Zen significantly outpaces Justnote in community adoption with 1,129 stars compared to 67 stars on GitHub. This 16.9x difference suggests Zen has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Zen has 61 forks, indicating growing developer engagement.

Zen shows more recent development activity with its last commit 3 months ago, while Justnote was last updated 6 months ago. This suggests Zen is being more actively maintained.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, JSX. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Justnote uses Typescript, C, Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, Kotlin, MATLAB while Zen leverages Golang.

Justnote has been in development longer, starting 6 years ago, compared to Zen which began 1 year ago. This 4.1-year head start suggests Justnote may have more mature features and established processes.

The projects use different licenses: Justnote is licensed under GPL-2.0 while Zen uses AGPL-3.0. Consider the licensing requirements when choosing for your project.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Note-Taking. However, they also have distinct specializations: Justnote also focuses on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Secure & Encrypted Notes.