Joplin is a fully open-source, cross-platform note-taking and task-management application created in 2016 by Laurent Cozic, a French developer. The application runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and as a terminal app, with notes saved in Markdown to an open format on the user's chosen storage backend. Joplin Cloud, the optional managed sync service, is hosted in France under EU privacy laws and charged from €2.99/month (Basic) through €5.99/month (Pro) and €7.99/user/month (Teams). All Joplin Cloud tiers support end-to-end encryption (the same E2EE available for self-sync scenarios) meaning Laurent Cozic's servers cannot read user notes even when syncing through Joplin Cloud.
The product positions itself as a privacy-first Evernote / Obsidian / Roam Research alternative. The core differentiators for EU-sovereignty buyers are the French operator (EU member state, GDPR-default), the E2EE architecture on the cloud tier, and the fully open-source codebase (MIT-licensed; GitHub: laurent22/joplin). Synchronisation works with Joplin Cloud (France-hosted), Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV, or any S3-compatible storage, giving EU buyers the flexibility to sync through purely EU infrastructure (e.g. Hetzner S3 / OVHcloud Object Storage / Infomaniak kDrive) if preferred.
For EU-sovereignty procurement Joplin is the cleanest note-taking listing in the docs-and-wikis category by operator origin: French developer, France-hosted cloud, E2EE, MIT open source. The remaining gap is the absence of a formal DPA document (typical for a micro-ISV solo project) and the lack of an explicit sub-processors page. In practice the E2EE architecture means this gap is structurally less significant than for non-encrypted services. Best fit: individual privacy-conscious knowledge workers, journalists, researchers, and freelancers wanting a self-hostable open-source Obsidian / Evernote alternative with EU data residency; teams using the Teams tier with shared notebook access.