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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

• agosta 3y ago
  When I once updated Evernote in 2015 and it got worse, I just reverted and never updated again. I've been using the same version of Evernote for over 8 years for free and it's amazing.
• anna022 3y ago
  [dead]
• cryptoz 3y ago
  Evernote lost my note when I tapped on an email notification in Android in ~2011. Nevernote for me ever since. How. in. the. heck. do you call it Evernote if it loses your note when changing apps?!
• revskill 3y ago
  We do have Notion (and alternatives), who needs Evernote now ? Evernote should have an exporting tool to import into Notion instead.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Notion is markdown formatted text only right? Big difference with a full wysiwyg notebook with attachments. Afaik notion only does images. Devs love markdown but regular users don't. But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed.
    • mbo 3y ago
      > But it's been years since I tried notion so perhaps this has changed. It has changed dramatically.
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        Hmm I'll try it out but I don't know... I don't really like cloud hosted stuff for this because it's very hard to liberate the information if I need to change (which, for the provider, is also a feature of course :) )
• buddha345436 3y ago
  [dead]
• tony2016 3y ago
  I think some users want all the features and everything for free. Evernote works well for me. It fully syncs all my notes between 2 devices. Those are my home and work computers. That's good enough for me. If I want to look at a note on a mobile device, I use a browser in desktop mode. However I only had to do this a handful of times in all the years they went down to 2 device syncing. I just have to deal sometimes with an offer to upgrade. So I close the popup. No big deal.
• simne 3y ago
  Evernote's server side technical stack is nightmare. This is definitely for better, to completely replace it with something modern and adequate.
• mindcrash 3y ago
  They don't. And it's quite simple, and to be expected (because after a acquisition this happens every. single. time). Bending Spoons only bought the assets, code, architecture and brand. They laid off the entire staff because ALL of Evernotes operations are taken over by Bending Spoons. The same thing will, for example, also more than likely happen when finally Adobe manages to merge with Figma. Why keep the Figma staff on payroll if you have more than capable staff yourself?
• gwern 3y ago
  Now official: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/evernote-layoffs-moving-to-europe-18190083.php https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/evernote-layoffs-moving-...
• grantcarthew 3y ago
  Why is Anytype https://anytype.io/ https://anytype.io/ not on this page somewhere? It should be.
• m0rdecai 3y ago
  I'm still using Evernote. It's become painful. Does anyone have a recommendation for a comparable service? Perhaps one that'll allow me to port everything over easily? ;)
• _eMaX_ 3y ago
  Would that not be a great idea... Create an Obsidian (or Chrome, for that matter) plugin where everyone can add scraping plugins that uses e.g. Chrome instrumentation to scrape out your content based on the SAAS walled garden you're using, and dumps it in a set of .md and .jpg/.mov files. So I could that way dump out my Tinder chats (I don't use Tinder, but I imagine you can chat there?) just as well as my Youtube videos, my Evernote notes, my Todoist tasks, etc. A meta tool. Let's raise some millions and push the content into our own walled garden. Just joking.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• yuppie_scum 3y ago
  I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe
  • echelon 3y ago
    I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers. The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes. There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultaneously. I want to start using Obsidian for work, but I'm not going to share or subset my private notebook. If I want to switch to the team workspace, I have to close my personal workspace. Only one can be open at a time, and that's awkward. If these two problems get fixed, Obsidian will become my end-all, be-all organizational software. I will pay a lot of money ($100/mo!) for this to work right. (Final minor nit: I'd like to include multimedia, but use Git LFS or another cloud storage system. I don't want them in git.)
    • jfim 3y ago
      Out of curiosity, what's the rationale for using git? Is it to get a history of notes or just for sync? If it's the latter, I believe obsidian has a paid offering for that, or one can MacGyver it with syncthing.
      • pcthrowaway 3y ago
        You don't even need to macguyver really. There may be some potential conflict issues, but you could probably put the obsidian vault directory inside of dropbox, apple cloud, etc (I'm doing this with apple cloud, but I really only use one device) Maybe a little bit of Macguyvering to add backups is a good idea
        • Kadin 3y ago
          > you could probably put the obsidian vault directory inside of dropbox I've done this and it seems to work fine. In theory I guess you could end up with sync conflicts if you are literally editing the same note on two devices at the same time, in which case Dropbox will create a "Conflicted Copy" which will pop up in Obsidian so you can resolve it manually. But in practice, because Obsidian saves pretty much constantly, and Dropbox syncs pretty much constantly, in a typical connected office use case you don't run into this much. If you work offline a lot, you might need to think about a more structured workflow (i.e. using Git). But for me it wasn't worth the hassle to commit/push every time I wanted to switch devices. Dropbox (and presumably the many Dropbox-like folder-sync tools) worked fine when I was testing it out.
• marvin999 3y ago
  This is sad. Evernote was phenomenal and I really loved it, years ago.
  • eimrine 3y ago
    Especially when it was a C++ application, not C#.
    • birdymcbird 3y ago
      Why did they rewrite?
      • ayberk 3y ago
        probably for developers' sanity :)
• timetraveller26 3y ago
  And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    On the other hand, it should be possible for software to be done. I have never used Evernote, but I am not sure how much innovation is required in the note-taking space.
    • ktta 3y ago
      Software is never done if the software it runs on is never done. Making that transition is not easy, and tech debt can accumulate to the point where you have to make substantial changes. In the meantime, UI standards/tastes change. Now you're at the right spot for a re-write
      • smaudet 3y ago
        Its usually driven actually mostly by hardware. Which is driven by games (and now apparently AI). Hardware gets better so UI gets more glittery, everyone tries to "stand out" by looking/working best, so the UI "taste" changes. Or hardware form factor changes, so everything needs re-written to support it, etc. Next hardware re-write will be some mix of AI/low power. None of the "green" energy stuff will deliver in time, nuclear won't happen in a way that is both safe and any-time-soon, and meanwhile power-hungry AIs will be battling for cpu cycles and watts with other devices. Your devices will be very low power and the majority of modern software will be laughably ill-equipped to handle that. Or it will run on giant mainframes that look nothing like x86 desktops or even server farms, more like specialized super computers.
    • Kadin 3y ago
      Perhaps, but setting aside the philosophical point, Evernote was nowhere near "done". Their 'new' client software (Electron-based, of course) never even achieved feature parity with their 'legacy' client software. The mobile app wasn't exactly screamingly performant, to put it nicely. Really basic core use cases, like creating a note, typing in a title and some content, tagging it with a keyword, and saving it, required a lot more clicks than it seemed to me like it should. Hierarchical tags, while technically supported, seemed like a weird add-on that never got full support. And Penultimate -- their tablet-centric app that stored data in your Evernote account -- hasn't been updated in several years; I'm actually impressed it continues to work. There's plenty of room where they could have built new features, if they'd wanted to. Off the top of my head, I'd have liked to see Markdown support instead of their quasi-HTML WYSIWYG editor (some versions of the thick client had a subset of Markdown-like syntax but others didn't). Penultimate would have been great if it had on-device OCR / handwriting recognition, or even just a way of tagging specific pages or page-regions with keywords. I think there's a lot of room in the notetaking space. I'm still waiting for an app that isn't a glorified text editor or a drawing program, but also doesn't lock your data into some unparsable binary format or obscure graph database behind the scenes. I want to take notes, using a pen, on a tablet, that might or might not be text, and then I want to annotate the shit out of those notes and keyword them and cross-reference them, and I want the whole thing to be searchable and I want the handwriting recognition to not suck, and I want all of this to be encrypted at rest and in transit, and I want native clients for all major desktop and mobile operating systems. So, yeah, I don't think notetaking is done quite yet.
• teeray 3y ago
  The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.
  • shusaku 3y ago
    You can already do this with Evernote in fact, it’s called “AI cleanup”. It’s not that good now but I like the idea of having an AI format everything cleanly
    • sneak 3y ago
      Do you like the idea of OpenAI logging all of your private notes for all time (and receiving a copyright sublicense for them from Evernote)?
      • shusaku 3y ago
        Well I’m talking more generically when I said I like the idea. If you’re uploading your notes to a cloud service like Evernote, you should already be thinking about acceptable privacy policies.
    • majani 3y ago
      Sounds like spellcheck with write permissions to me
• notyourwork 3y ago
  And for that reason I'm out. What a shame.
• julianz 3y ago
  I wonder how that 100 year guarantee is holding up? https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-guarantee/ https://longnow.org/ideas/evernote-and-the-100-year-data-gua...
  • slg 3y ago
    >Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.
    • xeromal 3y ago
      Is it a threat to commit a crime if it was posted before the law existed?
      • greggsy 3y ago
        Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff opposition.
        • barsonme 3y ago
          Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.
          • di456 3y ago
            Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively
            • polynomial 3y ago
              WWCD
          • 3y ago
• SanjayMehta 3y ago
  They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier. There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.
  • parker_mountain 3y ago
    Notes isn't as good as Evernote, not even close. However, it's "good enough" for most people, and free. One of the greatest bag fumbles in SV history imo.
  • dhosek 3y ago
    The increase in subscription pricing was the thing that got me to cancel my subscription. Hearing about the layoff of the staff makes me glad I did. Notes works just as well if not better than Evernote for my needs.
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I’m glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      While I happily sing and prance in Apple’s “Walled Garden” and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.
      • cweagans 3y ago
        You can AppleScript the contents out if you’re desperate, but there’s a SQLite database that you can pull the data from as well IIRC.
      • Terretta 3y ago
        You can use Exporter from App Store to export to markdown notes. https://itunes.apple.com/app/exporter/id1099120373?l=en%26mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/app/exporter/id1099120373?l=en%26mt...
• prewett 3y ago
  > How they intend to do that without any staff Contractors from cheaper cost of living countries, I expect.
  • baron816 3y ago
    They laid off all the employees based out of Chile too.
  • ElFitz 3y ago
    Bending spoons is based in Italy. So probably, yes.
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    intend to do what? acquirer probably has no intention of keeping the app running. just reaping whoever subscribes as profit, and having no opex
    • bighi 3y ago
      They probably intend to keep the app running. And nothing else.
• Douger 3y ago
  For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support. I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.
  • thsksbd 3y ago
    If you have an apple card, just change your number.
  • QuarterReptile 3y ago
    I canceled mine maybe a week ago. So hopefully it can be done for you, too! For anyone not jumping ship, you can reduce your price hike to only 78-ish total per year by clicking through the cancelation menus.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume. I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.
    • dylan604 3y ago
      Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's not even close to being even
      • kstrauser 3y ago
        I don’t accept that. If those procedures are failing, then someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started failing, unit and integration tests should’ve been raising alarms. A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.
• jrm4 3y ago
  At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea. Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete. Obsidian, et al understand this.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.
    • system2 3y ago
      If you can use a basic hosting with backup features, you can simply use a $5 droplet to sync almost everything possibly you can think of. Or OneDrive / Google Drive if you are using Windows based applications with databases. It is really not that difficult to keep data safe and backed up.
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        I mean, yeah, if for some reason you think Google Drive is safer than Google’s purpose-built notes application, that is an option.
        • system2 3y ago
          As a backup option. Not their entire service. I tend to think heavily encrypted files could be safe there.
    • Falkon1313 3y ago
      Or much more convenient, given that the data is local and almost always available without the vagaries of an internet connection and remote server (except if/when all the bad local data loss scenarios happen at once and you need to restore from your cloud backup).
      • 3y ago
• riffic 3y ago
  obsidian is worth looking at imo
• kstrauser 3y ago
  Not that I doubt this, because it seemed inevitable to my outsider eyes, but do you have any proof of that? I’d recommend getting off of Evernote anyway due to trends. However, is there evidence that this is newly urgent?
  • baron816 3y ago
    Heard directly from impacted employees. 30 to remain of ~300 pre-acquisition. 98 laid off today. No press release, which is why I’m saying something, but you should be able to find people posting on LinkedIn about it.
    • kstrauser 3y ago
      Wow. Assuming that’s all true, good luck, ex-Evernoters! I hadn’t used your stuff in ages, but I’m sure lots of worked hard to make something nice.
• vzaliva 3y ago
  Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.
  • lb4r 3y ago
    I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have that convenience.
    • vzaliva 3y ago
      I use dropbox to sync.
      • lb4r 3y ago
        I've contemplated this, but in general I'm not a big fan of hosting personal files on the cloud if it can be avoided. Maybe if I use rclone and encrypt it...?
        • pjerem 3y ago
          What about Syncthing ? It’s Dropbox like (you sync folders over different computers) but it’s totally P2P (so no cloud).
        • f311a 3y ago
          I use cryptomator and store my notes on Github (encrypted)
        • justsomehnguy 3y ago
          If you are okay with rclone (and do have vps/server/whatever somewhere) then Syncthing is the thing to do that. https://docs.syncthing.net/ https://docs.syncthing.net/
• manca 3y ago
  I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it didn't stick. They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.
  • jimt1234 3y ago
    Didn't Evernote precede Notes? My understanding is that Evernote was the first "notes" app, but I'm old; I could be making shit up in my head.
    • dboreham 3y ago
      Older than...Lotus Notes?
      • jimt1234 3y ago
        Short story about Lotus Notes: Back in high school, a friend of mine started writing "code" for Lotus Notes; can't remember what the "code" was called, though - templates, plugins, something like that. Anyway, he started selling his stuff; first to accountants and small businesses (his dad was an accountant), then he started selling to local banks (in Modesto). His dad used to do all the sales, and my friend would go along to meetings and just sit there. Then, he sold the "code" through magazine ads. Finally, he somehow got connected to corporations in San Francisco and started making a ton of money (for a high school kid). Last I heard, just after we all graduated high school, he moved to San Francisco to start a full-time company. I have no idea what happened after that. Steve, I hope you did well. ... His situation taught me two things: (1) you could use computers for more than games. And (2) a "little guy" could start a company and actually make money with software.
    • seltzered_ 3y ago
      Yes, it preceded iOS Notes. Evernote started in 2004.
    • 3y ago
• SamBam 3y ago
  I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags. Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?
  • cweagans 3y ago
    Apple notes. The ocr is pretty good.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      Apple stores these unencrypted with government access by default, FYI. Opt into e2ee to disable that.
    • allarm 3y ago
      For single use Notes is ok. I’ve been struggling sharing notes with my wife. Some of the notes would never appear on the other device, and it’s been like this for many years, regardless of the devices model and the OS version.
  • chazeon 3y ago
    I think now Apple’s Notes app does this right now.
  • evolve2k 3y ago
    Evernote alternatives for your 'digital shoebox'/'paperless office'. JOPLIN: Browsing through alternativeto [1], seems that the obvious replacement for a hosted 'non-tech' offering is Joplin [2] - a free, open source direct evernote competitor which includes Evernote import feature and cloud syncing. PAPERLESS-NGX: For the whole paperless office, scan/store receipts and PDF paperwork, I've been seriously looking at Paperless-NGX [3]. Downside is that you need to sort out self-hosting. Upside it's free and looks amazing for achieving a 'paperless office'. Found this on exporting from Evernote to Paperless-NGX [4], but its not definitive. Has anyone done this already? Would love your advice. Demand is out there for someone to write up a good guide on this. REFERENCES: [1] Alternatives to Evernote - https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote https://alternativeto.net/software/evernote [2] Joplin Open Source Evernote Alternative - https://joplinapp.org https://joplinapp.org [3] Paperless-NGX (Selfhosted paperless office) - https://docs.paperless-ngx.com https://docs.paperless-ngx.com [4] Discussion Evernote to Paperless-ngx - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernote_to_paperlessngx https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/120mmo1/evernot...
• 1123581321 3y ago
  What is your source for this?
  • jimt1234 3y ago
    Not sure of OP's source, but a friend of mine worked there for several years and can confirm. He got let go, too.
    • 1123581321 3y ago
      Thanks. Sorry for your friend and to see a longstanding company devolve into this situation.
• travelhead 3y ago
  I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    Why would you invest?
  • mangosteenjuice 3y ago
    How did you buy it?
    • travelhead 3y ago
      EquityZen
  • BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Let me guess: options were going to expire?
    • travelhead 3y ago
      No options. It’s secondary equity from EquityZen.
      • BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        Ah. Ouch.
• fastball 3y ago
  Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes. Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release in the very near future which should be exciting. Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the same for Evernote. [1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/ https://supernotes.app/alternatives/ [2] https://supernotes.app/features/ https://supernotes.app/features/
  • zwaps 3y ago
    I can't see on your features page whether you have a proprietary format and to which degree I can easily export my notes & data. Evernote being a cautionary tale, I think you understand why no one would or should move their notes to closed system. Being based on Markdown means notes are stored somewhere in the file system, like Obsidian?
    • fastball 3y ago
      The actual content of your notes (we call them cards) is Markdown and is stored as such, but the source-of-truth for the notes themselves is our servers (not in the file-system), as our priority is providing a seamless experience on all your devices (or anywhere with a web connection), so the app was actually originally built to be "online-only". It's become much more offline-friendly over the years (your entire card collection actually is stored on your system for offline use / search is entirely offline / etc) but offline is still not 100% there yet, which is what the upcoming 3.0 release will enable. Within the app we provide comprehensive export options[1] (you can export as markdown or as the actual JSON representation of a card that we use under-the-hood). We also have a public API[2] that allows you to do whatever you want with your cards at any time with an API key. Currently the docs for this are still only an OpenAPI spec (and not an entirely complete one at that), but again that is something we are improving with the 3.0 release / subsequent releases. So I wouldn't really describe ours as a closed system in the sense that Evernote was. In the case that Supernotes is ever acquired / shutdown / other black swan event for users, you should just be able to dump your cards into something like Obsidian and it will work pretty well, as we almost entirely respect the CommonMark spec. [1] https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exporting https://docs.supernotes.app/en/articles/3068672-printing-exp... [2] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
• swayson 3y ago
  Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    I mostly use Google Keep, which works pretty well. Though the "clippings" feature saving Web articles is pretty cool and doesn't have much of an analogue with that product.
    • freedomben 3y ago
      Google keep us awesome! Very underrated. I use logseq most of the time but keep when I'm on mobile and I'll sync them later. There are scripts to hello transfer but doing it manually is pretty easy. But on it's own keep gives me everything I need, except for the local markdown file database.
    • D13Fd 3y ago
      Just wait until they shut it down.
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        I guess I'll just switch to a new notebook application again if that happens. Very few of these notes are useful for long.
        • allarm 3y ago
          I’m using my note taking system as a personal knowledge base. It’s the most valuable chunk of information I have.
  • etrautmann 3y ago
    +1 for Obsidian. So much faster that Notion and does what I need, with amazing plugin ecosystem if you want specific features.
• belthesar 3y ago
  I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust. Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device.
  • iamjasonlevin 3y ago
    [dead]
  • TheMiddleMan 3y ago
    Don't you think having so many competitors offering free notes apps is a large part of it?
    • D13Fd 3y ago
      He gave the Obsidian example, which is a great one, so no. Obsidian shows you can still do well as a noted app company if you are selling the right thing (sync).
      • DeathArrow 3y ago
        But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.
        • nullandvoid 3y ago
          This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive installed) There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more points of failure etc. Hence the smart business model, of let us handle it for you for a small cost.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  > If you’re still using Evernote, probably a good time to stop. I doubt many people do anymore, which is probably the reason it's being dismantled. Sic transit gloria mundi.
• yayitswei 3y ago
  Sad ending for a great product. I've been using Simplenote since 2015 and it's been refreshingly consistent.
• it_citizen 3y ago
  Is there a good free alternative which would sync between mac and iOS that doesn't require iCloud? My company is blocking iCloud.
  • pps 3y ago
    Craft (https://craft.do/ https://craft.do/) has a free version that supposedly works well now (after they removed the limit on how many blocks you can have). I'm using their pro version thanks to the SetApp (https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/) subscription (highly recommended), available everywhere, mac, ios, web.
• ElFitz 3y ago
  Now I want to set up a Patreon or Go Fund Me to fund an open source web clipper by those who worked on Evernote’s. I’ve never really found anything that worked that well.
  • wj 3y ago
    That was my favorite part of Evernote. However, I was recently cleaning up old notes that I had transferred to Obsidian and few of the pages I had clipped were ever read. It turns out I was just hoarding.
    • ElFitz 3y ago
      That’s where I think coupling a web clipper with audio transcription, CLIP, & an LLM, can provide a lot of value. Have everything automatically classified, tagged, semantically searchable, and linked. This way when I, for example, write down a new idea about LLMs, everything related is automatically surfaced, including those Langchain and LlamaIndex tutorials, and the notes I’d left about them. Same thing when I look things up. And I think this "autopilot" aspect will drastically simplify the usage of tools like Obsidian & Roam. It won’t replace careful curation, but I am convinced it can be better than what most have (ie Notes, bookmarks, sticky notes, etc) Perhaps that’s what the guys over at Quivr[0] are trying to do, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it out yet. It’s such an obvious use case. [0]: https://www.quivr.app/ https://www.quivr.app/
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I like to bring up my personal opinion and realization of owning an open format -- plain-text - content for your life-long textual contents. I was once an Evernote user since its early days and a premium subscriber for many years. I have used many notetaking apps and bought enough of them – iA Writer, ByWord, Bear, SimpleNote, nvAlt fork of Notational Velocity, etc. I have moved to a simpler notetaking and writing habit for my notes. I have chosen a simple plain-text life. The idea is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. I have grown to like the simple methods I use and the philosophies of managing the files and the directories/folders. I wrote about it sometime back - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/ https://brajeshwar.com/2022/plain-text/
  • kpw94 3y ago
    Have you tried Obsidian? 3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792 https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792 Key quote: "These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last." Seems to align with your philosophy
    • Brajeshwar 3y ago
      I replied to him with with my idea and article https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465 https://twitter.com/brajeshwar/status/1675905574624702465 From the article, “Right now, I use Obsidian to manage my notes. The beauty of this setup is that I can change tools anytime, while my notes remain free of any dependency.”
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      I tried obsidian but didn’t feel it was much better than opening a folder in VSCode, and as I am already used to VSCode, that is easier for me.
      • me_jumper 3y ago
        Same. Have you tried https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ https://foambubble.github.io/foam/ ? It does some of the things Obsidian does, but is a VS Code Plugin. I really like that combination.
• thecodrr 3y ago
  Even though Evernote is a competitor, it's still sad to see such a giant in the note-taking space go down so badly. Of course, I am still skeptical about this news and whether its actually true since no source has been linked. Aside: I work (and lead the development) on Notesnook, an end-to-end encrypted, open source alternative to Evernote. Since we are based in Pakistan, our pricing has been really competitive at just $4.49/mo (compared to $17.99/mo of Evernote). And best of all, we have one of the best Evernote Importers around: https://importer.notesnook.com/ https://importer.notesnook.com/ If you'd like to learn more about Notesnook: https://notesnook.com/ https://notesnook.com/ Feel free to ask me any and all questions!
  • I_am_tiberius 3y ago
    How is it possible to offer unlimited storage?
  • yaiba 3y ago
    Notesnook looks promising! Does it support note history / versioning?
    • thecodrr 3y ago
      Yes! Every edit session is saved separately and can easily be restored.
      • yaiba 3y ago
        Great, I'll give it a try :)
      • yaiba 3y ago
        Oh wait, why note history is local only? Can you make it synced as well?
  • freefruit 3y ago
    Does it have OCR for images?
• emmjay_ 3y ago
  A possible way to migrate from Evernote to several different apps: https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/ https://www.popsci.com/diy/evernote-alternative-export/ (I have no affiliation with any of these).
• disqard 3y ago
  Looks exactly like the follow-up to an "Our Incredible Journey" post.
• tiku 3y ago
  Had a nice interaction with evernote a few days ago. A hacker had logged in on my Evernote account, received an email about a login. What stunned me was that I had to confirm by mail, but the hacker from Taiwan didn't have to.
• rnoorda 3y ago
  So many of these comments echo my sentiment around Evernote. I used it for years and was a huge fan, until they reduced functionality and increased prices. I got a new device, couldn't sync my devices, and realized there were many great alternatives. Exported to Joplin and haven't looked back.
• elkos 3y ago
  I'm personally using the Nextcloud Notes app, it covers my own needs pretty well and I have it installed on a couple of Android devices as well. I wonder what you would suggest is the most valuable feature of proprietary solutions?
• f311a 3y ago
  Moving to plain-text and markdown a few years ago was my best decision. I encrypt all my notes and store them encrypted on GitHub. I don't want my private data to be handled by unprofessionals.
• jayflux 3y ago
  Joplin felt like the OSS spiritual successor to Evernote for me. It’s in markdown, has a mobile app and you can self-host.
• pcchristie 3y ago
  I moved to Standard Notes a while ago. I like free things for basic things like notes, but was happy to pay for E2E Encryption to support what they were up to. I think I got a 5 year licence for $150 which was not outrageous. I just looked up their current prices - $80 a year which means I'll migrate back to Joplin soon.
  • LilBytes 3y ago
    Yeah I'm on a grandfathered plan of $50USD which still seems steep. Unsure what I'll do next.
  • J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    I guess their target market are people that really never want to worry about their notes being leaked, and are willing to pay a premium for that.
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• tempestn 3y ago
  Ah, that would explain it. I've run into three fairly major bugs in about as many weeks. It's like they're not doing regression testing at all, and rather than fixing bugs, they just keep rushing out new "features". Problem is nothing else fits my workflow as well as Evernote does, but looks like I likely won't have a choice. Guess it's time to give Joplin a try.
• dzonga 3y ago
  one long plain text file is all you need. easy to back up and replicate if need be.
• Animats 3y ago
  It is perhaps worth noting that spoon bending is a scam from the 1970s.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending
  • NovaDudely 3y ago
    I love the idea of of these guys being bought out by a bunch of people who managed to somehow make a fortune bending spoons (Not Uri Geller!). Like in 30 Rock how NBC is owned by the Shinehart Wig Company.
• TheChaplain 3y ago
  Wow, they even doubled the price of the personal plan.. I use it occasionally but to that amount it's not worth it. I need to figure out a way to export my data and then I'm out.
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• coolandsmartrr 3y ago
  Sounds like I'd better migrate my Evernote to somewhere else. What's a good alternative that plays well with my existing Evernote data?
• mukundesh 3y ago
  Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a backup in markdown...
  • johnwalkr 3y ago
    It's my concern too, Apple only makes it easy to export as PDFs. There is a third party tool that can export to markdown[1]. I wanted to point out as well that notes works really well in the browser these days. Good enough to use it on windows, not sure about android though. [1]http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/ http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/
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• antfie 3y ago
  I suppose I had better hurry up and finish building https://stickerdocs.com https://stickerdocs.com then. If you like the EN concept but want something privacy focussed and a honest company to support you on your journey, you might want to sign up.
• tluyben2 3y ago
  Replaced it with Joplin a year ago. Very happy paying user.
• irrational 3y ago
  Thanks. I just exported my notes and deleted my account. Between this and Reddit, tis the season to cancel accounts.
• _borj 3y ago
  The hard thing for me is getting an good exporter from Evernote to some .md kind of file, plus images. I searched a lot and Notion was the only alternative but there's a big hassle between "connect to evernote > export each notebook individually > import to notion > export from notion to .md" and after that 30% of your notes is still missing.
• stevefan1999 3y ago
  In case if you want some Evernote alternatives, here's my shortlist: 1. Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium 2. AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 3. Affine: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE 4. Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin https://github.com/laurent22/joplin 5. Dendron: https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron (requires VSCode) As a programmer I liked Dendron the most but if you want it to be packed with absolute features, try Trilium Notes (but some considered it to be feature creep and bloated)
  • 2rsf 3y ago
    Which one is the most future proof? I recently tried Organice, even though it has a different feature set, because is is basically future proof even if the hosting company tops functioning
    • shostack 3y ago
      Obsidian is a bunch of markdown files.
  • alsargent 3y ago
    Thanks. As an Evernote user since 2007, and paying customer for several years, this sucks. I’m curious: why is Notion not on your short list?
  • Charlie_26 3y ago
    Do any permit a transfer-in from Evernote?
    • fprotthetarball 3y ago
      Joplin does, and it works rather well. I have been planning on migrating my notes since the acquisition, but wanted to see what their next move was. Joplin seems like the best at handling my mix of text notes, PDF files, and images at the moment. If it doesn't work out, though, at least I have my data in a more open form.
• pps 3y ago
  > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about There are great note-taking apps that only a few people work on. Tana, Obsidian, Bear, UpNote come to mind, but there are many more. So it's definitely not a problem. It sucks for the old Evernote staff, but it doesn't have to suck for users, it might even be what Evernote needs, since it's pretty ancient in its feature set compared to the competition.
• gareve 3y ago
  I was there when lifehack blogs will continuously talk about a newly released note taking app(Wunderlist, Evernote, OneNote, etc.) After trying several apps, including evernote, it felt they had too many features that made them too complex for my simple use case. After trying several methods, my stable workflow is: - Dropbox markdown file for year long notes. - Google Keep for (shared) checkbox lists & multimedia notes. - Unread emails + snoozing for TODO tasks.
  • phito 3y ago
    Markdown in Obsidian is all I need for notes. Everything else is bloat.
• charlietango592 3y ago
  AFAIK, Bending Spoons is a company that successfully launched a couple of mobile apps and they know how to make a living out of it. According to an engineer who works for them and who I know, it’s a very demanding and stressing environment to work in. Probably they simply plan to throw more work at their existing employees. The plan was to buy Evernote and make it profitable. It wouldn’t surprise me if they kill the project if it turns out not to be profitable.
  • bighi 3y ago
    I think they BUY mobile apps. Their modus operandi seems to be: 1) Buy successful mobile app. 2) Increase the prices to insane amounts. 3) Profit off of the people still using the overpriced app. 4) Use the profits to buy another mobile app.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  There are ways to import data into other apps such as Logseq or Obsidian, so I'd search for an alternative now.
• blacklight 3y ago
  I know some of the folks at Bending Spoons, and I'm quite confident that they'll manage to get something good out of Evernote - eventually. It's a team of smart folks that so far has managed to get all of their apps right. I don't think there was an easy/painless way out of this though. Evernote has been agonizing for years, it placed too many wrong bets, its developments had basically stalled for the past 3 years or so. It faced the dilemma of how to appeal its base of power users who wanted tons of powerful features (Feedly/RSS integration, search engine snippets, HTML scraping, IFTTT rules etc.) for free / affordable prices, while developing new features that could also appeal a wider userbase and justify a subscription, all while staying profitable in the process. It wasn't an easy problem to solve. Me and many others realized it a while ago, and simply moved on to other solutions - from Pocket to save links, to Instapaper to keep an organizing list of scraped content, to Notion for all kind of extra integrations, to open-source solutions like Miniflux, Wallabag or Nextcloud Notes, or even Obsidian. I wish the best of luck to the new Bending Spoon adventure. I'm sure that something good will come out of it, but it'll probably not be an app that I'll use anymore. Competition in this field today is much fiercer than it was a decade ago when Evernote was the undisputed king.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  Boss1: let's create a great note taking app Employee1: creates a great note taking app Customers: :) :) :) Boss2: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea? Bean Counter: let's add some useless crap, our customer base will quadruple Employee1: ads useless crap Customers: ? ? ? Boss3: let's milk more money, does anyone have a good idea? Bean Counter: let's fire Employee1, hire Employee2 for half the wage and rewrite everything in Electron Employee2: rewrites everything in Electron Customers: :( :( :(
  • izacus 3y ago
    You missed "Let's add subscription and tell the stupid users it'll actually be used to improve their experience!"
    • bighi 3y ago
      Evernote had subscription since the beginning
      • prepend 3y ago
        For the first few years I could ignore the subscription because I didn’t want those features. Then they eventually made the subscription required for really basic things, so I left Evernote.
    • yomlica8 3y ago
      Users hate increased prices, but what if we insinuate that they are stupid when we announce it to soften the blow?
• valjaer 3y ago
  Honestly new features is something I would go away from, not pay for. Apps these days treat my device as something created so that they could update on it, not so I could use it. I would pay to "freeze the 2009 versions on my devices forever". Software that just works.
• lucraft 3y ago
  I've been an Evernote user since 2008 and a paying one for most of that. The other week I tried to go through some old notes. Half of them wouldn't load. Looking to leave now.
• fsckboy 3y ago
  is it possible that staff had some type of vesting rights in an acquisition that layoffs would terminate? (Yeah, it's not a nice thing to do, but the buyer has the leverage and no loyalty to the past, and they they call the shots in terms of sweetening the deal.) if so, Bending Spoons may plan to keep investing in product development, but they want to do it at market rates, not bonus rates.
• arthurofbabylon 3y ago
  For those looking for a focused alternative to Evernote, check out minimal.app – I built Minimal as the antithesis of Evernote: instead of clutter and feature bloat, Minimal offers focus and simplicity. I love Minimal and use it every day, simply because it is the most focused notes app I could find. Minimal's most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime, whereby notes "die" when they go unedited for so many days. (The Note Lifetime is customizable, and notes remain available in a deleted notes folder.) The effect is an always-clean collection of notes that truly reflects the present moment. Another effect is more action on the persistent, good ideas and less action/procrastination on the ideas that might be best let go of. Anyone interested in helping me improve the app, craft the roadmap, or simply get premium features for free can join the beta at minimal.app/#beta.
  • ComplexSystems 3y ago
    Can it record voice notes?
    • layer8 3y ago
      I would consider dictation an OS feature nowadays.
• scrollinondubs 3y ago
  I moved to Notesnook about 6mos ago and have been pretty happy with it. The founder is active in Discord and shipping new features about every 2wks. It's E2E encrypted and open source so you can self-host if you want to. I used their Evernote importer to move all my notes and it worked about 95% accurately (only formatting that didn't transfer correctly was the checkboxes): https://importer.notesnook.com/ https://importer.notesnook.com/
  • kimokabi 3y ago
    So do you get unlimited notebooks and tags when you self-host?
• zkid18 3y ago
  Subjectively, the app has improved its offline mode and cross-device sync since the company has been acquired.
• fredgrott 3y ago
  I like to add, since I got slightly organized after getting my ADHD under control, you never ever price-silo your workflow as then its locked away to be leveraged against you. Personally, I use vscode with a combo of zettelkasten and kanban boards which works quite well even for those with ADHD!
• ronyfadel 3y ago
  > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about. They will probably use their Italian in-house dev teams instead?
• ekianjo 3y ago
  If you buy into a cloud service this risk should always be top of your list.
• nashashmi 3y ago
  Notion is great at migrating stuff out of Evernote. I recently logged in and saw that upgrading to their new interface logged me out of all other devices unless I pay them. They are starting to nickel and dime instead of innovate. Evernote is dead.
• woodardj 3y ago
  There's lots of discussion here about the pros and cons of Evernote, and a slew of alternatives, but this HN post is the only result online since February (when there was lots of news about a Bending Spoons/Evernote layoff), what's the source for this July update?
  • j-bos 3y ago
    Agreed, no disprespect to OP, but where are the confirming sources or figures?
  • posix_compliant 3y ago
    I only have anecdotal information, but my wife worked for Evernote and was let go as part of this acquisition, along with the rest of the marketing team.
• concinds 3y ago
  It was only a matter of time. Great software in the early 2010s, when it had no good competitors. But with the software quality decline, dubious decisions by the last 2 CEOs, and intense competition, it was bound to die when interest rates rose. I recommend downloading a copy of your account data immediately. Notion has an easy Evernote importer. Obsidian import is much more convoluted, but can be done. Or you can probably download your notes as .enex and import them into the old Evernote client to use offline.
• Havoc 3y ago
  I’ve concluded that markdown in git is the way to go. Trusting longterm Knowledge to stay put in some VC funded growth SaaS is insane
  • frou_dh 3y ago
    I find having to push, pull, and heaven-forbid even write a commit message for notes to be asinine. Sync should be automatic and instantaneous if one uses multiple devices.
    • _eMaX_ 3y ago
      Y not use Obsidian and a plugin to do those git commits for you.
• mfld 3y ago
  Let's assume they shrink from 300 to 30 employees. After some time they adjust internal processes, focus on the original goals and main use cases, weeding out unnecessary features, and having stable applications for Desktop, web & mobile. 30 people should be sufficient to maintain & support & maybe even improve it a bit for a long time given a healthy revenue stream from loyal customers. Not sure if something like this ever happened in the history of software. :)
• kypro 3y ago
  > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about. A company I worked for did the same thing. They got rid of basically all of the staff and just outsourced everything to cut costs. I'd assume that's the plan here.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Microsoft being allowed to leverage its enterprise word/ppt/xls trench and bundle OneNote/Teams without anti-trust regulators batting an eye is what kills these companies.
• markus_zhang 3y ago
  I feel like any product that competes with free ones and does not have a technical wall is going to fail eventually.
• jonathrg 3y ago
  How can I download my notebooks on a free account? The internet says to use the desktop app, but I can't log in there without upgrading.
  • kimokabi 3y ago
    Go to https://www.evernote.com/Devices.action https://www.evernote.com/Devices.action and remove devices you don't use. You should be able to have one main device, and desktop app needed for your export.
• dkarl 3y ago
  This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data. I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.) I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me. RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for over a decade.
  • coffeeling 3y ago
    Depending on what you value in Evernote, Notion may not be the best replacement.
• 29_29 3y ago
  Every time in the last 5 years that I drive by Evernote Building on the 101 - I was shocked it was still in business. With Apple Notes chipping away at its core, and stiff competition from Notion - how long could it survive?
• phkahler 3y ago
  All commercial software is rented. It's already been created and the marginal cost is Zero. You are ostensibly paying for bug fixes and new development, which is at least partly true in many cases. SaaS at least admits a rental model. Free Software is rent-free, but development may be slow.
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Wrong. You're conflating on-prem and SaaS commercial software together as "rented", when the former can be delivered as a perpetually working product whereas the latter isn't. FOSS isn't free to host, accessible to users of all experience levels, doesn't necessarily include support, and isn't guaranteed to have a license that isn't hostile to its intended use.
• snowpalmer 3y ago
  For anyone that used Evernote as a "Document Storage" app instead of just purely notes, I found Notebooks, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ https://www.notebooksapp.com/, https://www.notebooksapp.com/ https://www.notebooksapp.com/ to be a good replacement. It works with files on your harddrive and your existing cloud storage (icloud / dropbox.) macOS/iOS only, but for someone who primarily is storing PDFs this was a much better fit than more alternates that are for taking notes.
• 727374 3y ago
  Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.
• smarx007 3y ago
  My use of Evernote has been replaced with two apps a few years ago when they abandoned native apps: 1. https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ for all the notes. 2. https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ for almost all webpage clippings.
  • ubermonkey 3y ago
    But Obsidian is Electron, right? Not a native app?
    • smarx007 3y ago
      It is indeed Electron, but it has a much better linking story (don't even mention plugins [1]). Evernote being a native app was the last thing the held me as a paid customer with them. Also, the move to Electron was quite bumpy, they simply dropped half the features and it didn't recover until well over a year into the migration. [1]: https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/ https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/
    • coffeeling 3y ago
      Yes, but comparatively lightweight for being one. The devs don't use large frameworks like React and write pretty barebones JS. It shows.
    • mesoman 3y ago
      What's the beef with Electron?
      • coffeeling 3y ago
        Usually high resource use - more RAM use, using the processor more while idling, etc. and usually poorer integration into the OS in terms of look and feel and in terms of actual integrations. eg. native Outlook - ~200-250MB RAM use, same email open in Outlook Online-based New Outlook/Project Monarch: 400MB, and Monarch isn't even Electron but a supposedly lighter architecture. Microsoft To Do (UWP): ~100MB Todoist (Electron): 300MB The RAM usage adds up, especially on older hardware.
• blitz_skull 3y ago
  Posting as a lover of the tool, but reflect.app is my new love-affair with note-taking. Evernote has been far too bloated for far too long. Reflect is an amazingly well built product with an awesome team behind it.
• civilized 3y ago
  My Evernote use peaked in 2013-2014, during a whirlwind postdoctoral fellowship. Man, I loved that thing. So simple and responsive. It was a real tool of thought, and I used it for everything. From then on, it got worse and worse every time I "upgraded", and I basically stopped using it since 2016 or so. Yesterday I "upgraded" at its urging, against my better judgment, and was greeted with a lovely surprise: no local notes anymore. Only cloud sync. The justification for this was basically "less capability is actually good for users", phrased in more or less that way. It seemed like the developers were blinking torture at me. Evernote was a big blackpill. My bitterest realization that technology doesn't necessarily progress, and many products are just trapped in a cycle of tragedy.
  • mmchicago 3y ago
    You took the words out of my mouth. Exactly my experience, except I deleted my account in 2020. Evernote taught me to stop trusting startups with critical services, to manage my own notes, and to always have an exit strategy.
• mechhacker 3y ago
  Evernote lost me when they changed the UI and made it take 5 taps/clicks to do what took 1 before. Was happy paying for it until then. Now apple notes has replaced it. I tried obsidian as well but like notes better
• whalesalad 3y ago
  Wow, I thought people stopped using Evernote in like 2017
• uyfyxr8 3y ago
  Can someone tell me a better way to export Evernote content?
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    I used cloudhq to migrate out many years ago. Looks like they're still in business.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  I tried Evernote when it came out ~2005, but it never got rid of its rough edges. There were some neat features but they were overshadowed by bugs and glaring gaps in functionality. Tried it again ~2010 to see if it improved, but it was still a no-go. ): It was always an over-hyped app. I'm currently migrating from Apple to Obsidian.
• ubermonkey 3y ago
  Evernote was briefly interesting, but they managed non-Windows clients so poorly and kept playing feature-creep calvinball so badly that I gave up on them YEARS AND YEARS AGO. Basically, TIL that Evernote still exists. Sorta.
• sinoue 3y ago
  Wild that Bending Spoons doesn’t even list Evernote as an app they own. https://bendingspoons.com/ https://bendingspoons.com/
• foobarbazetc 3y ago
  RIP.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  > How they intend to do that without any staff is something I would like to know about. Bending Spoons has a product and engineering team. They may have concluded that they don’t need the staff from Evernote to take the product to the next level.
  • pantulis 3y ago
    Seems unrealistic to me. Evernote's backend platform sure has to be pretty substantial (and legacy!) and managing and operating these types of platforms does not seem Bending Spoons' forte.
• kunjank 3y ago
  - What is the best way to export Evernote into plain text? - Is there a good way to export the notes so that it preserves stacks and notebook structures?
• brodock 3y ago
  I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited due to the technology limitations. You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript" based desktop version, because that was too much state for react to handle. The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support. Using it would result in several seconds of latency. I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only got worst. So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin your only opportunity to stand out.
• moxplod 3y ago
  Personally, been using OneNote for over 10 years. Never jumped to any other hyped note-taking app.
• atemerev 3y ago
  I don’t know where to store all my tons of scanned paper documents to be automatically OCRed, searchable, and accessible on all devices :( Do you know any other solutions?
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  I've been "trapped" with evernote for a long time because I put more than a decade's worth of stuff into it, and their exporting tools are shit. Literally I "exported" whole notebooks and what I got was just the titles of notes and no content. Ugh. Guess time to just sit down and spend a few hours doing tedious, tedious tasks for a while. Notion and Obsidian are great though.
  • manifest3r 3y ago
    Have you tried Notions Evernote importer? There are also quite a few Evernote to X applications exporters on Github
    • kunjank 3y ago
      Do you have recommendations for exporter that preserves the notestack/notebooks?
• getlawgdon 3y ago
  Ha. Interesting reading through the comments. I recently downgraded everything in Evernote after seeing that Evernote was reporting 3 different service tiers for my account in different places. I kept getting nagged to re-up. I finally did and in the process, with a HIGH degree of intention, selected the "monthly" slider fully planning to cancel my account while salvaging some of the notes. Lo and behold, unbelievably, Evernote somehow still charges me the annual rate. Absolute transaction dark pattern happening in there somewhere/somehow. This is after a long sequence of ineffective exchanges with support regarding my tier, and also a long period of being a customer (10 years?) and seeing basically zero feature development in line with long-running community requests. Net/net: I'm done with Evernote. Just ain't working for me.
• pyrophane 3y ago
  Not sure about the veracity of this, but it is in-line with how people said Bending Spoons operates at the time of the takeover: they buy up apps and then raise prices to try to squeeze more cash out of the existing subscriber base while also cutting costs by firing development staff. Seems like an almost inevitable end. Evernote was a great app once upon a time. I'm still not aware of anything that works quite like it. Unfortunately they decided to take too much outside money, which put pressure on them to grow revenue by finding new kinds of customers. They started adding "team" features that no one wanted (work chat?) while neglecting the core features everyone relied on. Prices went up. Nothing left to do but move on.
• danielseltzer 3y ago
  Evernote was critically valuable for me but has degraded steadily and sadly for years now. I began my Obsidian migration a few days ago and it's encouraging. I found the evernote2md project on Github (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) the best way to get from ENEX->md files with good resource references. Joplin wasn't getting it done.
• tombert 3y ago
  I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring. I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way to interview, I spend hours doing problems on Hackerrank or Project Euler, just to be told that they were "impressed by my abilities but they don't think I would be a good fit at this time, but they'll keep my resume on file". The part that's even worse than rejection for me is idiotic and disingenuous email that I am expected to send to the hiring manager explaining that while it's disappointing that I didn't get the job, but it was such an honor to grovel and waste hours of my life to just be considered for such a prestigious position. Actually, no, the worst part is the fact that I have to pretend to believe all these companies about their stupid mission statement, and how they're going to save the world. I can't be honest and say "I want a job because I want money in my bank account, and I'm hoping that if I perform labor for you that you will provide me that money", instead I have to make up some reason about how I think StylishlyMispelledCo is actually going to solve all the world's problems and that I want to be a part of the ground floor because I believe in <cause x>, and all the other companies working on <adjacent cause y> simply don't get it. Or I have to pretend that instead of hanging out with my wife or friends, I really want to hang out at a workplace that's more than just a workplace, but also a family. I'm being unfair to startups, every company is doing this shit now. You can't just do a task because you want a paycheck, you have to launder it through some bullshit sanctimony about saving the world. That's how it was at Apple and Walmart at least. It's demoralizing, but even worse, it's exhausting. I'm so frustrated with the world right now, and while I know that it certainly will get better eventually, I am also deeply unhappy with my life right now. I hate the power imbalance that companies hold. I hate that these companies won't acknowledge that power imbalance, or the fact that deep down they're just greedy. I hate that I have to pay for my own healthcare out of pocket (or effectively out of pocket because the COBRA stuff I have is basically worthless). I hate that I got myself into this situation.
  • WonderBuilder 3y ago
    I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating, and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and dedication to the interview process, the method is indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery. I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said, it will end...
• poppafuze 3y ago
  tomboy/gnote
• cenriqueortiz 3y ago
  I was a paid user for many, many years. I helped them when they opened the Austin office, and find folks. I liked Evernote. Like 2 years ago I canceled; bugs and the features/functionality didn't justify the cost when apps like Apple Notes (free) just do the trick well-enough. This remind me that I still have content in Evernote that I need to get out (when I tried the 1st time was kind of a pain to do that).
• amai 3y ago
  Which alternative note taking apps offer a web clipper? I just found - Evernote - Onenote - Notion - Joplin Are there any other?
• fencepost 3y ago
  THIS APPEARS TO BE UNSOURCED. There's a TechCrunch article about layoffs of 129 people in February, a Wikipedia edit today (July 6) links to that implying that it's happened now instead of 4+ months ago and also states (unsourced) that the 129 is more than half the remaining staff (the article link was retrieved today but is from Feb). The price increase referenced was announced in April 2023 and took effect in May so also not new. The Wikipedia article has now been updated to reflect the above. Edit: I see that OP has noted that it was heard directly from affected employees, with 98 gone and ~30 remaining (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36619945)
• jWhick 3y ago
  feels like notion is gonna be the next evernote
• FreezerburnV 3y ago
  This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in the same package. (And no, Joplin is not “just as good”) Unbundling to multiple places that don’t have the same capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life. If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote so I don’t have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it’s a mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website archival all at the same time. And I’m not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of that stuff, I hate using it.
  • julianz 3y ago
    I was a big (paid) Evernote user for a long time, and also don't particularly like Onenote. I switched to Notion (paid) and it's been pretty good - they had a patch a year or two ago where the mobile apps were a bit rough but they have improved a fair bit. I don't make big use of some of the more advanced features but the basics are solid and work well. Sharing a couple of notebooks with family members works fine. Exporting and importing from Evernote also worked quite well, a bit of formatting fixup was needed on really old notes. (Note - the Notion Reddit forum is full of weird life optimization types who want a dashboard for their entire lives with aspirational quotes or something, and that doesn't match my use case even slightly. You don't have to do any of that stuff.) Obsidian looks nice but the pricing for the sync feature, converted to my currency, is wildly out of whack. It wants to charge me the same amount per year as a family license for all of Office 365, so that's a non starter.
• n8henrie 3y ago
  Timely thread about Joplin, an open-source alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611355
• yuletide666 3y ago
  My main use case for evernote was for storing recipes for cooking -- the web capture archiving on mobile or desktop was quite nice. Whats a good alternative for this? Apple notes? Can obsidian actually do this? Sad to lose this. Also if anyone wants some veg cooking recipes I have 270 of them for a limited time
• nashashmi 3y ago
  I am playing with the old versions of evernote from old version.com and it brings back so many memories and hopes of what the old web could one day become. I changed the evernote web back to the classic version, and that also made me reminisce about the old days when I used to be more productive. Those were the days.
• KenArrari 3y ago
  Is there an easy way to just export all my stuff?
• __sivakumar 3y ago
  For Evernote users, it is time to look for alternatives and migrate their existing notes. The best alternative to Evernote is Zoho Notebook. You can find out why on this blog https://www.zoho.com/blog/notebook/why-is-zohonotebook-the-best-evernote-alternative.html https://www.zoho.com/blog/notebook/why-is-zohonotebook-the-b... Please ask away any questions that you have.
• bks 3y ago
  Spent the last few days trying to find a hosted (paid) service that does PDF indexing. Check out https://notejoy.com/ https://notejoy.com/
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• s_horner 3y ago
  I was a user since August 2008 and became a paying user shortly afterwards, it had fantastic OCR which never failed to amaze when I showed it to people. I used to be one of it's biggest fans, always demoing it to friends and colleagues and got a company I worked for to use Evernote for Business back in around 2014 and it was around this time when things started to go wrong. Notes I synced from a Windows Client disappeared, the Android app regularly had problems syncing and often had to reinstall the app and sync everything again. They rewrote the Web App with less functionality and it was a lot slower. Evernote Business was just confusing for a regular user. There was a period where they just appeared side tracked with too many shiny projects, Evernote Food, Skitch, rewrites to apps that previously just worked. It eventually got to the point that I just could no longer trust Evernote, notes were just not on my devices and features I used weren't there anymore. I have been searching for a replacement for years. I am now using Notion, but there are some big missing features for me: Offline sync in phone apps, OCR, Location, integration with a scanner. I stopped paying for Evernote around 4 years ago, after being a paid subscriber for over a decade. I gave it a try again about 18 months ago but it was still slow, so gave up and started extracting the data I needed. It's sad to see a product that I used constantly and recommended so much, disintegrate into an unusable product due to poor company decisions.
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• Alifatisk 3y ago
  I am so glad I migrated off all my notes from Evernote, their limitations and popups triggered some red flags I was not willing to risk. This proved me right, thanks!
• jSully24 3y ago
  I loved Evernote. And then they decided to make fancy and expensive notebooks, pens and paper and stopped working on the product itself, or so it seemed. They really lost focus. And then the price changing. It was a wonderful product in the early 2010s.
• wbharding 3y ago
  For the poor few still using Evernote, there are many great alternatives now available: Notion is the obvious one: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-notion https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-not... Amplenote was heavily inspired by early Evernote: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amplenote https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-amp... Reflect is another up and comer: https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-reflect https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/evernote-vs-ref... And of course Obsidian has its many evangelists, though the sharing situation with Obsidian leaves something to be desired.
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