I find it weird that no one is mentioning that this article is written by an EN competitor.
I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fine but I don't like they way it handles organizing data. I prefer a nested hierarchy which I can get with tags in EN. Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin.
EN has the advantage of being available on Mac and Windows (and Linux w/ Wine), allows you to capture from literally anywhere and has a fantastic and fast search. You can encrypt notes. You can schedule notes. You can make todo's. Capture emails. Scan documents (and then find them with OCR). It's got a very usable api to integrate it into any part of your workflow they don't cover. I dunno, I've tried em all and EN is still the best IMO.
ps. I've been using org mode lately too. That _might_ be what finally gets me off EN but the mobile experience just isn't there yet. Beorg (iOS) is great but still pretty short on features. Especially capture and search.
> Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin.
So true. I've used Evernote for years and recently started using Notion. Notion works much better for organizing and structuring stuff, but when it comes down to jotting down a quick note, I istinctively open Evernote. Just recently I've realized it's because of the speed, both on desktop and (even worse) on mobile, Notion just takes too long to start up.
Just now while writing this comment I tried to open both of them on my Windows laptop: Evernote took ~1s, Notion ~5s between launching and loading the content.
Same. Love the ideas happening in Notion, but until I can go from idea to having it in my phone in less time than it takes for me to find a pen and paper, I'll stick with other tools.
I was an early EN user from way back in the day when the UI metaphor was basically an infinite roll of paper.
I abandoned EN around the time everyone else did for a Dropbox synced folder full of markdown files. I use Sublime Text as my client on the desktop.
For my particular use case (I never really used the advanced EN features) it's worked well. I never really created notes on mobile, but I can read them using the Dropbox app.
You can simply use ripgrep to search. Either from a terminal, or from an editor it is integrated with.
I favor the same approach. In my case, I use org-mode instead of markdown as it offers a few niceties when editing from Emacs. But irrespective of that, IMHO plain text overrules any other choice as it is future-proof and can be composed with your favorite tools. For example, a VCS like Git.
I have many files in a flat zettelkasten-like structure [1]. That means, essentially, having one file per concept and using links to chain them.
That assumes that the text in your notes uses the vocabulary you'd expect, and isn't misspelled. Neither of those are guaranteed if your notes are snippets of other documents (a common EN use-case) rather than text you wrote yourself. Especially not guaranteed if the snippets are images where their textual representation is the output of an OCR algorithm.
Sublime's file search is super fast. Works great for me.
My folder tree is fairly flat and folder/file-naming is self-explanatory, so when I have to use the dropbox client on mobile, finding stuff isn't too bad.
Every time I find a new Evernote competitor, I try it out. I keep thinking that it must be easy to top Evernote, which I have various complaints about.
I was never an evernote power user, but I find Notion to be much more intuitive and preferable with two exceptions: Evernote's inline audio tool is really excellent. Being able to capture snippets lightning fast inline is crucial to my workflow as a musician. And Notion is slow on startup. Hopefully they become profitable enough to decide a native mac client is worthwhile.
In general, Notion has the same feel to me that Slack did when it first came out: Just the right balance of cutesy, thoughtful detail in the UX, but in a way that doesn't feel superfluous because the underlying abstractions are also very well considered.
Choosing the emoji icons for pages, being able to /page to make a new linked page inline, @referencing pages, the interchangeable table and calendar views... none of it is particularly novel, but they're the best I've ever used at making it feel effortless to compose.
My issue with Notion is just picky little things that make it not fun to use. It looks great, is intuitive to me, and seems pretty powerful, so I want to like it. But, I hate having to be emailed a log-in code. Everytime it happens I think "oh yeah, this is why I never use Notion". I don't like that the desktop and mobile apps are just wrappers for the webview. As a user I feel like I have no control over anything. At least with Evernote and OneNote, I can literally see my database on my computer. With Notion, I am always aware that this is data on somebody else's servers. I've also had subpages completely disappear if I move their parent note, and I gave up on support and just accepted the loss.
I use Joplin every day for work, and review notes on the commute home from phone. Love being able to write in Markdown, fully encrypted across all devices, full hierarchical structure plus tags support. The UI is "basic", but so are my needs. And if it goes away, I have an up-to-the-minute backup organized by those same folders and markdown files. Several new releases since I started using it 6 months ago.
The lack of tags support on mobile and the proprietary storage format is what drove me away from OneNote.
I use EN every day also. The search is not good, but I haven't found anything better, I have a lot of notes in different notebooks and it works ok for me in terms of speed and usability across mobile and desktop. I'm glad they didn't become some bloated app that tries to upsell you with useless new features all the time but worry they might not survive. I had a major problem with sync 3 years ago where I lost an important document, ever since then I write important things outside EN and store a copy in it
yeah, search is really bad. Not sure if it's still possible, but a few years ago when trying to find something I knew I captured, I just wrote my own SQL against the local DB - found what I was looking for pretty quickly.
Hi! I am the co-founder of FYI and author of the blog post. We are not an Evernote competitor. In fact we integrate with it and many other document apps.
This is a very strange content to post on your product's blog. What marketing advantage are you seeing from your blog, which seems to only contain this takedown article of a quasi-competitor alongside mostly clickbait posts ("These 10 tips will change your life!").
Strange content indeed. I thought it was interesting but totally inappropriate for a company’s blogging platform. Seems like a cheap shot way to drive traffic to their site.
I really liked Google Keep before I started concerning myself with privacy and boycotted all Google products. It struck the perfect balance between organization and the ability to easily jot things down; one thing I never liked about EN was that every note had to go in a notebook and had to have a title. That would always give me a mental block when I just wanted to write disorganized thoughts and then organize them later. I'm also a huge advocate of tags-over-categories.
Currently I'm on Apple's notes app. There are lots of things I don't like about it - rich text formatting needs to die - but it gets the job done and has "jot-ability". I've thought about writing my own dead-simple notes app but just never had the time. Plaintext, dropbox backup, simple substring search, maybe tags, maybe markdown.
I'm a happy Org Mode user, but it lacks a complete, reliable and easy to use mobile interface. It is and probably will always be a desktop-centric application.
really? Been working fine for me apart from the occasional sync conflict. I just make sure to sync before I make any changes on the phone, and then sync again.
Depends on your use case. If you are just storing text string, simple notes, using it as a scratchpad or maybe a todo list, then yeah, it's hard to justify pricing.
But some note services are the backbone of some people's workflow. I personally require one and if Evernote shutdown, it will create massive disruption to my life.
thats the thing: a NOTES service is useless. EN is not just a notes service. In fact thats probably its least useful feature. EN is a knowledge database. Its a place to stick stuff you might want to use later. As I've said before, its too bad that no one that works at EN understands this.
Isn't that just a fancy way of searching notes? Seems like full text search and/or a wiki linking interface is most of that functionality.
It's a hard problem; I don't mean to demean the work of the people on the product. But notes apps have been more or less the same for 30-40 years now barring features like OCR that I'd never use: the main difference is that you pay to sync them somewhere.
I didn't read it as demeaning. I would respectfully like to posit that perhaps you haven't fully thought through what makes EN and its ilk different.
Yes a full text search and wiki linking interface would get a fairly large chunk of the essential functionality done. But there are MASSIVE gaps there. For one, a wiki is a web interface. Those are slow and suck on mobile. I've yet to see one that doesn't. Attaching media is painful. Theres no web clipper support. You'll have to roll your own infrastructure including backups. Capturing anything outside of a traditional desktop context is going to suuuuuck. Capturing TEXT is a fairly trivial problem. So much of what I capture in a given day is much more than that. I regularly scan documents and use EN to manage a paperless office for instance. You can do that with a wiki I suppose but it's more friction than is worthwhile IMO.
If you practice GTD like me, you need a trusted repository for capturing your thoughts, items, todos, etc. It should be fast and easy and available everywhere. Thats The value prop that EN brings to the table. No matter what it is you want to capture and store, no matter what platform, they have a way to quickly and easily do it. You can even email notes right into it (they give you a special email address) which I use for things like tech newsletters and stuff. So while you are right that notes apps have been around, its the little things that really make the difference here.
OneNote's Android app is still a bit iffy of an experience for surfacing notes and reading content (the scrolling can be a bit jittery sideways, and there's no separate edit/read modes), something where Evernote's steady scrolling has it beat. ON Android is amazing for capture, though, but I don't imagine Evernote falling behind much on that count.
Good to know. For some reason I just kind of hate the UI. Thats my primary reason for not using it. MS apps just look like garbage to me. Personal taste thing tho.
OneNote is the only thing I've seen that pretty closely matches EN in features. Its missing the email to inbox feature that EN has (unless they've added that since I last checked).
Due to some weird bug in Evernote, I lost about 10% of all my notes. Some of them critical. This happened about a year ago, and I never found out the actual cause. I think it was some kind of bug triggered by the combination of syncing from/to the mobile app and the desktop app. But I completely stopped trusting Evernote after this and stopped using it.
I've always had a terrible experience using Evernote across multiple devices. Editing a note on mobile seemed like a surefire way to get a merge conflict. I believe I also experienced a mysterious disappearance of a large chunk of my notes.
I just opened for Evernote for the first time in years and it looks like all my notes are now duplicated for some reason. Awesome.
This has happened to me as well. Not just entire notes, but even while I am typing it will have a synching hickup and delete everything I have written and rollback to the previous synching state. It is really really bad at synching.
I've always thought the Evernote sync issues got much less attention than they deserved. Both myself and my co-founder were repeatedly burned by Evernote sync when working on notes between mobile and desktop. Sync was the foremost reason we began working on a replacement.
We picked "sync" and "security" as the two core values we wanted to put most focus on when building our note app (https://www.amplenote.com/).
It's curious to me that Notion has so little to say about the effort they put into sync and security -- these seem like such essential features to a great todo app, and I don't think either can be done right unless it is an active, top-tier priority.
I also lost some data. I used to keep a personal journal in some random website, but when they closed that I copied it as a single huge block of text, encrypted. One day, it cropped 80% of it. Gone forever.
I tried using it years ago over the span of a couple months and found syncing to be absolutely atrocious. It'd delete pages of notes if they didn't exist on the other computer I was syncing to and then they were simply gone forever.
Dropbox was getting huge around the same time. I started just saving my text notes in a dropbox folder. Never had any syncing errors, deleted Evernote, and never looked back. I'm sure they've improved since then, but it's hard to go back after such a sour first impression.
That and the Mac and Windows versions had functionality that didn't work in the web or Android versions. So you could read notes that others sent you.
The web version would also reasonably regularly save 100 versions of the same note. Support queries on this got a shrug response and "yeah don't use the web client".
So I switched how I do notes and ditched Evernote.
I'm in the same boat with the text files in a dropbox folder. I thought about just emailing myself notes to a notes-only account, but I'm not sure there much of an advantage there over Dropbox. Still, files in a folder checks all the boxes for me. Compatible with everything forever, can organize and reorganize as creatively as I want, lightweight, can search my notes and sort a bunch of different ways, and osx even supports tags.
Granted, this is a little clunkier on mobile, but for quick notes I use drafts which is the speediest note taking app I've found (opens directly to writing prompt, one button save or append to dropbox files).
I've tried Drafts (and pretty much every other app that supports Dropbox sync) and none felt as intuitive as Notebooks[1]. There is even a free iPhone version[2] you can try. Has support for Markdown and Webdav as well!
Also i know, at least for me, that when i find myself wanting to take notes most is whenever its a spur of the moment kind of idea that i dont want to lose.
In that kind of scenario, i find that a small notebook and pencil is still superior to an app simply because i don't have to think too much about the process of getting myself into a position where i can actually record the idea.
Its just too hard to get into the habit of remembering you have a note taking app on your phone that you can use whenever the good idea has just hit you.
You are too excited about the idea and trying your hardest to recall all the key details and keep them freshly in mind to be able to navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.
Plus if im pulling out my phone, why not just use the voice controlled virtual assistant to record my ideas?
Not only does it have speech to text recognition but its actually quicker and more reliable than pulling out your notepad, flipping to an empty page, and hoping your writing utensil doesnt break/run out of ink.
>navigate to the app, wait for it to load up, press the + button, type in the idea using your thumbs, write in a title, save it, shit the app just crashed, load the app back up, great my idea wasnt saved, guess ill try writing it again, damn it i wish these notifications would stop popping up and pinging me, uhhh crap what was the clever angle to my idea again? Damn it.
This is like the black-and-white scene in an infomercial in which a person dramatically fails to perform a simple, everyday task.
If using an app is truly that hard, use a different app.
I have an "email to self" app on my phone. One tap and it opens my email app with my personal email address pre-loaded. Then I write whatever in there, or use voice dictation, and hit send. Syncing, backups, distribution to all my devices - all taken care of already because it's email. Fancy stuff.
What it sucks for is any idea that is better explained or formulated with a drawing. For that I use paper. When I'm done, I take a picture with my phone, and then it gets synced to the cloud.
Also sticking to email for notes. It's the one account that I expect to migrate between providers when need arises,whereas something specific to notes I would likely just abandon. Advanced features like sync between devices is already set up and it's searchable, I have encryption when I want it, the UI is familiar.
For even more transient notes I have a widget on my phone's main screen that is just a single, persistent multiline text field without even something as complicated as a save button. It will typically show the number of a hotel room I stayed in months ago or something like that.
I use the app “launcher” at the top of the iOS widget area with slots that are pre-filled in templates that append to specific Evernote notes via email.
Also, use a Siri voice shortcuts that launch specific Evernote notes. Have a Siri voice shortcut that transcribes what I say and appends to a specific note. Many solutions to get stuff into Evernote on iOS and I’m sure Android too. Paper is still superior at times, but stuff ends up in EN eventually.
Getting stuff into it isn’t a problem I have with it.
After over 30 years of Franklin Planners, Apple Newtons, GTD, Sharp Wizards, Ecco (how I miss you), Field Notes, and a laundry list of others I have forgotten, I believe I have found the Holy Grail: a combination. Leuchtturm 1917 notebook for the bullet journal, Bear Notes on the Apple devices, vimwiki for heavy lifting on "real computers".
Most of my time is spent in the paper journal for day-to-day. I use the Bear Notes complication on the Apple Watch to take a quick transcribed note that will probably end up in the paper journal. I also use Bear for shopping lists and checklists that I keep on the phone. And then for project notes, lab notes, anything worthy of an outline, or anything I don't want to hand-write or fiddle with on a phone, I use vimwiki. (I'd use Bear, but I have a Windows desktop at work, and Bear is Apple-only.)
To put it another way, there are three tiers:
1. Hand-written, used most frequently day-to-day.
2. Digital Lite: Bear for quick notes, or reference when not at a desk. Don't particularly care about long-term persistence of these. If persisted, often goes in #1 ('do taxes next week').
3. Digital Industrial Strength: Long-term storage, and long form documents.
Trying to squeeze it all into one do-it-all tool became a fool's errand, IMO. Sometimes I need to just hammer a nail, sometimes I need to split wood; one hammer won't do both.
I hate glue-bound notebooks, because the page I'm writing on pillows up a bit. It's a personal tic for me, but I want the page to lie perfectly flat so it doesn't give while I'm writing.
I finally found the perfect notebook. It's ring-bound, and you can add or remove pages from it easily. The paper is very smooth and heavy enough that you can use both sides without bleed-through. Even with a fountain pen.
So this is my shill post for the Aqua Drops notebook. It's awesome:
Same, sometimes pen and paper is just better for my needs. I keep flirting with digital pens. The idea is awesome, you write with a pen on paper and it's automatically digitized and backed up. (There's special markings on the paper to help the digitizer). In practice there's been some glitches, but in the worst case it's still paper and ink.
I tried a Livescribe Echo pen for awhile. It always felt kinda bulky in the hand, and there were some glitches. It also had audio recording, and probably the best feature was you could point at your writing and it would fast-fwd/rewind the audio to the moment in time that you wrote that word. Great for filling in gaps when taking notes. Livescribe tried to integrate with Evernote at some point. Seemed like a great idea, but either Evernote or Livescribe failed terribly on that integration. Lost functionality from the stand alone Livescribe app, and never gained the functionality of Evernote. Ultimately my pen fell prey to a failed OLED problem that many of those pens had.
Recently trying again with a Neo Smartpen. The first one had a firmware bug and after a few days it couldn't re-charge anymore. Customer service replaced it, and replacement seems fine. This pen feels much more like a regular pen. Power on/off is triggered by removing/replacing the pen cap, so I barely even notice it's not a normal pen. Digitizing quality has been solid. Not as many features as the Livescribe had, but the transcribing quality (OCR) is much better. (Of course, I'm comparing a brand-new Neo to a previous-gen Livescribe. Could be cool to check out the new version of Livescribe, too)
Android at least has specific tasks in apps' home screen context menus (hold over app icon, get list of tasks). Those can be dragged to the home screen so you get buttons for specific actions. I have a host of quick capture tools on my home screen:
"New Note" task icon (personal notebook)
"Add new task" icon (adds new task in my todo app - personal or work depends on which one was open last)
Office Lens (camera, documents, whiteboards)
a shortcut to my work notebook's "quick notes" section (would be another "new note" button but OneNote can't handle that)
I can pretty much press a button and instantly be capturing what I need to capture. The drag-a-task thing is also useful with Outlook, since the default Outlook shortcut opens the email client. Luckily, Outlook's tasks include "Open calendar", "new event" and "new email". Bam, calendar has its own icon on the homescreen too.
One thing I like about paper and pencil is that I tend to have a better signal to noise ratio in my to-dos and notes. I guess the extra effort to write encourages me to trim the fat. I also can't check my mail from my note pad, so there's that.
For me taking notes on my phone is usually as easy as clicking on an app, clicking new page and then typing. I have never had any problems with crashing, synching, notifications or opening the app that you mention. I find it much easier and better than taking notes on paper.
My handwriting is terrible and I can type faster on my phone than handwrite things. I have become significantly more organized since transitioning all my note taking and ideas to my phone rather than handwriting on some notebook where it will be forgotten and likely illegible.
I wanted a way to keep a pen tucked into the journal. And I didn't want a spiral-bound cheap one. Most of the journals I've seen don't have a way to store a pen.
Semi-ironically, I use a BIC Atlantis pen with it, because I don't like most Cross pens...
What do you do about ideas you think of when you're not at a computer? Or when you're at a computer that doesn't have access to the network you usually store notes on?
We contacted Evernote in 2012, 13, 14 begging them to try CRDT based synchronisation.
First, it might have fixed their sync glitches.
Second, that would make the client a full copy of the data, very much like a git repo. You can't lose data that way.
Third, that would be a step towards collaborative features.
We got brushed off. We used personal connections as well as official channels.
In 2014 we annoyed them so much, we're got a very confident response: sync is not a problem. Ironically, in a couple of months that "bug ridden elephant" post was out with all the reputational consequences.
CRDTs are objects that can be updated without expensive synchronization/consensus and they are guaranteed to converge eventually if all concurrent updates are commutative (see below) and if all updates are executed by each replica eventually.
So it has been 5 years since 2019 and they still haven't fixed the synch problem (in my experience). That doesn't bode well for the product as a whole I would think.
Me and the other guy. I am Victor Grishchenko, PhD. At the time, we had a CRDT based sync engine which we white-labelled to Yandex. We had been eager to work with Evernote cause all their sync issues have been very clear to us.
These days, even Apple Notes syncs with CRDTs... at the time, it was cutting-edge.
P.S. Please never let me feel that my response is more polite than necessary.
Not OP but I think that may be a way of saying, in effect, if one person is being more polite than the other, then they might feel like they are being "more polite than necessary". So his P.S. is saying "please match my politeness level", or, possibly, "You are being impolite, compared to me. Fix that" in an oblique manner.
Continuing to play devil's advocate, I think implicit is the expectation that all parties know good manners when they see them, which could be yet another way of putting people down in that statement.
One day I noticed that one was missing shortly after I created it. Eventually I discovered that the convenient new-note shortcut was failing every time with a database corruption error - but the error only appeared in a system log I was unaware of. There was no indication to the user that the notes were failing. To this day I have no idea how many notes I lost due to this bug. It was a traumatic experience.
It also sometimes simply doesn't sync for days on end, until I notice and trigger it manually. This leads to conflicts I must resolve manually.
What do other people use that has similar:
- Low-friction global shortcuts for creating and searching.
- Organization (tags and notebooks, or something similar).
- A UI that handles large note bodies well.
- Is at least on Windows, macOS, and Android.
I'd love an alternative, but I've yet to find one. And I don't even use most of its features.
I was going to comment to recommend orgmode too. Like you said, the org files are plain text, they can be opened by practically anything, and can be saved practically anywhere.
I use Orgzly on Android, which syncs manually to DropBox. A free dropbox 2GB space is going to store a lot of orgmode files! I edit mostly through Orgzly, although I do use the orgmode extension in Visual Studio Code to edit on my laptop.
I guess the real answer is "a folder of text files you sync." You don't have to use Orgmode or emacs at all to get a good chunk of the benefit here.
True, you can't do rich text or media, but it turns out I almost never even WANT to do that.
Anyway, I was doing sync'd text with a Mac tool called Notational Velocity for years before I got sucked into OrgMode (emacs' Deft mode is a workalike). Point any iOS or Android editor at a Dropbox folder and you've got mobile sync on the cheap with versioned backup and more or less ever present and completely open data that works on any platform.
OneNote and EN may have some shiny features, but NOTHING they do is worth locking your data up.
> True, you can't do rich text or media, but it turns out I almost never even WANT to do that.
And the times that you do, you can use Markdown and Pandoc to convert it. And mdfind/spotlight will index and search it just fine, as will any other search tool you wish to use.
I lament some of my coworkers inability to see the utility in text+markdown+pandoc or even just a plain old wiki like Dokuwiki. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to wait a day for someone to dig out an excel spreadsheet to email me an immediately-out-of-date copy.
While I will joke about how people would find it so much easier if they just did everything I said, I do wonder why so many people keep themselves permanently handicapped by their choice of information storage and sharing.
Well, what is easy and intuitive and quick for you might not be for other folks, so there's that.
The immediate staleness of traditional Office docs is a downside, but the upside is that you have a copy you control. It falls down a little on collaboration, though.
If OneNote had been made by a hot new startup if would have crushed the competition (easy to use! affordable! very flexible! just works!). Instead, it's too often glossed over because it's made by one of IT's behemoths and not considered to be sexy enough.
When I first tried it in like 2012 it was absolutely a mess that crashed all the time and bogged down with hardly any notes and was deserving of all the hate it got. If it was in the hands of a startup it would have been long gone by now.
How is the OCR in OneNote now? One of the features keeping me on Evernote is being able to take a photo of a whiteboard and put it in Evernote which then does a surprisingly good job of recognizing the text and making the photo searchable.
Last time I spent some time with it, the UI just never clicked for me. My main notetaking device is my iPad with a Pencil stylus and GoodNotes. It does a great job of interpreting my handwriting and then I can export a searchable PDF to Evernote, or I guess, OneNote.
Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?
The thing about Microsoft’s stuff is that it slowly but inexorably gets better over time. Like a watched pot, if you are waiting for a feature it will never arrive but if you walk away and come back a few years later it will be significantly better.
"Is the metadata search in OneNote decent? For example, can I search for notes I created in Houston?"
Don't think so. You can search note titles, bodies, section names, section group names, handwriting, OCRed text in attached images (OneNote can embed pdfs as attachments or insert a printout of the file as images, it doesn't have an inline pdf reader yet). It can't search inside attachments or inside cloud attachments.
The app has its own tagging system that lets you attach tags to eg. paragraphs and the desktop clients have tag search and custom tag creation. The desktop and mobile apps both also have search that treats "#word" and "word" as different things, so you can jury-rig a hashtagging system should you want to.
In my experience, onenote's synchronization still has serious performance issues if you have a huge number of notes. Try moving or deleting a large number of notes and watch it just completely lock up for 20 minutes.
Also, initial sync on a new machine is ridiculously slow. As in I need to leave it for hours before it totally syncs everything.
This! Once Microsoft bundles something that has 80% of what people want, you need to get far ahead on the innovation curve. (Though I will never understand why the formatting gets messed up when copying pasting from OneNote to Outlook)
I like and use OneNote, but "all platforms" isn't quite correct - there is no native Linux client, so I have to use the browser version, which isn't nearly as good as native versions.
While MS doesn't do great on Linux support, given their web push, I can usually find a decent Electron alternative for desktop linux. Of course it's more overhead than native, but a lot of MS's own implementations for tools are now electron based.
Are you able to create/filter/update/delete tags across all devices now in OneNote? I know that wasn't the case for Android as recently as 6 months ago.
That's a gross exaggeration. Every OneNote client (except for the browser one) downloads everything from OneDrive to the local machine and does all the changes to that local copy, which then gets synced to OneDrive. You could take weeks' worth of notes and peruse mountains of reference without any Internet access and the app wouldn't bat an eye.
It's true the app's positioned as an online service rather than a file reader for offline files the way it started, but calling a native app that operates on local data a "thin client" is just disingenuous.
I've captured (in Evernote, ironically) a few Evernote alternatives. Haven't had time to look them over yet, so not sure how much they address each of your needs:
- https://getpolarized.io/: open source html and pdf document manager. Supports Anki flashcards, local storage, markup of pdfs, tracking reading progress, more
I've been happily using Joplin for about a year now, after having been an Evernote paid user for years. It's definitely "good enough" for my needs, and it's open source so it's hackable (I added in a 'today's date' shortcut key just by hacking the production package - I didn't even bother to build it.) Everyone of course wants something different from a note taker, but I figured I'd chime in with an endorsement.
I've been using Trilium[1] over the past two months and I really like it. It's being actively maintained and worked on and is just getting better and better.
Although, the Android client is quite limited. There's an app to send notes. You can however, use the browser.
The app has its own tagging system that lets you attach tags to eg. paragraphs and the desktop clients have tag search and custom tag creation. The desktop and mobile apps both also have search that treats "#word" and "word" as different things, so you can jury-rig a hashtagging system should you want to. The big difference is that both OneNote Tags and #hashtags have to live within the note body, they're not metadata properties of the note the way they are in Evernote.
UI for large notes shouldn't be worse than Evernote's.
Is on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, web, though different clients have different featuresets.
Cost is the price of however much OneDrive storage you need for the notes.
I've switched over to Notion. They even have a tool now to transfer all your notes from Evernote. Feels simple to use but has some really powerful features.
I use zotero for papers and plain text files in folders for everything else. Dropbox keeps everything synced and I'll definitely be able to open a text or pdf file in 40 years, not too sure about evernote.
If you have a Synology NAS, DS Note is amazing. It's a full featured Evernote/OneNote clone that you self-host on your NAS. Mobile clients available. Easy import from Evernote backup, etc.
I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook.
Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to go back.
The moment I switched from Evernote to Onenote was the time EN screwed up the formatting of one of my very important ornate lists. To make things worse, through an unlucky combination of keystrokes I deleted everything I had in my note, only to find that version control was a Premium feature of Evernote.
I promptly used the free "Recommend to a friend" 1 month trial to recover my note and used the importer to move everything to OneNote and I haven't looked back since.
If this just worked, if they could just make it so I can copy a bulleted list in Evernote and paste it somewhere else without the formatting going bananas, I would have stuck with it.
Precisely this. I use lists to structure my thoughts, and the fact that Evernote couldn't handle basic continuity for nested ordered lists turned me off of it completely.
I use Onenote because it comes with Office on our work computers, but it's still an annoying mess. The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it, maybe it's user error, but it feels clunky. Sometimes I open Onenote after rebooting and it just decides to not find my Notebook? Also, how come if I type a title and then hit the down arrow (and again, because the first time it goes to date), I'm now on the second line of the text area, and have to press up to get to the first line? I have no idea why this bothers me so much, but these little weird behaviors drive me insane.
> The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it
It's meant for drawing and rich media, so you can type notes and draw/paint in the same document. And for that particular use case, if you own a Surface Pen or such it is kind of nice to use.
But I suspect the majority of people in OneNote just need to type out notes. I agree with you, and I wish OneNote had some concept of a "typed-only" note, that did away with the weird textboxing-layouting stuff.
For sure. I had an Evernote subscription, but I used OneNote at work - and it's just better. Letting you place snippets and notes on the vertical AND horizontal plane makes sense for quick note taking. Anyway, I switched last year and the fact that OneNote had a convenient note importer for Evernote was icing on the cake.
Evernote never seemed to evolve either. It was the same product 5 years ago, as it was last year and the company employed hundreds of developers - doing what?
The OneNote canvas based model doesn't really work for note taking for me.
Switching between mobile and desktop devices means the content doesn't fit on either because it the form factors are so different.
I think they special case the mobile product to act like a traditional text editor when there is a single text field. But it is a kludge on top of a broken model.
That's fair. I personally never found value in note taking on mobile. I present at conferences, and deal with partners and customers, and in those cases pen with a pocket-size notebook beats fiddling around with a phone. To compare, to take a note on a phone while talking to a partner, I have to 1) take my phone out, 2) unlock it, 3) launch the app and wait for it to load 4) wait until the software keyboard shows up, 5) start taking notes. At any point the phone could start acting up. Maybe it'll be extra slow this time. Maybe the app will crash. Maybe the fingerprint won't take on the first try. The opportunity for delays are always there.
With a notebook, it's so much faster. You take it out, and you start writing. And at the end of the day, I manually add my notes to OneNote.
At work we have Office and I decided to give One Note a try. The note taking itself is awesome, but I kept running into an issue where copying and pasting would copy images of what I had highlighted instead of just the text of the notes... After Googling for 3 days I gave up and I'm back to pen and paper.
Another thing in OneNote’s favor is you know it’s going to stick around because they sell it to businesses. With Evernote it seems like they could run out of money and with Google they could just get bored.
After I noticed that their forum thread [1] about requesting LaTeX-style math notes was almost as old as my Evernote Premium subscription, I came to the conclusion that this is just a ripoff. I paid all these years only to keep my access and for the occasional design update but the core experience stagnated.
Dropbox Paper already provided a better note-taking experience and with Notion.so I finally found a full replacement. The product is in active development [2] and I don't feel like I am just paying to keep the servers running.
I think I post this every time I read something about Dropbox Paper but I think it's important: Every note is shared by default when you know the URL, nothing is private by default. You explicitly need to make every single note private so no one can access it. I really want to use paper but I think this really sucks IMHO.
I really like the UX of paper, but I feel like it stopped moving forward, and unfortunately it seems to be moving further away from straight markdown little by little. That said, it's still my go-to for writing anything that requires quick and easy inline styling and formatting.
Notion looks great, but I'm still on the fence about it. I tried it a couple months ago and can't say I loved the mobile experience on Android. I should probably give it another shot.
Notion looks great... but I just can't seem to keep using it consitently (maybe too many features?)
Now I am back to markdown files strucuted in folders
I think I may have the same issue. There's a bit too much going on for me.
Markdown has definitely become my format of choice. It's like the JSON of plain-text files: Imperfect, but simple and everywhere.
I'd like to simplify down to markdown files in folders as you have, but I can't seem to find a native editor that I actually like on Ubuntu. They all feel incomplete, or they insist upon "preview" mode, which I can't stand.
Paper has the best editor UX for me, where the formatting happens inline, immediately, as I type. The automated TOC driven by headers is pretty great as well. I do wish I could "view source" once in a while, but for the most part I never actually have to.
I'm pretty late on this response, so I'm not sure you'll ever see it, but after your recommendation I downloaded Typora. It's excellent. I'd tried it a couple times in the past and was not impressed, but I am now. It's fast, it works predictably well, and the documentation is really good.
I wish they had a means of adding plug-ins (or if it were open-source, so I could figure out how to add my own).
Thanks for the recommendation!
As for vscode, I may try it at some point as vscode is pretty impressive, although I tend to live in the Jetbrains world, and happily so. That said, I haven't really been a fan of any Markdown plugin on Jetbrains apps.
Paper does this right with single `$` for inline math and double `$$` for math blocks. Currently, Notions supports only math blocks and you can invoke those with `/math`.
I'm a paid customer of Evernote, I must say that it works great and it has no reasonable replacement.
I use it for all kinds of notes, like for example short tutorials on the command line, issuing commands that are hard to remember, TODO lists (both at work and for grocery shopping), meeting notes, listing pros and cons, everything.
In meetings I like the ability to record audio, or to add pictures I take with my phone, which isn't necessarily a capability of your average open source alternative.
Its search capabilities are also great. I have a ton of notes in my Evernote and I never have issues finding what I'm looking for. Compared with Google Docs for example, which is terrible.
My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox. Also support for encryption is weak. Apps like Evernote can be end to end encrypted, there's absolutely no reason for Evernote, the company, to have access to my notes.
I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me like many other startups before it.
> My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port, I would have liked for example periodic Markdown backups to my Dropbox.
Because Evernote is so common, there are tools that understand Evernote's export format. You might be able to find a tool that can convert an evernote export file?
> I also worry about Evernote, the company, dying on me
I'm a paid user as well and also worry about the company dying. Frankly, I wish they would focus 100% on the core product and kill features that aren't part of that core. For example, get rid of chat. Other companies do it better.
Like many others in this thread, I lost data due to Evernote bugs; I also found their app incredibly slow to use, and then combine that with the price increases as perfectly fine alternatives (OneNote, Apple Notes) were still free or much lower price (Bear plus Drafts on iOS are my current replacement)---I cancelled my account last year.
The headline makes this seem like much more of a mystery than it is. "Offer an unreliable product at a high price" isn't a recipe for commercial success, not unless you're a monopolist (it works for the cable companies).
The problem with both Dropbox and Evernote is that their minimum pricing tier is too expensive for what they provide - particularly when both functions are provided as part of the Microsoft Office package with is the same price as Dropbox alone.
I used both for years and would have happily paid a couple of dollars a month as I do for the basic tier of Google Drive. I abandoned both when the 2 device limit came in.
This. Office 365 package provides full office suit + 1TB of storage + 50GB ad-free mail box for the same price and they are already profitable at this price tag. If you are an startup offering any service more expensive than office 365 you are doing something really wrong.
Well it's not so much that you're doing something wrong. It's that Office 365 has such a ridiculous market share so their developments costs make up almost none of the price. Any start up is almost inevitably going to find their first development costs push their price up so they've really got to offer something new.
A lot of startups price themselves out of the competition simply by believe the nonsense concept of pricing based on "value" == charge users more than they really should.
I agree 100% about the price. I subscribe at the $36/year level (I don't think they advertise it) mostly because I want to support the company. I probably only open the app once or twice a month which means every time I do, it costs me $1. By that standard, it's the most expensive app I use.
"To Pachikov (one of the founders), Evernote wasn’t just another app or a way to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s burgeoning obsession with personal productivity. It was an extension of the human mind itself that would let users remember everything."
TFA made many good points about distractions into merchandise, missing the group discussion opportunity, etc.
But the critical element that killed Evenote is it's unreliability and data loss/corruption.
If anyone actually uses Evernote as intended -- the tool to extend your memory -- the sync and storage functions simply can NEVER lose or corrupt data.
Absolute reliability is more critical than any other feature.
Yet they failed on this one key function.
My anecdata is that while evaluating apps for gathering info & taking notes, Evernote's feature list came out on top in nearly every comparison -- but it had significant reports of unreliability. Disqualified. Period. Never looked back and no regrets, especially since it is still evidently not fixed.
Developers must distinguish between general usability features (e.g., supporting platform X or data format Y) and critical functions.
General features will lose you some users, but you can get them once you get around to implementing.
Critical functions failing or missing will keep people away no matter what you do, forever. And beyond that is the general damage you'll cause to other people's lives by, in this case, corrupting their highly valuable data and memories.
Am I the only one just using the stock MacOs Notes and Reminders? Does the trick for me. Never lost a thing. Does pictures and text and has basic grouping.
I am too, but I really wish I could sync them with my Android phone somehow
Alternatively I have Google Keep on my phone which I can use on desktop via web app. I prefer the design of macOS Notes app for a lot of the notes I want to take though (i.e. long form rather than lists)
After reading this thread I am going to try MS OneNote, seems quite recommended so far and has free macOS and Android apps with syncing
You know, weirdly enough I actually lost about two months of daily notes from the macOS Notes app once.
Something went wrong, and a bunch of notes disappeared from the app. I determined where its database was stored, and set about replacing it with an earlier backup. But that didn't work and I'm still not sure why.
So now I use text files in a directory. Hard to go wrong with that.
I'm using them. The web interface is a bit clunky and occasionally hiccups in chrome but otherwise is pretty solid.
I only have 2 issues.
Syncing across 4 different devices (phone, ipad, mac, and web) is eventually consistent. It can take hours for everything to sync up. Most of the time it's instant but I've had plenty of times where syncing on one device gets stuck for hours.
The other issue is locked notes. If I use FaceID/TouchID instead of a password, syncing gets absolutely trashed. It looks like it's re-keying the encryption for every locked note. (I have hundreds of them.) It's easier to just disable FaceID/TouchID for locked notes.
I also use notes and reminders. They're simple and reliable and I can easily add reminders via Siri. I've tried OneNote, Evernote, and I've paid for reminders apps but they're all unnecessarily complicated for my needs. I found myself spending too much time trying to figure out how to use the third party apps most effectively and fiddling with configuration. Finally realized that simpler is better for my needs.
I've been trying to retain / sync / archive / etc my electronic notes since the mid 1990's - starting with one of the early Palm models.
It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.
The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of other more mundane backups.
It's on my todo list (in trello :) ... but haven't got to it yet.
I use a combination of Unison(-gtk) and Foldersync (android) to replicate some quite large data sets between desktop, server, a couple of laptops, and tablet & phone. Keybase and Synthing are definitely on the list of potential replacements for the manual, periodic sync.
How does Syncthing go insofar as replacing a note-taking system (tagging, collaboration, etc)?
There isn’t any explicit notion of collaboration, and tagging can be accomplished by way of a folder structure. I haven’t tried symlinks, which is how you’d make multiple tags work on a regular file system.
Syncthing’s purpose is to ensure that a specific directory remain synchronized across multiple computers and/or mobile devices. It accomplishes this goal with the minimum of fuss, and (in my experience) works better than Dropbox in that it burns fewer CPU cycles and doesn’t crash/hang/nag me to upgrade.
I think when I looked at it a while back my concern was how it would cope with one or more of my devices being off-network for days at a time (a regular occurrence).
The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems to be quite robust - but given Evernote's primary stated purpose was to ensure none of your data was ever lost (and yet many people have sad stories of data loss) I'm extra-cautious about changing my workflow.
Actually much more pedestrian than that, as I'm confident it works on cases more complex than me. It's simply that I've got a series of mechanisms that work acceptably, and it takes time and effort to run up a VM, set up an archive process, test a new suite & workflow over several weeks.
I don't think Evernote need(s/ed) a team version, but I do think its not sufficiently better to current alternatives for note-taking and bookmarking. I use Pocket for tagged bookmarks and OneNote when I want more context.
Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder (e.g these web tabs, that note, this tag) tied to some event or place where it would be useful - you're in the workshed and picking up some old project; its someone's birthday you wanted to remind them about xyz. Now that would be a genuinely useful memory aid.
I saw a guy pitching a location based notes app years ago one morning on CNBC. I believe it was called "Acorns" (not the investment app). I was super hyped for it. Would mean the wife could just jot a note about grocery items at any point during the week and I'd get an alert whenever I got to the grocery store. Brilliant. No "don't forget milk" texts, which I forget because it's not on my actual list.
But it never launched. Or did under a new name I was unaware of. I've been waiting for location features for a long long time.
I use google keep, it has time and location based reminders. I think there is even an option to create shared note with your SO
edit: yes it works :D I managed to share a note with my gf and she sees it. Now she tried to set up a reminder that will ring my phone when either of us gets close a certain groccery store that we visit
Keep is my current go to. They've added a lot to it recently, but I was unaware they've added locations. The ML predictions for grocery items when you're writing a list is a nice touch.
I'm trying to get off Google's teat, but it looks like I'm on the Keep train, until they abruptly discontinue it in 12-18 months.
KolabNow Noted (and I'm sure just about any CalDav protocol supported email provider) was a perfect drop in replacement for Goo Keep for my somewhat basic needs.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem, there's an app called Grocery[1]. It uses the built-in reminders database, but does lots of excellent grocery-specific things (remembering the order of items in the store, using geofencing to know which store you've arrived at, Apple Watch support for checking items off). And, since it's just Reminders under the hood, you can tell Siri "Add Foo to my grocery list", and it works.
> Where there is a gap in the market, tying notation to memory and productivity, would be some kind of notation context and intelligent reminder
If I were running the company, there's no way I would start chasing idea like this. I like how they used to describe the product 10 years ago - your external brain. It's an application for taking notes, not calendaring or task management.
There are lots of apps that do exactly what you are describing. I think it's a core Android features. You can say "ok google, remind me to buy eggs when I'm at the store" and it just works. I believe iOS has the same functionality.
Reminders of that sort are pretty basic; I had something more like "Now where was I?" in mind - recovering the context, or at least easing the context switch cognitive load. E.g. a task which pops out of the backlog based on your current context of being at the hardware store, to remind you to get a claw hammer, along with the why (you may have forgotten). A memory aid as a synergy of todos, note-taking and reminders basically. It also reduces the constant re-iteration and procrastination over important but not urgent items or ideas that you can push off the top of mind to your note taking app if you can trust it to bring it back at the right time and place or in the right context.
Evernote is still the only accessible note taking solution to offer OCR + related notes search. I've tried moving away from Evernote many times, but I always come back because of this.
Example 1:
1. Snap photo of document on table
2. Seconds later: Open in Evernote and see related documents
Example 2:
1. Take notes on laptop at lecture/meeting
2. Evernote presents photos of slides and handwritten notes about same topic
If it wasn't for Evernote I would never revisit my handwritten notes, ever. And I would have lost countless important receipts, bills, etc. I have tried various open source home made setups but nothing has come close to the portability and ease of use of Evernote. This is why I keep using Evernote to this date.
I just wish they would fix basic issues such as slow, or completely broken, search on mobile, etc. I think if they can strengthen their core product they still have something unique that I think many people would use, and possibly pay for, if they knew about it.
Evernote isn't perfect. That said I've used it forever since the days when it was just a desktop application and have thousands of notes. I've never lost one. While it shocks me, after many years there is still no real alternative to seamlessly synch all the documents I am reading and filing across all my computers and my iPad. The product is feeling a little stale as if active development has stopped but it does work fine as it is.
Honestly, who was sitting there in the middle of a CS class at Standford taking notes and found themselves so absolutely bored to a point of absurdity that they frustratingly sighed out loud,
"man, if only there was a way more exciting way to go about doing this.";
Which prompted the "ahah" lightbulb moment of the guy sitting just within earshot, one row over, who just so happened to be jotting down his own notes on some promising startup ideas?
I've yet to see a note app that didn't just serve up the same functionality of plaintext files and calendar events in a bloated, proprietary, and pricey package.
I've been using Evernote for a while. But since the time MS made a shift to the cloud and has put a lot of effort into OneNote and Office 365, OneNote was doomed to decline in use. Why would you pay for it when you already have Office subscription?
On top of that I was struggling with the UX, it didn't fit my habits.
OneNote is also more importantly completely free on all platforms including all of it's cloud features.
Besides OneNote being much better for handwritten and typed note taking as well as "rich notes" one of the most best features it has is email to note which means that even if you have to take notes on a machine that doesn't have it or you can't log in into OneNote from it or if you want to take notes from someone else it can be easily done via emailing to your [email protected] address and the auto formatting is pretty awesome.
You can email to Evernote, and it's better than OneNote, if anything, since you can email to your Evernote from any account. OneNote needs the email account to be yours and associated with the notebook you want to send it to.
Still using Evernote. Haven’t had the sync problems some describe. Still storing everything I put in it. Still isn’t trying to cram my rich tech notes into Markdown, still isn’t a web view pretending to be a native app.
I’m not using it for the original grandiose attempts to Remember Everything. It’s just my notebooks. It’s great to have all my notes for a project in one shareable place. And I’m still paying for it, like I’ve been doing for most of its lifespan.
Every now and then I look into the competition and nothing feels worth the hassle of trying to switch. I’ll do it if Evernote collapses as a company or if I end up working somewhere I’m forced to use a different collaborative note platform and end up liking it more. I got too many other things to worry about to hassle with it until then.
How are you OK storing your notes in a cloud system where your notes are viewable by third parties? How do you get past Evernote not supporting end to end encryption? This has been the dealbreaker for me since the beginning.
What a strange article. It's a note taking program. It has search. The author called it brilliant. Huh? As a long-time (no longer avid) user, the screenshot of the old version made me nostalgic, but I don't remember the search as different to a standard search function.
I found it weird too how they presented as revolutionary a note taking app with search. Evernote's strength was great execution and good timing (having the app on the App Store very early) but other than that it was just a note taking app, and plenty of them existed before Evernote.
Search in Evernote can also use metadata. So if you jotted down something you wanted to remember while you were on vacation and now you can't recall what that was, you can search for all the notes you created in Ibiza.
But it only started to do it from the mobile app, and I didn't realize the idea behind it, it annoyed me because I just wanted to take a general note, nothing to do with the location (which is how interpreted it, a location based note would be something like "This is where I parked my car).
Is that useful? You already get date created/modified in every OS. Shouldn't be hard to figure out when you were in ibiza and sort your notes folder by date.
It is for me. It saves me a step searching me email for flight or hotel info to get the dates.
If it is a note I made on vacation last week, then I would do what you are suggesting. If it was for a note I made on vacation in 2013 (or was it 2014), then the metadata makes things much easier.
I used to love Evernote, but for some time it felt like they were hyperfocused on adding features I had no use for (collaboration, business integration...) while making the stuff I did use slower and buggier. The last straw when I emptied the trash and it perma-deleted over 100 of my non-trash notes. From the comments here it sounds like that sort of shit wasn't all that uncommon.
Once I found out that OneNote had launched Mac and Android versions, I switched immediately, and found that OneNote just feels sleeker and more usable to me anyway. My one annoyance with it is that the Mac version of OneNote is fairly stripped-down, where EN had feature parity across all desktop platforms. But I'm using my MacBook less and less these days.
This is the problem with taking on lots of venture capital - the pressure to grow and meet impossible expectations. Evernote could have been a great small-medium sized software company, making it's owners and employees nice money and satisfaction. But instead they needed to make moonshots to make VCs happy.
The shift to business and all the bloated features in the core app became a big turnoff to me.
I switched to Bear, happily paying for it, and haven't looked back. A nice focused app that hopefully will stay focused. https://bear.app
I never got into Evernote, the UI was just horrible. I started using Bear a couple years ago and immediately fell in love with it and started paying right away.
I use Evernote for anything that is relevant to others in my family. We can keep each other up to date on things like shopping lists and trip planning, family events or projects. Plus take notes. It’s one of the only apps I use and pay for. Chose it because it works on all devices and is simple. They could handle syncing a little better, when a change is made on two devices at once. But the almost unforgivable sin is that they don’t have a calendar. It’s hard to use a tool to organize your life that doesn’t have a calendar.
Same. I have been using it for my consulting business for years, keeping daily notes for client work as well as personal items in a notebook that my wife and I share. Evernote has proven to be quite useful for me.
Early and longtime EN user here. In addition to bloating the app with little features and collaboration tools —and the distraction of selling desk accessories and a food app— one of Evernote’s failures was in not helping users put the information they captured to better use. For example, if I was collecting code snippets, my IDE could hit the API and have access to them. There are many ways they could have similarly helped users better leverage the information and become more valuable in daily life.
I switched to Bear Notes long ago. The hash tagging feature is pretty powerful and allows for really nice, complex structures for your notes (or simple, really it's up to you).
It's absolutely crazy some of the reasons stated for evernote failing to get investment early on. Today people would be clamoring to invest in a company that was bringing in users by offering the product for free. The sell is so compelling "Get our users to write everything in evernote, build a huge userbase and then you can start to monetize because you've got a fantastic way of keeping them". I feel like that's one of the most common uses of VC money today.
I think it's opposite actually. 10 years ago, it was way easier to raise without any profitability story.
Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "Ramen Profitability" (2009), and later "Default Alive or Default Dead?" (2015).
Nowadays, you NEED to have a story for how you're going to become default alive, and not rely on investor cash. That's because of what we learned from all of the failures from Evernote's era.
Think about other companies that started in that era – Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. The entire strategy was user growth and figure out monetization later. You don't see that as much today.
I suppose Uber/Lyft are good counter examples, but they at least had massive revenue along the way, and a great story about future profitability. (Swap out drivers with self-driving cars.)
But they gave the full feature set away for free. Hoping that users would be generous enough to "make a small donation over on Patreon" (to use today's language). In a shit economy.
No one does that today, not even Google. You get limited features for free.
I will continue to use Evernote however it has two major flaws:
1- No way to resolve the conflicting changes. It puts the conflicting document in the conflicting changes folder and you're on your own to find out what changes are conflicting. They don't provide a side by side comparison. Any developer knows what I am talking about. A way to resolve merge conflict resolution.
- It doesn't do partial text searches. Say you have a phone number like 9067372823 and you only remember the first 3 digits. You search for 906 and you get zero results! It's a lame search Evernote uses. I heard excuses from other users about performance issues. Screw that excuse. Users don't have tens or million of text they are searching for. Computers are very fast in searches.
We've been complaining about these issues for YEARS and the heavy lazy ass Evernote company hasn't done anything to add these important features. Everytime I get an update hoping they have a fix and they don't.
I've switched to plain text notes synced via google drive. There are a bunch of great apps. I use The Archive, but nvALT is open source and looks great as well.
If Evernote will pursue the "Spaces" route, it's going to end up like Google+, trying to be like others without truly understanding why.
What they should do, is double-down where the puck is going in the context of individual productivity.
What is interesting in cases like this - it's all there, in their own forums. A roadmap vector based on their own WHY in a form of their userbase voice.
That being said, I still use Evernote. For existing Evernote users there are no real alternatives to it atm in my opinion (yup I'm using Notion, but for diff purpose). It's astonishing how much bullets can an original purpose-driven WHY take over the years and still keep going.
I'm working on an Evernote clone for markdown. I find that almost all my notes are text. I hate the buggy EN editor, it's where I constantly think the app could do better and wonder what the heck all those engineers are doing...
Here's the gist of my idea: Similar UI like EN, but designed along UX experience of VSCode. It's an Electron app using Monaco as the editor. Also uses a similar concept like VSCode's workspaces. Each workspace is indexed for quick search and has a powerful tagging system (just like EN has). The idea is to support different file types for notes over time, but it will be first and foremost designed for markdown. For me, it is essential that I can use Dropbox, GitHub, or a different provider to sync my notes and that I don't have to trust my note taking tool to do that.
Anybody interested?
(I know there are different tools like this already, but nothing that a) tracks EN's UX closely, and b) is comparable in usability and hackability to something like VSCode.)
Edit: notes are simply text files. ".md" or whatever you want.
I like the concept - do you have any plans for a mobile client and how the UX would translate to smaller displays? In terms of essentials, version history would be on my list, perhaps using git as a backend so that you can access the notes with other tools as well.
I do not have any plans for a mobile client yet. I have thought about it quite a bit, but I'm not sure what would work best there in relation to what I have proposed. What is clear to me, especially from my own experience, is that there are really two main note-taking "activities": the quick memento from mobile, often just a phrase, or picture, etc. And then the sustained effort to write notes that will remain a source of knowledge for me for years to come. Many of my notes are thousands of words long (book notes, research for academic papers, etc). I want to solve the latter use-case once and for all. When it comes to producing more sophisticated knowledge items, I'm usually on my laptop or desktop computer.
Yea...I don’t understand anything Evernote has done that’s new since I’ve been using them. I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider, or don’t fix the syncing errors. Like others have mentioned I’ve never had syncing errors with google drive or box or Dropbox like I’ve had with Evernote.
> I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider
Because the purpose was to encourage you to trust them to store information "forever" - having a storage limit is antithetical to that because at some point you will be encouraged to clear out old things to make space. With an upload limit, once it's in you don't need to worry about it ever again, in theory.
Since OneNote became available everywhere and for free I'm not even sure if Evernote still can be considered doing it well considering just how much better OneNote is for actual note taking.
Or even just a text editor for a lot of purposes. I'm probably near the perfect target audience for something like Evernote. (I do a lot of research, note taking, and writing.) But I never really got into a single master tool to do everything, especially a master tool that wouldn't allow me to simply output what was in it into a standardized format.
I installed it recently but I don't use sync (main pro of it imo) and since it didn't have a dark theme I went on to try other local note taking programs.
It seems to really be for mainly syncing, like dropbox but notes.
The dark theme has been a feature request for years, I believe the top voted one on their forum. It's been ignored completely, afaik no staff even commented on it. Pretty weird, I mean, why would you ask people to vote on feature requests if you're going to ignore them anyway.
I think the nail in the coffin for me was lack of support for Linux (this was years ago). I know that Linux is a tiny subset of their potential users, but I needed my notes to be everywhere, not just on the main platforms.
Ironically, I'm not using Linux as much now, but going back to Evernote was unappealing. I'm now using a combination of Bullet Journaling and Notion.
I used Evernote for a bit years ago, but only for scratch notes I didn't care to lose. Mainly because I saw there didn't appear to be any way to export/backup my data from Evernote in a format that was not some proprietary storage mechanism that only works in Evernote. I figured the end-game was always to lure people with freemium and then dramatically increase the prices later, holding your data hostage. And it appears that is exactly what happened.
It looks like you still cannot backup to an open format:
"The Evernote XML (.enex) file generated by the above process can be used to import notes or notebooks back into Evernote. This process can help you move notes between Evernote accounts or restore lost notes from a backup."
I’ve been using Evernote since it came out and have about 19,000 notes in it. They’ve been slow going at adding new features or at least making it super stable and it’s starting to feel dated.
I’d like to see: ability to put tags to sections of other notes, ability to put links to notebooks within a note, collapsible/expandable text blocks, recurring reminders, Apple Pencil support for iPad where you can freehand draw instead of having to import from Notability/Goodnotes, quicker access to text colors on mobile and desktop.
I’ve tried all the competitors and keep reluctantly coming back to EN. Notability was the one I liked the best, but it is super slow and it can’t be used offline on mobile.
Evernote has gotten a lot better on iOS in the last year and I’m still paying to use it until something better comes along, which I don’t anticipate will be long. I hope they step it up.
I'm trying to nail the work flow where you read a book on your computer and can easily annotate highlights as 'notes' and then those can become sort of like notes as in Evernote.
I think we're about 95% of the way towards having something killer and I'm still putting on the final touches.
Right now you can read and annotate amazingly well, create flashcards, highlights, and comments.
The remaining things I need to polish are to add support for annotating area highlights and to have better management of the annotations.
Comparing Evernote to Dropbox is interesting to me.
Evernote had a bad rep for reliability, and was messing about with very questionable enhancements to its product line. I switched to a Good Enough competitor after being an Evernote customer.
Dropbox has a great rep for reliability, and is messing about with very questionable enhancements to its product line. I have plenty of OneDrive and iCloud disk space, but I pay for Dropbox because it just works.
To me the lesson is make sure your primary product works and remains best in class. "Fly the Aircraft First" [1].
I travel a couple of dozen times a year for both business and personal reasons, and I've found Evernote to be a good tool for handing travel related documentation.
For each trip, I create a new notebook, and anything relating to that trip goes into that notebook. Screencaps/PDFs of my hotel and flight reservations, boarding passes, etc. If I'm on a business trip, I scan my receipts with ScanBot and sync the scans over to Evernote, where I move them into the proper notebook for that trip.
Being able to add in my travel documents on my computer, receipts through my iPhone, and retrieve the receipts back on my desktop is exactly what I need, and so far Evernote has been the best tool for the job. 2,604 notes and counting!
I cannot share notes using URL, because notes are encrypted on a cloud drive in way that prevents even the cloud providers from reading them, but that is the only inconvenience I have for having 100% control over my data.
Evernote is very frustrating and yet I can't fully move over to something else. It feels like they are swinging between being indifferent to paying customers and outright hostile. I particularly dislike that they display ads in the product when I am paying for it.
I have been a paying user since 2010 and I have got 3901 notes in Evernote.
Last year I started using Zoho Notebook and I have been quite happy with it for note taking, but I am still stuck with Evernote for the webclip function.
I have doubts about the accuracy of this article. For one thing, products like Evernote Food probably didn't take much resources to build so aren't as big a deal as the article suggests. For another, the article doesn't mention the acquisition of Skitch and Penultimate, while chastising the company for a lack of vision. Those aquisitions might not have turned out well, but were more related to Evernote's core product than Evernote Market.
So, with all these sync tools, there is a potential problem. We do not know if any data is lost until we look for them.
Recently, my apple notes were not getting update in Yahoo Mail(Its the way apple notes works). For a long time, I thought it was Yahoo mail problem. I did upgrade to iOS 12 and lost my notes. It turned out that apple was not even sending my notes to yahoo mail for backup.
Some one needs to come up with the a service which monitors whether these syncs are happening or not.
Are there any good, preferably open source, alternatives to Evernote/OneNote? I like Markdown but plaintext is not enough as I need support for pictures, tables, ...
Do you need them in the same file? I'll do plaintext notes and have the relevant pic or other file have the same file name (or filename_fig2.png, etc.) as the plain text to keep things together.
Evernote and most note-taking or knowledge repository solutions are pretty solved problems for those willing to do a bit of self-hosting. Personally, I host a Tiddlywiki server on a cheap VPS I own that runs other things. A cron job regularly backs up the entire TiddlyWiki to a git repo, and the contents of the repo to cloud storage. TiddlyWiki is responsive and works fine on mobile, and I am assured that all my data is backed up and private.
Well, Dropbox itself is struggling these days, because consumers are a fickle market (and because there is tons of competition in the space from Google Keep and others). My comment was specifically meant for technical people who are readers of this forum.
I use Evernote, and like it. (Mostly for to-do stuff, in a way I can tweak it in a way I like + sync with phone.)
For the other alternate solution is text notes (in Markdown), which I use a lot (when I don't need to sync stuff + want to enjoy distraction-free environment without Internet).
The only real annoyance of Evernote is that each time I click on an external link, it asks if I really want to leave Evernote (anxious attachment?).
Once you’ve shared an entire notebook then anything added to it should be visible to other people with access to that notebook? I don’t use the team version, I just share a couple notebooks for collaborative projects (writing a comic, planning a cross country move) and it’s pretty seamless. Aside from “oops it defaulted to the wrong notebook and now I have to acknowledge that this note will (now/no longer) be shared with N people if I move it to the right one, why can’t I tell it to stop reminding me of this”
I've been using Evernote since September 2008. There's lots of things I would like to improve, but overall it's invaluable to me. I've tried Apple Notes and OneNote and they both lack some of the organization features. Some people say it's bloated, but I actually find it quite simple.
Notion has been getting a lot of hype recently as Evernote, Trello, Todoist, etc., killer. Switched to it recently. It has a bigger learning curve compared to the other apps, fetlt unconfortable at first a bit but now I'm glad to have everything in one place with less confusion.
Evernote had (has?) five different client implementations:
1. Windows desktop
2. Mac desktop
3. iPhone
4. Android
5. Web
5 and 1/2. Mobile web
While I haven't worked there, I feel this must have created a huge burden on development. Any client feature has to be re-implemented 5 times! This must have made it very difficult to keep up with competitors that supported just 2-3 platforms.
I have thousands of Evernote notes and have been an Evernote user since 2009. I’ve often thought of switching to Apple notes but I stick with Evernote. If I could change things, I’d make searching better and I’d find a better ways to create utility from old notes.
I love Google Keep. It's simple, syncs great and overall it's a great tool for keeping notes. But I am trying to switch to something else. I don't want to wake up one morning and see a blog post from Google saying they are shutting it down.
I think Google Keep killed it. I'm part of the user base that hardly takes notes, so for me, none of the advanced features of Evernote appealed to me. Once Keep came out, I just stopped using Evernote because Keep was more convenient.
Does anyone have a solution for notes that include equations? I don’t want to spend the time on LaTeX for simple math notes for myself. Something that I could just type in “sum” and a summation sign would appear?
This blog post has a nice workflow that discusses how they take notes for their math classes in vim.
It's an interesting read regardless if you want to go this route or not.
The default search looks for folder names too, so searching "[folder name]" will bring up all the notes in that folder, and "[folder name] [note name]" will bring up the specific note in that folder, as of the latest commit a few minutes ago :)
The Web Clipper mangles most web sites for me. These days, I try the "simplified HTML" mode, or just do a screenshot, because the default mode just ends up a jumbled mess like this: https://i.imgur.com/RsadnVx.jpg.
The problem with Evernote (and most of desktop apps) is that, it requires a bunch of RAM and CPU usage to use it. (Can relate with Slack desktop app, or Github desktop app).
Just like user/customer could blame your web app if it starts too slow. The same applies to desktop apps, too.
I don't know. I've it open all day, I'm editing plenty of notes because I'm preparing a seminar... it consumes 44.1 MB of memory right now, I just looked it up (running W10).
Slack, totally idle, oscilates between 225-250 MB for some reason - now this I agree is a resource hog.
On my Mac it's using 708MB of memory and the CPU, which should be <1% since it's in the background and presumably not doing anything, bounces around constantly but is almost always in the 20%-30% range, which makes Evernote a ridiculous battery wasting abomination.
The memory use also grows for no reason. I have caught it consuming 20GB+ after a day or two. There's obviously an egregious memory leak and that's been true for at least a year; I can only conclude that Evernote is a crap company that doesn't care at all about bugs, even critical ones.
I have taken to only running Evernote on my desktop when I absolutely have to, and I try to remember to quit it so it doesn't gobble CPU and RAM, but sometimes I forget.
Intrigued, I checked again. It's at 21.5 MB now. I wonder to what extent is the difference caused by platform implementation (Mac vs. Win), and to what extent by the content (admittedly my notes aren't media-heavy).
I just checked again. After 4 hours of sitting idle in the background with its window minimized, Evernote is now using 901MB of memory, up almost 200MB. And it's not really "idle": it was using 34.1% CPU when I just checked. For what???
I do have a lot of notes, like 20,000, and many of them are HTML pages, but I don't have any huge graphics or videos or anything. Even if I did, I can't imagine why it would need so much RAM to just display a list of note titles, or why it would constantly be using between 5 and 40% of a CPU, or why the RAM usage would constantly creep up. It's just really terrible software. It galls me that I'm paying $7.99/month for this crap, and I would instantly pay that much or more for an alternative that worked properly.
I don't compare to anything. The point here is, it requires my RAM and CPU usage.
Just like, i prefer using Google Docs cloud to opening an Excel document on my computer.
In my case, open/close a web app on a new tab is much much faster than openning an Excel file. It's the point. And they're different.
Well every single application or website you could run requires RAM and CPU. If you're not comparing to anything then you're complaining that it uses any RAM and CPU? That's not a reasonable thing to say is a problem. Why do you have RAM and CPU if you don't want to use them at all?
Maybe, my computer is slow, maybe for another reason i don't know. But openning a google docs file on my Chrome is much faster than openning a local Excel file.
Maybe in your case it's different.
That's my experience with most of desktop apps.
The only exception, is VSCode and iTerm2. Can't live without them.
If your key point is 'it requires my RAM and CPU usage' then you're going to be disappointed to learn that a website also requires your RAM and CPU usage.
>However, the real brilliance of Evernote was its search functionality
I'm surprised this is supposed to be a selling point. Search has rarely found what I am looking for and I almost always have to go hunt for the note I am looking for manually. I've even been known to export all my notes as plain text files and use an external program (even the OS!) to search for something I'm looking for.
Frankly I've had so many many problems with Evernote. The synching is terrible. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a lengthy note when it will try to synch and have a problem and it will trash everything I've written since the last synch and revert the note back to what it was before. This has happened to me so many times that I've started to write my notes in other apps and then copy and paste the text to Evernote when I am finished.
I've tried other note taking apps, but they all have problems of one sort of another. My ideal note app would have the following features:
* The ability to export all of the notes with the click of one button to plain text Markup files. Ideally any folder structure within the note app would be maintained and the notes would be zipped up and could be either saved locally or emailed to me. I have seen so many cloud services go up in flames suddenly that I have less than zero trust in cloud services. I want my data to be available in a format that I could easily move it to another service and I can back it up locally. Evernote doesn't really do this. This is the primary reason I only trust it for notes that I don't really care about. Anything really important I keep in other note apps that do let me easily export the notes. Unfortunately those other apps have other downsides that keep my coming back to Evernote.
* The note app can store notes of just about any size. I have some really really long notes that I don't want divided up among multiple notes. Evernotes doesn't appear to have a note size limit, I've found that most other note apps do have a limit that is far less than the length many of my notes already are.
* I want seamless and automatic synching across platforms. It needs to work well and not lose any of what I have typed (Evernote fails in this regard). I shouldn't have a ton of duplicate versions of my note with timestamps because the synching has gotten all out of wack (Evernote does this a lot).
* It should be easy to create a new note. This is basically Evernote's number one benefit from what I've experienced.
* It should be easy to create links between notes like a personal wiki. I have one (unfortunately no longer being developed) note taking app that excels at this. So far I haven't found how/if this is possible in Evernote. It's certainly not easily discoverable if it is possible.
* It should use Markup as the underlying formatting engine. This goes back to the first point about being able to export the notes in a non-propietary format.
tl;dr, "Silicon Valley company with strong vision and passionate founders takes too much VC funding and loses its direction under the pressure to grow at all costs."
Reading these comments reaffirms my position that I've had for years: I only trust plain text. For this reason alone org-mode is the only note taking system worth using. But it's also good for other reasons. You should try it.
Yeah, I'm so glad it has support on gitlab and github. It's a far superior format compared to markdown and does most of what RST can do as well. I would prefer it to markdown even if I didn't use emacs.
Evernote is a pig. It's the single biggest issue. It's slow to launch, slow to respond, doesn't follow Windows or Mac OS UI/UX standards, and is just clunky.
Note apps need to capture thoughts and objects seamlessly, quickly and with very little friction. Evernote doesn't do that. Launching Evernote feels like launching Excel or Photoshop, when it should feel like clicking on your Wifi menu.
I've been an EN user since 2010. Yes they have had some problems and I have even tried to jump ship (as recently as last fall when I gave DEVONThink a go). I keep coming back though. I've yet to find anything that touches it in terms of features and functionality. Only ones that come close are OneNote and Notion. OneNote is fine but I don't like they way it handles organizing data. I prefer a nested hierarchy which I can get with tags in EN. Notion covers most of the bases but its an electron app and its SLOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW if you have a lot of notes in it. Takes 30 seconds for the mobile app to open and be useful for instance. Thats a dealbreaker for me. I need to be able to get a piece of knowledge on the go fast. If you can't give me what I want in less than a few seconds you go in the bin.
EN has the advantage of being available on Mac and Windows (and Linux w/ Wine), allows you to capture from literally anywhere and has a fantastic and fast search. You can encrypt notes. You can schedule notes. You can make todo's. Capture emails. Scan documents (and then find them with OCR). It's got a very usable api to integrate it into any part of your workflow they don't cover. I dunno, I've tried em all and EN is still the best IMO.
ps. I've been using org mode lately too. That _might_ be what finally gets me off EN but the mobile experience just isn't there yet. Beorg (iOS) is great but still pretty short on features. Especially capture and search.