Standard Notes significantly outpaces Zen in community adoption with 6,574 stars compared to 1,129 stars on GitHub. This 5.8x difference suggests Standard Notes has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Standard Notes has 540 forks, indicating moderate developer engagement.

Standard Notes shows more recent development activity with its last commit 1 day ago, while Zen was last updated 3 months ago. This suggests Standard Notes 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: Standard Notes uses Bash, Typescript, SCSS, C, Objective-C, Java, Swift, Ruby, Kotlin, MATLAB while Zen leverages Golang.

Standard Notes has been in development longer, starting 10 years ago, compared to Zen which began 1 year ago. This 8.3-year head start suggests Standard Notes may have more mature features and established processes.

Both projects use the AGPL-3.0 license, providing identical terms for usage and distribution.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Note-Taking. However, they also have distinct specializations: Standard Notes also focuses on Secure & Encrypted Notes.

Standard Notes provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while Zen may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.