping from the tag-pill. Tags can tag other tags, allowing you to create multiple types of TOC's with the built-in tag macros. You can create new notes tagged with the current note with just one click.

You don't have to worry about leaving your TW somewhere it might get exposed. You can activate the built-in encryption ability, using the Stanford Javascript Encryption Library to have your wiki encrypted with 256 bit security.

TiddlyWiki gives you the choice of whether you access additional resources (images, docx, pdfs) externally from the operating system or internally as embedded objects.

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.

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.

Zim will automatically create a folder structure that fits your page hierarchy and adds/removes files such as images to/from appropriate folders.

Zim supports HTML, LaTeX, Pandoc Markdown, and RST. This allows ones documents to be easily used in a wide selection of other apps.

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.