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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
- i386 8y agoEvernote and Dropbox would have made a great start for Apple iCloud. Convergence is the future.
- nizmow 8y agoAre there any good self-hosted alternatives to Evernote/OneNote etc?
- devit 8y agoNextCloud has simple notes and document sharing
- nizmow 8y agoI actually run a NextCloud instance and never thought to check. Thanks, I'll take a look.
- maddening 8y agoI'm using Joplin. 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.
- matthewn 8y agoI replaced Evernote with Turtl and never looked back. https://turtlapp.com/ https://turtlapp.com/
- vertis 8y agoI 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.
- TheChaplain 8y agoThe author is painting doomsday all over Evernote, but honestly I don't see it. They are like Dropbox, they do one thing and do it very good IMHO. I've been a subscriber for 2 years and use it daily on desktop and Android without complaints or data loss. If there is be a thing to complain about it's their api. It's rather quite annoying to work with and some of the language SDK's are outdated.
- tapland 8y agoI 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.
- V-2 8y agoThe 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.
- tapland 8y agoSeems it got it for OSX, iOS and Android in december. Feature request is from 2013. Still running windows at home.
- dogma1138 8y agoSince 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.
- ghaff 8y agoOr 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.
- zihotki 8y agoI'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.
- dogma1138 8y agoOneNote 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 you@onenote.com address and the auto formatting is pretty awesome.
- coffeeling 8y agoYou 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.
- dogma1138 8y agoEvernote formatting from email is absolutely horrendous and the fact that it's restricted to specific emails is a huge bonus for OneNote, no spam.
- hs86 8y agoAfter 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. [1] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-support-for-latex-formulas/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/16445-request-support-... [2] https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c https://www.notion.so/notion/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45...
- jem72 8y agoThe 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.
- majidazimi 8y agoThis. 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.
- Traster 8y agoWell 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.
- arkitaip 8y agoA 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.
- criddell 8y agoI 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.
- zwaps 8y agoFor me real simple: Evernote works only on Chrome, at least the new version. And the Evernote team was quite smug about it. Since I do not use Chrome, i canceled my premium account.
- shorts_theory 8y agoFWIW OneNote has an ugly grayish tint to the notes UI in Firefox and only looks good in Chrome. This is a bug which affects Word Online too.
- fiblye 8y agoI 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.
- shermozle 8y agoThat 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.
- asdff 8y agoI'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).
- rb808 8y agoIs there a way to make notes on a phone and save to dropbox? Sounds good but I"ve never tried.
- tracker1 8y agoI think the dropbox UI does give that option, at least to edit existing text files... I tend to use google's keep myself these days though.
- huffmsa 8y agoI think they need to bet the farm on collaboration. Maybe focus on building a solution for the education market. Perhaps even roll the dice on AR applications. I say this as someone who has wanted to love Evernote, but has ultimately stuck with pen and paper and occasionally Google Keep.
- guiriduro 8y agoI 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.
- huffmsa 8y agoI 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.
- random_kris 8y agoI 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
- huffmsa 8y agoKeep 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.
- Kiro 8y agoI would pay big money for one single feature that's for some reason is missing in their premium tier: backups. What's up with that?
- netsharc 8y agoWhat 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.
- laurent123456 8y agoI 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.
- criddell 8y agoSearch 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.
- asdff 8y agoIs 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.
- criddell 8y agoIt 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.
- netsharc 8y agoBut 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).
- mortdeus 8y agoHonestly, 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?
- revskill 8y agoThe 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.
- chrisseaton 8y agoA bunch of RAM and CPU compared to what? A website?
- revskill 8y agoI 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.
- chrisseaton 8y agoWell 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?
- revskill 8y agoMaybe, 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.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> I don't compare to anything > is much faster than 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.
- Traster 8y agoIt'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.
- a13n 8y agoI 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.)
- huffmsa 8y agoBut 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.
- bad_user 8y agoI'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.
- lskopwol 8y agoI’d argue that it’s precisely because of your worries (lack of portability, vendor lock-in), that a lot of people would rather not use it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dangoor 8y ago> 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?
- ubermonkey 8y ago>it has no reasonable replacement. Others suggest OneNote does exactly that. >My problems with it is that the data is not easy to port This is a fatal problem, and is a big reason I don't use either EN or ON anymore at all.
- criddell 8y ago
- sgt 8y agoDue 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.
- e1ven 8y agoI had a similar issue, and moved away from it. I had been becoming heavily invested- It's unfortunate, but they -need- sync to be 100%. 99.99% is worse than 0% :(
- irrational 8y agoThis 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.
- vernie 8y agoI'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.
- wbharding 8y agoI'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/ 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.
- idearoots 8y agoIf 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. P.S I just build a tool for Evernote (https://neuracache.com/ https://neuracache.com/) just because these are the things that were missing for me the most. Again it's all in their forums, just as an example in the context of my own itch : https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetition-with-evernote/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/82427-spaced-repetitio...
- chdaniel 8y agovery sweet design for your blog post, if OP is the owner — even leaner than Medium!
- kaffeemitsahne 8y ago> leaner than Medium Not so difficult nowadays.
- chdaniel 8y agotrue! any other blog designs you've got that you like? For some reason I pile them up in bookmarks and have developed a hobby around that
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoSorry, I don't blog!
- mortdeus 8y agoAlso 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.
- black-tea 8y agoIn emacs (where I do 100% of my work), I press a single key combination, make the note, then go right back to work.
- Jedd 8y agoI'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. I've never felt so relaxed about my data.
- temo4ka 8y agoHave you tried Syncthing? [1] An open source alternative to Dropbox. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- Jedd 8y agoIt'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)?
- maxaf 8y agoThere 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.
- xivzgrev 8y agoYea...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.
- misnome 8y ago> 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.
- tolien 8y ago> I also never understood why they charge based on upload volume vs total storage, say 1000 notes or pictures, like every other storage provider Every other storage provider charges you by the number of files you store, not their size? Really? Considering the kicking Flickr got for their 1000 image free limit, that’s…interesting.
- aristophenes 8y agoI 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. I hope they stick around.
- StacyC 8y agoSame. 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.
- kayhi 8y agoIs there an OCR out there that is better than Evernote? It is the one feature that impressed me (searchable hand written notes, etc.), but that was years ago.
- tnolet 8y agoAm 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. Mac only of course.
- taude 8y agoProbably. I love my Mac, but I don't use any of their apps.
- pivo 8y agoI 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.
- codydh 8y agoI do the same, and it's worked out very well for me so far, for many years.
- anentropic 8y agoI 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
- drunken-serval 8y agoI'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.
- taude 8y agoI 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.
- macspoofing 8y agoFor 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?
- acct1771 8y agoAnyone know if they're involved in selling metadata/data?
- macspoofing 8y agoMicrosoft or Evernote?
- underwater 8y ago
- happytoexplain 8y agoI have over a thousand notes in Evernote. 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.
- acl777 8y agoOneNote. It’s free on all platforms and handles your listed requirements.
- arkitaip 8y agoIf 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.
- criddell 8y agoHow 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.
- landonxjames 8y agoNot bad at all, even with my atrocious handwriting it manages to be around 85% accurate.
- crushcrashcrush 8y agoEvernote 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.
- gyvastis 8y agoNotion 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.
- black-tea 8y agoReading 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.
- merlincorey 8y agoIndeed, and org-mode is supported (mostly, anyway) by Github and Gitlab renderers, as well as to a lesser extent by Gittea. Since it is plain text, it is easily stored in revision control. Apparently, this is not the case with Evernote[0]. [0] https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-support-git-version-control-as-backup-mechanism-for-evernote-repository-and-document-change-tracking/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/95214-evernote-to-supp...
- black-tea 8y agoYeah, 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.
- notheruser 8y agoI 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.
- irrational 8y ago>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.
- mruts 8y agoDoes 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?
- aeorgnoieang 8y agoI use GitLab for almost everything. They've got pretty nice LaTex support (via KaTex I believe).
- sxldier 8y agoThis 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. I think it was on HN not long ago. "How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim -" https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
- agbell 8y agoI'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. https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/ https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/
- lukebuehler 8y agoI'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.
- erkkonet 8y agoI 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.
- lukebuehler 8y agoI 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.
- schnable 8y agoThis 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 https://bear.app
- armandososa 8y agoI 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.
- paultopia 8y agoLike 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).
- bluedino 8y agoI liked using Evernote for myself, but we subscribed to the team version or whatever they call it, and didn't enjoy it. "I put that in Evernote. Did you see it?" Turns out you have to add it to the right notebook. Then you have to explicitly share it with your team members. THE WHOLE POINT IS SHARING. It should be default. It's too much work to do the one thing I want to use this for.
- egypturnash 8y agoOnce 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”
- sandgiant 8y agoEvernote 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.
- thanatropism 8y agoThis essay convinced me to just find a way to organize handwritten notes: https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
- gritzko 8y agoWe 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.
- irrational 8y agoSo 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.
- everdev 8y agoWho is "we"?
- gritzko 8y agoMe 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.
- fabiandesimone 8y agoI'm intrigued by your P.S. Mind expanding on why?
- ambicapter 8y agoNot 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.
- toss1 8y ago"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.
- gumby 8y agoThe web clipper is still the best I’ve seen (though also buggy, sigh). Do any of the EN alternatives have something like it? I’d be happy with Apple notes if I could restrict a search to a folder.
- atombender 8y agoThe 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 https://i.imgur.com/RsadnVx.jpg.
- sballin 8y agoIf you have Alfred, you can sort of do this with an extension I made: https://github.com/sballin/alfred-search-notes-app https://github.com/sballin/alfred-search-notes-app 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 :)
- ssmarine 8y agoThis is the single most important reason I still use Evernote. No other app could clip a page like Evernote. Tried OneNote but pages are blurry, not editable and just terrible. Those having issue with clipping try disabling uBlock or similar software. Sometimes it doesn't work I admit. But no other app can clip like Evernote. Maybe someone has other suggestions?? Also, this article is just what I have been thinking all along. I'm worried about Evernote. I like but but I wouldn't trust it with my life...
- stared 8y agoI 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?).
- Quanttek 8y agoAre 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, ...
- convivialdingo 8y agoI use GoodNotes. It’s a notebook/paper paradigm which relies heavily on pen input - but it works fantastic for what it does.
- asdff 8y agoDo 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vikingcaffiene 8y agoI 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.
- jredwards 8y agoEvery 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'm always back to Evernote within a week. Notion and Joplin were my most recent attempts.
- kirubakaran 8y agoCould you please describe what you missed when you tried Notion and Joplin?
- ukyrgf 8y agoMy 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. Joplin looks good. I am going to give it a shot.
- MagicPropmaker 8y agoI used to use Evernote when I was using a "digital ink" product (that also never caught on). I used it for several years and it worked well. But then Micosoft's OneNote got very, very good. And I switched.
- thanatropism 8y agoI paid for Evernote for in-pdf and -docx search. It was too slow, though. Too slow, too slow. Nowadays my personal notes are all written in paper and filed in cardboard boxes. My work stuff is all in gmail somehow anyway.
- nafizh 8y agoI 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.
- arx1422 8y agoEvernote 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.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoI 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: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-How-to-back-up-export-and-restore-import-notes-and-notebooks https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-How-to... "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."
- bsamuels 8y agohow would you prefer to export your data if not in a plaintext xml file? would you prefer it export to markdown and lose information? (evernote's markup doesn't cleanly convert into markdown)
- throwaway35468 8y agoSo, 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.
- evo_9 8y agoI 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).
- dmuth 8y agoI 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!
- mattrp 8y agoI 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.
- marcell 8y agoEvernote 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.
- _bxg1 8y agotl;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."
- burtonator 8y agoOK.. this is the second time today I've dropped a reference to Polar. Not trying to spam HN I sware :) Polar is sort off like Evernote but mostly (for now) focused on book annotation (PDF and web content). https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ 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. We have web and mobile is coming along too.
- rb666 8y agoNotionHQ is simply better, less bloated, and their free tier beats Evernote in functionality.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI 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.
- charlie0 8y agoI 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.
- Karrot_Kream 8y agoEvernote 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.
- underwater 8y agoYour post echoes the infamous comment on Dropbox's announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 There is a difference between building something that works for you, a technical person, and something the general population will trust and pay for.
- Karrot_Kream 8y agoWell, 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.
- kevitivity 8y agoI've been a paying user of Evernote for years and love it. Use it daily.
- cjensen 8y agoComparing 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]. [1] https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2018/media/SE_Topic_18-07.pdf https://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/2018/media/SE_Topic...
- shosko 8y agoEvernote was never simple to use, and its design was clumsy. I have always wanted to use it but never enjoyed the product. Makes me miss del.icio.us. So simple and useful.
- cparsons3000 8y agoI agree. Always found it clunky. Now I use Bookmark OS for notes and bookmarks and am happy https://bookmarkos.com https://bookmarkos.com
- ticmasta 8y ago>> They say that elephants never forget, and Silicon Valley is no different I'd say this statement is both incorrect and accurate.
- jeffrogers 8y agoEarly 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.
- c-smile 8y agoFor the history, here is photo of initial EverNote team: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-history/ https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-... Yet, I think the article is incorrect about the role of Phil Libin. First production ready version of EverNote contained all basic components and ideas. Phil was far from EN at that time. Role of Phil and then CTO Dmitrii Stavisky was to transform initial startup alike environment to formal "enterprise" thing. And the result we see.
- habosa 8y agoI used Evernote for all of college but it just became clunkier over time and some workflows were just not optimized. I recently gave Notion a try ... wow. It's everything I ever wanted.
- chillfox 8y agoEvernote 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.
- egypturnash 8y agoStill 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.
- irq 8y agoHow 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.
- egypturnash 8y agoI don’t encrypt my email either.
- capedape 8y agoI’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.
- mattca 8y agoI'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.
- tony2016 8y agoI 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.