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Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
200 points by cconcepts on April 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 274 comments
I have depended on Evernote for a long time without even realizing how much of a daily utility it is. It has been so seamless that I had forgotten I was rolling with the free version, until recently. I noticed a few UI changes which seemed a little unintuitive and some of my notes didn't seem to sync as reliably between my phone and laptop. No biggie, I have gotten used to updates.

Then this week I was working through a new project on a customer's site taking notes in Evernote as I normally do. I spent a good chunk of time going through the project onsite and making a comprehensive list of everything that would need to be done. I noticed the header on my note was grey but assumed it was a UI change. I had 4G reception on my phone and figured, even if something's not quite right I can sync it up back at the office like I normally do as the note would be on my phone. So I proceeded like normal.

The whole note is gone as if it never existed.

Is this some sort of effort to onboard me to the paid version? Have I inadvertently clicked a "yes I accept that the free version is going to become unreliable" button?

I appreciate I am not a great customer - I have been using a free version for years without even thinking about it. But thats kind of the point, Evernote worked so well I never gave it a second thought.

Now I am not 100% sure on the safety of my notes...

What is other people's experience? Have I just been caught napping because I mindlessly clicked an updated terms of use without reading it (as I do)?

If I go paid am I getting something as good as what the old Evernote was like?



Maybe this is just me getting old, but I feel like Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago. Back then it was just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities - perfect.

These days they have added all these extra features which I don't need, and which have made the whole app slow and terribly clunky. When I use the iPad app it takes several seconds to load notes or search, and the UI keeps jumping around if it hasn't loaded completely yet. Terrible experience.

The icing on the cake is that they changed the welcome page of the app to no longer show the list of notes - and if you want to edit the page to get that list back, you have to sign up to their premium subscription! And I'm already paying too, just not for the right level of subscription apparently.

I have been meaning to find an alternative for months now, so if anyone has any suggestions please do let me know! The most important features to me are note syncing across iOS/Mac/Windows and the ability to import my notes from Evernote.


Evernote has only gotten worse since I started using it over 10 years ago

That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.


I had an idea for a website: crowd-maintained list of downgrades for products, e.g. "Product: Twitter, Feature: login nag-wall when you scroll down. First Noticed: $month 2021,; Feature: killed the open API, Date: ___", etc. I still have the idea, if anyone wants to implement it, feel free.


Hell, it's fractal, all the way from major services to operating systems to the most minor app store apps. Products get better until someone decides they aren't growing fast enough and then they get worse until they die or someone sane realizes that your video file player doesn't need its own social network.


I bet you would get a much better conversion rate if you implemented a login wall on that service though!


This is what I call “cashing out the social capital”.

I don’t know if I’d call it a business model, but it’s certainly something that many modern businesses do.


Ah, so that's what Blizzard/Bethesda have been doing. :D


And what Notion will do really soon.


And EA


and Dropbox


I will never forgive Dropbox. I spent a decade evangelizing them as the way to do cloud file storage to all the tech-illiterate people in my life and then Dropbox decided to limit free accounts to three devices. The sheer number of pissed-off and/or confused phone calls I got from all of those people was enough to make me wish eternal suffering upon the Dropbox executives.


That is basically the dictionary definition of cashing out social capital: be so good that people evangelize your brand, then start aggressively putting profit first once you reach a critical mass of public awareness.


I think they didn't cash-out on social capital. They grew, and became "enterprise first". The recipe is to limit free services and increase the price of paid service, so only big customers and serious users get attracted to you.

Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process.

I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.


The 1:1 analogy is to investment capital: let's say someone started a successful company that got purchased and has now invested the $5mil USD they got paid (the capital) with an annual rate of return of 5% giving them $250k/year.

They could reasonably retire off just the return on investments.

However, if they start using the $5mil to buy houses and cars and whatnot, they are "cashing out the capital". As they spend more and more, the return on investment drops but everything looks great from the outside: they have lots of cash, a lot of "things", and so-on. However, look ahead a few years and they might be left with $500k invested giving them a return of $25,000/year and it's possible that they would no longer be able to retire off that putting them in to a possible tail spin of needing to spend the remaining capital just to pay the monthly bills.

I propose that this is what companies are doing with their "social capital" (which includes the public's impression of the brand and that brand's work on building up their customers). Creating a brand with integrity and values while working to solve a problem well builds social capital. All they have to do is "maintain the balance" (stay true to the values and mission that got them there) in order to keep getting the "return on investment" (continual influx of new paying customers). However, if they choose to start sacrificing values and quality for the short-term gains they can definitely do that. On a quarterly balance sheet it even looks like they are "rich": "We're spending less on dev time by ignoring bug reports and less on servicing free customers while also converting 10% of those old free customers to paying customers. The bottom line is way up!". But because they've sacrificed the values that attracted those customers in the first place new potential customers will start looking more critically, or will choose a competitor, or will even start their own competing service. It's only a matter of time before the company looks at the balance sheet and wonders why income is down. If they are really looking to ruin the company they might even point fingers like "we used to get $250k/yr, but now we're getting $25k and our competitor is getting $225. we must conclude that the market is saturated and we have to go on the offensive against that competitor.", when what they could do is simply accept that they have to start over to rebuild the social capital so they can have the same level of return again (or maybe even take the lesson and work harder to build more capital and have a bigger return in the future).


Yes exactly


The challenge is every PM at the company thinks they can see a step function increase in engagement, retention, etc. if they just add the right features.


This! Can't get that promotion until your feature that somehow increases some kpi somewhere in short term.. this why lot of sites go through complete redesign when everything is already working


I don't think so.

Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse.

When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on.

Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff.

Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.


I stopped paying for Evernote two years ago. I guess the more individual customers leave, the more it makes the management depending on business users, so the less they care about individual customers.


Obsidian. It's markdown based, so simple at the base, but you can go wild with plugins ( including latex, graph visualisations, dynamic queries across notes, etc.), and it supports metadata, tags, etc. if you want to. You can sync with anything supporting text files ( Git, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) or pay a bit for their ens to end encrypted service that works great.


Dendron, it's like Obsidian (markdown based notes in files on your filesystem) but as a VS Code plugin, so it's also compatible with Git and other VS Code filetype extensions.

https://www.dendron.so/

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron


This.

After using Notion, Obsidian, Mem and other tools, I have settled down on this app. Solid community too.


Would like to mention excalidraw plugin for obsidian. It works in both desktop version and obsidian mobile (with pencil support). One can quickly scribble a drawing (LaTeX formulas allowed in drawings) and embed it in an obsidian note. Syncing between desktop, laptop and iPad works great.


I wouldn't mind using it but their license keeps me away.


What is it about their license that bothers you? It seems pretty fair to me... Free for personal use, pay for commercial, unless you are a nonprofit or a single employee company. Did I miss something?

(I assume you mean EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula)


Some us based companies forbid to use obsidian due to this clause in license:

This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada applicable in that Province. Any action or proceeding arising from or relating to this Agreement may only be brought in the courts located in Kitchener, Ontario and each party irrevocably submits to such exclusive jurisdiction and venue.


I don't want to have to separate my notes between work and personal. Sometimes in my daily journal I will think about work things. That would requires me to pay $50 a year for an editor to edit Markdown files. That seems steep even if mostly I use it for personal use.


A solution springs to mind, but I fear it would be impolite to state it directly.


Well my solution is to use an editor that is free, open source, and is not burdened by a license that cares not what information I store in it's memory nor how many other people I organize with.


I agree. This is my solution also.

Obsidian's license terms are weirder than expected. But I'd never hesitate to use a Personal license for random, incidental professional purposes.

But I'm much happier to avoid thinking about the question altogether.


I just wish the Obsidian sync features were better. I often end up with two copies of the same note when switching between devices.


Another vote for Obsidian here. Its the first 'note taking' system I actually _use_ (even evernote wasn't as frictionless for me).

Not an issue for me, but others might be concerned about its (lack of??) mobile support. I do all my work on desktops and sync thru git, so its not been a problem for me.


What do you mean by lack of mobile support? Mobile app had been working fine for me since its been released, at least for me. I only use it to access previously written stuff or quickly capture something to be properly edited later on my laptop though. So I’m not exactly power mobile user.


I couldn't tell you...which is why I put question marks in :-)

I just remember seeing comments about it being a bit behind some of the mobile support offered by other systems. I do everything on desktop, so I ignored it. This was a while ago though, sounds like they have a (new?) mobile app?


I cant remember when it was released, I had access to TestFlight for a good while for being the supporter. But honestly, its great. I was amazed that plugins just sync between desktop and mobile.


Obsidian has a solid mobile app now


do they have widget support? Specifically a list of starred/favorite notes?


Starred notes is a core plugin that lets you pin searches too.

There are slightly more involved approaches as well:

https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-organization...


All the plugins from desktop version sync to mobile too.


yes, core obsidian support star notes and lists them in a star note tab.


I’ve stopped using it because I can’t figure out how to make a nice home page with links to various notes and important links, it just dumps me in the latest random note. Is there a way to organize that, like in notion?


https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-organization...


If you use any of the daily notes plugin, you can tell it to always open with the note for today, which is based on a template and can contain anything you want. iIRC by default it just opens the last note you were in.


So every daily note saved will have this saved over and over? Doesn't seem very elegant


I actually sync my instances so when it does the git pull, it puts me in the last note I was working on, regardless of what machine it was.

I use the calendar, and tasks stuff to give me a daily/weekly view in the sidebar for quick nav. and a 'general' note for links to notes I want quick access to.


Obsidian has a solid mobile app and a good sync service. It's not an issue.


Many products would have been better off by declaring them as feature complete and only continuing fixing bugs. Unfortunately, this happens rarely due to misalignment with employment incentives I believe.


This is the reason I believe there should be a framework/mechanism for dying companies to open source their works. this way they can continue to live on forever or at least have a way to influence something better.


"Exit to Community": https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/exit-to-community


I did not know about that but thanks for sharing. this is what I am talking about though I believe it will have more teeth if VC firms have some sort of an alliance that adopts this model. in-fact if they do that they can dictate the terms of s/w release in more palatable licenses than say GPLv3.

overall I feel a lot more work is needed in establishing some sort of commons framework.


> establishing some sort of commons framework

I very much agree, and there are some compelling projects happening in that space as well:

- https://commonsstack.org/

- https://commonsengine.org/

Getting VC firms on-board is a tough sell, though. Their model intrinsically involves getting a greater return than the up-front investment, usually through centralization, quasi-monopoly, and rent-seeking. The low hit-rate of breakthrough successes makes the perverse incentive all the stronger: VCs need unicorn cash-cows, to offset and subsidize the failures. At best, exit-to-community would be a mechanism to cut losses on investments with a small-but-loyal userbase, but without enough revenue to be truly profitable from the VC's perspective.


That doesn't really do anything to address the incentives.


No it doesn't but I am assuming current financial incentives of 90% of failed startups are already fine tuned enough. eventually one of those startups would get it right but what this gets us as a whole is to not reinvent the wheel (or at least take the good parts of the wheel) move to the next stage by building on top of existing infra. Big VCs or accelerators like YC should be creating 'commons' to house freely available works of failed startups to be used by next venture.

the big idea is that after a few such iterations startups will focus on solving the core fundamental issues of the target market rather than build out a bunch of infra. IMO this would reduce capital cost for newer startups in the same field, that should impact the incentives but its subtle.

also, who know if all the work is out in open maybe some new startup would get an idea to put things together in a entirely new way. just imagine if BeOS we opensourced when it went under instead of letting it rot in some server.


There are comments recommending popular apps like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I find hard to trust those apps will last 10, 15, or 20 years. I have switched note-keeping apps a few times in the past and no longer want to do so. That's why I decide I will not use any of those apps.

Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages, templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use the default note app on my phone.


I've previously bounced between different open-source notetaking apps but the great thing about any note format based on Markdown (Standard Notes/Obsidian/Zim/etc), is that it's pretty easy to move from one platform to another if they stop being maintained.

Although in the end I ended up with Microsoft OneNote (with Obsidian for special cases), Microsoft isn't going away and they don't have a habit of killing core products like Google does.


Yes. I almost settled on Microsoft OneNote. I just don't like several things of it. The writing and reading experience is not great. And I constantly find I really need one note to belong to multiple categories, but OneNote forces me to think where to save a note (which leaves me writing fewer notes).


A solution to that is to have a fleeting / unfiled notes area where you write notes and to have a separate maintenance process where you file them. OneNote also lets you link to notes internally, so you can have a dummy in one place and a link to the actual note in the dummy.


The beauty of Obsidian (at least) is that it does not matter whether the company is still around. It’s your files in a standard Markdown format.


I used to think so. Now I believe it's a misconception.

Not all your notes can be just Markdown format. You will have image files. And then different apps handle image file location differently. Joplin turns attachment filenames to random strings.

Also, Markdown format is insufficient. I will need categories and subcategories, etc. And then different apps handle those differently.


Syncthing and your favorite text editor has been great for me. Setup is fairly easy and you depend on no offical service other than people hosting a relay server which you could also host. A little more setup and DIY, but at least the experience will remain the same for a long time.


Agree! Syncthing is fabulous and this is a good use for it. Though hese days, I use Nextcloud Files and Deck more often (I can run my own Nextcloud instance).


Evernote does a lot more than text. For me, the first killer feature was taking a picture of a whiteboard after a meeting. The photo metadata is indexed (date, time, location) and all the text in the photo is recognized as well. Evernote’s text recognition works better for me than any other solution I’ve tried, although Apple is getting pretty good at that too.


On that topic, anyone know of an automated way to convert whiteboard text and diagrams into proper vectorized diagrams (ideally including anchoring the endpoints of lines and arrows)?


And Apple Notes will automatically name a note with the first words of the OCRed document – did Evernote get around to adding that feature after I gave up on it?


https://standardnotes.com syncs well. cant speak to importing. they have an interesting privacy/encryption approach and some (all?) open source https://github.com/standardnotes


I found it hard to tell if standard notes is fully open source, as well.

My bigger gripes are that it doesn't support (markdown) formatting without a subscription, and I can't figure out how to put notes into folders.


I haven't used the folder option, but but search seems to have worked well enough for me. I believe the client at least is open source. (That is, when updating on Arch-based Linux, it's going through a JavaScript-based build process. Should all be there somewhere.)

Their selling feature (to me) is the privacy focus, because end to end encryption is the default, and a very rare one among other note apps I've taken a look at.

Sync works well, and is one way I use the app, even when I have other things like org-mode in play on some devices. It is typically quite handy to just paste something on my Linux desktop, and copy-paste on my iPhone to send somewhere iOS-specific.


Folders requires a subscription on Standard Notes as well.

I only use the free version of Standard Notes, but I am a big fan of the product. Their syncing has been the most solid/problem-free I've seen amongst all of the notes apps I've tried over the years.


Joplin - https://joplinapp.org/


Thank you for the suggestion, I am giving that a try right now. A little rough around the edges but seems to work quite well so far!


I use Joplin and a docker next cloud instance on my local home network and set Joplin to only sync on wifi. Works great to keep notes synced on phone and laptop!


I use Joplin with Hetzners storage box service to keep my notes in sync.


UpNote is my recommendation for an Evernote replacement:

https://getupnote.com/

Cross-platform, and it feels like what Evernote was back in the day: a simple note-taking app with a beautiful UI.

I replaced Evernote with it a few months ago, and it's been a daily driver since. It was first recommended to me on /r/evernote, a subreddit that has basically been echoing the OP's concerns about Evernote for the last two years it looks like.


OCR?


I'm on the same boat, burnt by Evernote and trying to find the good alternative. Sticking with Obsidian for now with some apple notes in-between. But the former has too many features I don't need and later has this vendor lock-in.

If I ever built a note taking app, I'll be using your tag line as a subtitle and a guiding principle :)

"...just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities"


It sounds like you want [nvAlt](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) pointed at a synced directory of text files.


Workflowy! It's approach of "one infinite tree" has been a very simple mental model for me (been using for more than a decade) and they're recently bumped it up with some nice features like image support, optionally viewing lists as boards, and date support. They've had sharing and sync to Dropbox for backup for a while now (paid version). This is currently the only tool that works at "speed of thought" for me across a number of devices. Their hashtag support is the best I've experienced in any tool yet.

For a sales pitch, the slack team apparently used workflowy to coordinate dev before they launched.

https://workflowy.com


I switched from Evernote to obsidian.md last year and am very happy with my purchase. You have to pay for the ability to sync between devices but I'm okay with that.


You dont. I use iCloud to sync between my devices and its free. I donated to Obsidian team regardless because they created amazing piece of software but just pointing it out that you dont have to for it to work.


I think that Evernote went from an app to becoming a feature, a bit like Dropbox. This happened so some early startup apps 10-15 years ago.

What once warranted an app is simply a feature somewhere in another app. MacOS comes with "Notes", which is perfectly sufficient for me.


Notion


Same thing. Incredibly slow and clunky for me as well. Seems like all tools go through this evolution because you know, somehow they have to get VC-sized returns instead of staying small and nimble.

I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom format because I know they will eventually degrade into something unusable.


I find it telling that notion managed to break the core web concept of the hyperlink by implementing their own version of the <a> tag.

If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.


(I work at Notion)

It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors.

Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this: https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fon...

I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.


Oh hey, I didn't see your reply until just now, thanks for the explanation and trying to resolve it! I understand the technical issue now.

I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!


(not gp) Is there any way to track the progress of this? I would be very happy to see this fixed.

Btw, if links inside a contenteditable aren't supposed to behave as links, why make it clickable in the first place? Because if you make it act like a link, you indeed have to reimplement the whole thing because of expectations.

I'm no interaction designer, but imho a simple edit button would be mucher simpler. It could still be integrated nicely, no need to have wiki-like editing where the entire context is lost.


I think an edit button could improve Notion’s UX for small touchscreen devices where drag gesture is used for both scrolling and editing, but it would make the product worse for larger screen devices with precise pointing. It’s better to work hard in order to build the ideal product, than to make developers lives easy at the cost of a worse product.


It's nice but it's slow. Would love to have a solution that combined Notion's capabilities with Sublime Text's speed and maybe JetBrains's ability to work with keyboard shortcuts.


You might take a look at Obsidian. For me it’s the best of two (or how many you like) worlds. You can sync your files via git or a cloud service of your liking. What bugs me is that it’s not open source but what makes it great is a lot of open source developers contributing plugins and themes.


I know it's biased because it's an opinion from a competitor, but it's interesting nevertheless:

https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-secu...


Have you considered adding a capability for plugins to draw HTML into an <iframe sandbox>? I'm always pondering such features, but I'm wary of letting a plugin potentially block the CPU forever with custom <script> elements. I have a solution to plugin CPU blocking for pure API plugins (https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten) but not a way to meld it safely with HTML access.


I‘ll give it a read, thank you!


Oh, I did. It looked real nice but I'm not there yet. Sticking to Sublime Text for the time being but if I were to switch to something right now, I'd be Obsidian.


Notion has a very nice feature set. I like to use it for my freelance side business.

Currently it is sadly the best set of features within one tool for me (at least the subset I use). I would love to switch to an open source variant to self host. But till then I will probably stay with it.

Still. I don't like the slowness (web and app). I don't like how it feels just off sometimes. And how the Android app just so-so works for me.


What bugs me more than Notion not being open source is that the notes are nowhere on my device apparently but on their servers. I don’t have anything locally. If something happens to Notion or I don’t have access to the web, I’m done?


Notion has export function that allows exporting your entire workspace to Markdown, HTML, or PDF. I do it once a month so that. (It'd be really nice though if Notion had an automated solution to back up to Google Drive, etc.)


Today I’ve learned! I knew about the export function but not that you could export the entire workspace. I’ll take a look into that. I’m currently 50/50 between Notion and Obsidian, however a blog post regarding obsidian plugins makes me think twice…


I use notion and I have to say regardless of what you want to use it for it will probably do much more than that for your use case once you understand how it works.

My only quibble is the lack of offline functionality.


Yes. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, it's nice being able to use them and not be subject to connection issues or server outages, or developer whim.


Notion is just way too convoluted.


Seen it first with Nero Burning ROM


Nextcloud Notes might work for you


I migrated from Evernote to Microsoft OneNote. If I was 10 years younger or still an engineer I would have experimented with a 'roll your own' FOSS option but these days I'm an exec and I just need my notes to be stable, dependable, easily accessible etc.

OneNote is essentially free, it's Microsoft's gateway to get people to come back into their ecosystem and you obviously know it's going to be well maintained, high integrity of storage, etc. I know it will be still around and maintained in 10 years time when I still want to access my old notes.

The mobile and iPad apps are nice, there's also a convenient Evernote to OneNote importer: https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote

My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the number of devices you could use your account on which is just such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual cost to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only thing they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX until I coughed up. Sorry, no thanks.

Honestly, if you just want a solid 1:1 Evernote replacement that isn't markdown, self-hosted, etc just use MS OneNote. It's great.


I've been a onenote user from its inception, desktop only.

I've never lost a note yet and have all of them since I started gosh whenever it shipped. It survived moving 4 companies offline until 5th forced me into syncing it to cloude one drive so that I can share it between 3 macs and 4 windows machines and vms.

An incredible tool that I can't do without.


> My take on Evernote is that they never managed to properly monetize it. I was a single user, not in a team, didn't need shared notes or chat functionality and there was no need for me to pay for it... until they decided to arbitrarily limit the number of devices you could use your account on which is just such a shitty approach because we all know there's no actual cost to servicing three devices vs two. In other words the only thing they could do to get me to pay for it was hobble my UX until I coughed up. Sorry, no thanks

Asking people to pay for a non-crippled experience makes sense to me. The behavior I want from a note-taking app is not conducive to any other way of monetizing my usage. For a long time Evernote wouldn't face up to that, and a result, they didn't value their product or their users. I used to take backups obsessively because every day I half-expected Evernote to shut down their servers, because they couldn't figure out how to turn it into a social network or a business collaboration platform. Now at least they seem to have settled down and accepted what their product is.

I click on virtually every headline I see about note-taking apps because Evernote has done plenty over the years to alienate me. I'd love to switch. But I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, and I don't want to be anyone's free user. I'm keeping an eye on Joplin, but for now, Evernote is the best for my purposes.


Joplin is a solid alternative for me. You can also spin your own cloud or just buy a bit of space.


I tried Joplin, but sync from desktop to mobile happens on a fixed interval instead of syncing automatically when you make changes. That was a blocker for me because a lot of basic use cases involve switching between devices:

- Create a workout on my laptop, then walk to the back yard and follow it on my phone while taking additional notes.

- Create a packing checklist for a trip on my desktop, then walk around the house with the list in my hand, checking off what I have already so I know what I need to buy.

- Scan a tax form to my Taxes notebook on my phone and then go back to my laptop where I'm using Turbotax.

Evernote has worked for these use cases for a long time.


For mobile users, Joplin does not support widgets and never will. Its written in react-native and that does not support widgets. They have an open issue and basically responded with will not implement or support. I'm someone who needs widgets for my notes...


What widgets do you have in mind?


Thanks. Never heard of Joplin. Its OpenSource, uses E2E encryption and says that the notes are stored in an open format. Deffo need to do some research


Hope you like it. I just do regular back ups through my own pipeline, it’s really easy to link to files, pdfs, and so on.


If you trust that Windows will support legacy versions of apps (true so far), and you are ok with a free but proprietary license (use freely in perpetuity as long as you can get a copy of the portable installer)...and you want to save plain text data via version control... maybe try my app: http://notes.paperbirch.app.

It's not for marking up documents or drawing, let's say that data-storage and recollection is the main use, it might help you.

BTW, the use of tags allows you to quickly "view the world" from a particular set of words, "work,project,todo" is a pretty specific domain and my app is designed to let you work within that domain or simply change tags to view the world from a new domain.


I wouldn't say OneNote is a 1:1 replacement. The tagging system works differently and is more for callouts than note organization, while OneNote itself is much more folder-driven than Evernote's limited foldering ability (which it compensates for with stronger tag support).


I still use Evernote for scanned documents (invoices, receipts, insurance papers etc etc), and have done so for ~10 years - because I can free-text search in scanned documents.

During those years, Evernote has kept getting worse and worse, becomeing slower and more unreliable at doing cores things, while they slap features on it, that I do not want (collaboration, chat and other garbage).

I want to migrate off at some point, but 10 years of scanned documents are tricky to migrate, and frankly I do not know of any good alternatives at this point.


I've switched to SwiftScan with automatic upload to Dropbox. It does decent-ish OCR on documents so that you more or less can select text in scanned PDFs. I rarely search inside scanned docs, most of the search is by filename which I manually set a couple of times a week. For file search VoidTools Everything is great.


Any other recommendation for an iOS scanner app that doesn't want me to subscribe to a mailing list and doesn't ask for monthly payment?

Free or one time payment only.


Apples built in Notes app does pretty well these days.


If you’re looking for discovery scope out Memos. Been using it for years, happy customer. It indexes all images, I snap menus and receipts and search is instant plus everything is on device.


I'm on Android, sorry.

SwiftScan has a one time payment option AFAIK, that's the one I used.


No, I installed it and saw they offer a subscription. There is no one off payment, they offer a yearly VIP package for £35.99.


Huh. I've checked by purchase history on the Play Store and there's a 2016 May charge for SwiftScan Plus, no active subscriptions. I've got the iOS version on the iPad, fully unlocked, also no subscriptions.

I guess they eliminated the one-time purchase option. Bastards. No way I'd pay £36 for this yearly. Netflix doesn't cost that much more!


I’ve used and liked Genius Scan for a long time. Roughly six or seven years.


iOS notes!! hit the camera button from a note, scan multiple pages, turns it into a PDF


Has this changed your mind about hosted third party services? I have seen a number of people bitten by this kind of vendor behaviour, but they swiftly go back to making the same mistake.


It’s certainly changed my mind.

Now, part of my vetting process for new services is “can I not just get my data out, but also the metadata I care about?”. That’s done with the first few projects/documents/whatever, and then because of being bitten in the past, I know I must do the same export at least twice a year in order to know that the company has not silently restricted it.


How safe is my data if I use Notes on Mac and then upload it to iCloud?

The reasoning is that Apple is a trillion dollar company and they've no interest in screwing me over. I know it's naive but a consolation I guess. If not, what would be an alternative?


They do have an interest in making sure you can’t take your data with you if you leave which I would argue is a type of screwing you over.


For a long while, notes backend used IMAP.

I lost a bunch of notes that I didn't realize were stored on an email account that went away.


I just take photos of documents and tag them in the Photos app, which OCR’s documents out of the box now.


> I still use Evernote for scanned documents

In my opinion, that is Evernote's one and only killer feature.


On Windows, when creating a new note with the keyboard shortcut, Evernote started to silently fail to save the note. Once I noticed, I checked its log, and saw that every time there was a database-related error. I reinstalled and that fixed it, but I had to stop using Evernote. I back up my notes, but that doesn't help when the program is silently failing to save them in the first place. I used Evernote for everything, and I will never know how much information I lost due to this bug. It was a data nightmare scenario.

I also noticed one day that some of my notes that only had titles also had a body containing the same text. I backspaced through the superfluous body, and the note deleted itself. I reproduced this reliably. I think maybe those notes really only had bodies, but Evernote was duplicating the body text in the title textbox, or vice versa, tricking me into thinking it had both, so when I deleted the body, it considered the whole note empty. Luckily, I noticed what was happening before I could no longer remember which notes I had accidentally deleted.

Other than the big bugs:

Pasting without formatting never seems to work.

Assigning a note to a notebook and tagging it is not keyboard-friendly, reducing efficiency dramatically.

Filtering by notebook/tag takes way more clicks and screens than it needs to on mobile.

Launching the app is incredibly slow, which means you can't use it for a quick look-up.

The conflict rules seem overly simple, as I frequently get conflicts in a big note I have when I simply add a line anywhere in it on two devices.


Wow, both of those issues are horrendous.


Personally, I'm using the next cloud notes app. It's somewhat limited - essentially just plain text with a bit of markdown support, but the upside is that my data is stored in plain text files that are easy to backup and/or export if I ever decide to switch to something else.

I'm running it on an unRAID server with nightly backups, but you could just as easily run it from a raspberry pi.

Before next cloud, I was using text files in Dropbox.

My employer just started using notion. It seems fine so far, but I don't see myself switching away from next cloud any time soon.


I basically have the same setup, using nextcloud notes. The notes aren't in plaintext, they are in markdown. Joplin can use nextcloud has a sync backend. There are also other note taking apps that can use nextcloud has the sync backend but in the end I wasn't happy with anything. Going to test drive Obsidian and dendron.so to see how they go.


I'm using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.niedermann.... on my phone. It's not super fancy, but it works well. I might try out Joplin sometime, but I'm pretty happy with what I've got.


Since the move to Electron, Evernote has become a dumpster fire. It's considerably slower in everything and no longer supports standard native affordances. I've moved my 12k notes to Apple Notes and the difference is staggering.


Out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh?

Sure, Apple Notes may have native window resize, but can you tell if the app is syncing right now? When was the last sync? What happens in case of a versioning clash? Will it decide to work with patchy Internet on that upcoming train ride? Will it sync once you go back online? Will it decide to party with some random Exchange server you used for work once, and how will this affect your notes? Are your notes safe from random changes in formatting when Apple rolls out improvements to the Notes app?

Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and have used Macs for decades, but I wouldn't trust Apple cloud services with anything even remotely important. I'm even a little sceptical about Mac Finder at this point, which is ten minutes away from becoming a cloud service itself.


My main issue with Notes right now is that somewhere along the way we became OK with software having no Undo at all, combined with the power to instantly sync your typo everywhere so it is truly gone forever, combined with UI that basically encourages accidents. So if I am perfect when typing with a tiny virtual keyboard, nothing goes wrong; otherwise, I could lose things in ways that are interpreted by the software as me choosing to lose them, which is bogus.


It actually does have undo, something I know about from it frequently detecting waving my phone around as an attempt to undo.


Use three fingers swipe gesture from left to right. That’s also an undo action in Notes. From right to left is redo.


Apple Notes supports undo which reverts all changes you've made in the current editing session for a note. A note can also be undeleted for 30 days.


Isn't their sync system CRDT-based? Would be really weird to not have undo with it.


Never lost a note with apple notes lost a lot of notes with Evernote. anecdotal but I personally don't care about empirical data in regards of myself.


Somehow the apps which are using Electron don't care about RAM. I always use Evernote in browser in a desktop, likewise Slack. Slack app in Mac is horrible.


If you are on Apple, have you tried Bear app?


Or the FOSS FS Notes https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes (I don’t use it as it doesn’t fit my case but I bought it because the developer is really dedicated to work on it). Very similar to Bear.


I have used Evernote practically since it's inception and had a similar doc loss to @cconcepts where I wrote a long piece on a plane which was synced with another user. It just disappeared and was a big loss as it was due the following day. I badgered Evernote support with my ZDNet blogger hat on but never got a satisfactory answer or the doc back.

It's a terrific product but I no longer trust it for anything important. I also find the search is increasingly janky which is now a major problem. This is all a shame because it is still best of class to me


> my ZDNet blogger hat on

No disrespect but surely this was a hail Mary and not immediately expected to actually work out.


The great advantage of having a ZDNet column was you immediately get responses to personal product issues in case you write them up for public consumption.


Is that what it means to you? That's an interesting angle I had not considered.


Absolutely. companies are terrified of bad publicity.


Evernote got slower and buggier every year, until I finally gave up.

I switched to Joplin and I like it a lot. It's very fast. It uses markdown syntax with all the features like LaTeX equations. It stores your notes as regular files in the file system so you can export or grep or whatever. Syncing to the mobile app works OK.


While I cannot comment on what changed in Evernote, eventually someone unhelpfully will ask you "WHAT? You didn't have backup?!", which is kind of a legit question.

Until then, on Evernote's Tos [1] scroll down to "What Else Do I Need to Know?" and read point f) of section "YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE That".

In summary, it says they are not in any way reaponsible for your data loss. Reading in-between the lines, it basically says, they will have outages, disruptions, or buggy updates and your responsibility is to defend yourself against these events.

[1]: https://evernote.com/legal/terms-of-service

I think you already assumed all these. I only elaborated on it because I saw this many times, even (especially?) with the largest providers like Gmail, AWS etc. And this will continue happening.

I understand (and a bit scared for) that most of the people don't even know how unsafe their data is, however, on HN I would expect everyone is (paranoid enough to) back up their data.

I hope you can recover your notes, and regardless of your success in doing so, please spend an afternoon looking up ToS's of the services you use.

(disclaimer: I worked a bit in the backup sw industry, and yes I have multiple full offline copies of my emails and notes for the past 20+y)


> "WHAT? You didn't have backup?!", which is kind of a legit question.

No it's not, and it's interesting that you recognise yourself that it's unhelpful and lead with it anyway with a disingenuous wording of "eventually someone unhelpfully will ask you".

You're just blaming the victim for the failure of the provider. Yes the risk would have been mitigated had they had a backup, and of course that's a very good thing to do but that doesn't make evernote any less culpable nor does it make your question any more legit or any less unhelpful.

In software/Saas somehow people think it's ok to blame the user for not doing things to work around the services provider providing buggy software or an inferior service. Referring to the TOS doesn't change this.


A backup of... what sounds like a newly-created note?


I bet it wasn’t even cold before it got wasted in a cache glitch.


Ok, but to be realistic, this comes from legal. Of course they will try to minimise the responsibility, regardless of technical possibilities. Even rsync.net which basically does data storage says the same under "LIMITATION OF LIABILITY" in their ToS. Unless you're ready to pay for an SLA on your enterprise contact with a company - who would ever say "we're financially / legally responsible for your lost data"? I challenge you to find a single public counter example.


That's the point though. You won't find any example, because none of these services would ever want guarantee of 100% data safety. That's why I encourage to think about what services we blindly trust without having safety measures (email, photo/document storage, note taking) and make sure that we understand the impact of losing the data and how we can prevent it.

On the proactively constructive side (and although my system is not bulletproof either), everything I _create_ first is stored locally and then a copy is stored server side (note, sent email, photo etc). First safety measure is Syncthing (to replicate to other devices), second safety measure is backup (locally and remotely)

Complicated? Yes. Necessary? After reading ToS's, yes.


I’m a big fan of Joplin

https://joplinapp.org/

The sync works with a bunch of different cloud services and I’ve yet to have a problem with it.


I love it. I wish the search was better though. Yesterday I searched for something and could only find it using a combination of search terms, not with the individual search terms.


More importantly - it can be fully self hosted.


How about their export file? What happens if/when this software disappears?


Markdown format in a SQLite database, and there’s a command line client to script it if you like. Joplin is excellent.


I'm sure Joplin is excellent and I hate to argue one against the other. The markdown files in themselves should be independent. I have used several full featured, rather excellent, note-taking software, where the export is not "open". Obsidian is the only reasonable system I have seen where the software is up to date and it doesn't do anything with the markdown files to lock them in. I speak of this as a single user experience. And no, I don't like the idea of Mac Notes and Windows OneNote either. I'm all for note-taking apps which keeps the data/files independent.


I recently migrated from Evernote to Joplin. This was a concern for me, as well. However, I got past it. This isn't a case of "lock in". Even if Joplin loses mindshare and stops being actively maintained, I know that I'll always have a version available (even if only locally on my desktop, seeing as how I install it manually) that I can use to export to plain, raw Markdown files. And, with them, I can migrate to Obsidian or whatever comes into vogue.


Seconding Joplin, but noting that there is currently a bug in the iOS client that has broken Dropbox syncing. Hopefully will be fixed soon, because apart from that I can’t recommend Joplin highly enough.


The short history is that Evernote spent the early part of the 2010s expanding its portfolio into products that didn't really serve its core offering such as Evernote Food and Evernote Hello as well as other distractions. They should have used that time (and money!) to set themselves up for the future and now they're continually playing catch up.

You can read about this era in detail here: https://nira.com/evernote-history/

As we come towards the third quarter of the 2010s, Evernote was being shaped up a bit in terms of non-core products being dropped, on-prem infrastructure being migrated to the cloud and so on but this wasn't without great pains as well.

Not to mention, a non-trivial number of staff appear to have left during that period too which creates a negative feedback loop where the upper tier of potential candidates may be dismissive of an employer like Evernote (if it looks questionable on your CV) which is arguably the type of talent you might need in a period like this where your competitors have true realtime collaborative elements that the market is expecting from you as well as table stakes.

Now after this period, and this is just from my own observations so I don't have any particular stories to link, Ian Small tool over as CEO with a personal focus on continuing to modernise Evernote.

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4I5cq2DfrSpehLO_71NC...

I can't say how that has been received but I have a lot of respect for the "Behind the Scenes" series that occurred, showing Evernote's technical investments such as:

* Sharding their databases

* Standardising feature sets across mobile. Android might have had features for years that aren't on iOS and vice versa

* Standardising their applications hence the move to Electron. In the context of them needing to move faster, it makes sense to focus on one codebase instead of five, regardless of how you might feel about Electron itself.

While I don't know that Evernote can ever catch up, I have to say I have a lot of kudos for the risk that Ian took in showing us what they're struggling with.

That said, I don't use Evernote so I can't exactly say I feel the pain of their customer base but as far as content that might attract new talent, I think transparency like that is pretty much the gold standard next to having a technical blog and so on.


They replaced the good enough native apps with a horrible Electron piece of garbage. That was the final straw.


The new clients are terrible. I’ve been a paying user for close to a decade and am now actively looking for a replacement. I really, really dislike the Windows client. I thought the old one was quite good and did everything I wanted.


As a long time Evernote user I can say that the move from Evernote 6.x to the 10.x version has been a bit of a rough ride. I still use Evernote everyday because I did not find any other note taking tools that fit my workflow. And changing workflows ingrained over many years takes a lot of effort.

Then again there are some very irritating things in the new Evernote 10.x versions of which I am constantly thinking: "are they using this feature themselves or am I the only one?".

For example:

* try to move a note to a different notebook. You would thing that the obvious thing to do would be to click on the current notebook name that is shown above the note and then it drops down a list. But no.... You have to hover over the current notebook name, then a _hidden_ button becomes visible, that you have to click and then you can move the note.

* copy&pasting you tube links always shows a videoclip preview. I never want that, I copy and paste a link because I want to save a link thank you very much.

*search through a stack of notebooks still does not work. You can only search through one notebook at a time or through every note.


The weird UI for moving notes to a new notebook gets me every single time.

I’ve been looking for a good Evernote replacement for YEARS, but rely heavily on their OCR stuff to file well over a decade of important documents that I need to be able to call up fast.

I’ve replaced text notes with Bear for years, but for scanning I’ve still got to use Evernote. And that god damned move note UI.


Apple Notes' OCR is about as good as Evernote's, and the bulk migration worked fine for me.

And Apple Notes will name a new scanned-document note with the first words of the OCR'ed text, which I don't think Evernote ever got around to.


Oh god, I just tried. That move note UI is awful, to say the least. Would it have hurt them to leave the button visible, at least?


I was a paying customer for years until I realized that I probably spent about 5 hours a month carefully curating notes, but spent almost no time reading them.

Since then I have switched around using Google Keep, Apple Notes, and FastMail Notes for quick and dirty notes on things to do or things to maybe look at in the future.

I consider myself to be a gentleman scientist, I am deeply interested in a small number of technologies. What I most enjoy doing now is organizing things I learn or little code experiments in online books that are easy to update, and eventually retire when I don’t want to maintain them or they no longer seem relevant. Sort of like blogging with more structure.

Sorry for being so off topic here, but it seems too easy to get into long term habits and not occasionally decide what is really worth spending time on. My carefully curated Evernote notes were a waste of time.


I was in the same boat. I switched to https://logseq.com/ + Google Drive. Markdown based so there's no issue with being locked in at least.


Second that, I switched from

- Joplin (Nextcloud sync)

- org-mode (Nextcloud sync)

finally to Logseq (org format, not md) and Nextcloud sync. It feels like I found a solid note taking / life organising / knowledge management solution for me now.

As soon as mobile is working as well I am set for a long time.


I used Evernote 5-6 years ago. It was a decent product but somehow I lost a note once. I deleted the app and never tried it again. A few months later my wife went through the same experience.

I now use the iOS Notes app. It’s good enough, including the sharing feature.


Same, iOS Notes all the way.

Adding this because I didn't know about it for awhile and maybe someone reading doesn't know - iOS notes includes a pretty good document scanner with the iphone camera. Open a new note and press the camera icon, you can scan multiple pages with the camera and it turns it into a reasonable PDF.


I would like to know if iOS notes has reasonable export/interoperability features these days, because last time I looked it certainly didn’t, unless you fancied doing PDF exports for every note manually.


You can export multiple notes at once (PDF or HTML) on macOS.


I was equally hooked on Evernote as a main driver both for work and personal notes for many years, but switched to Joplin in 2020, and never looked back. It's also much better for development-related notes, as it supports markdown and syntax highlighting for code snippets. The only downside to me is the crazy large binary, but I can live with that.


Evernote have been walking a slow death march for 5+ years.


It is quite unfortunate. Around 2013-2014, I started systematically saving everything to Evernote and even got a paid plan. There were two issues:

1. Their app was getting buggy to handle on mac/win. The migration was terrible and they had a custom container format for export which was pretty useless. It became like the Hotel California of software. You could bring your stuff in, but never leave due to the lock-in.

I eventually migrated everything out of Evernote by saving printing emailing and started using plain Git on a local server for document save / version control.

2. There was no app for Linux. They made a lot of efforts on windows mac, and then ios/android but left native Linux support completely out of the picture. Evernote in 2015 had a hard time with Wine for emulation.


Latest version has a closed beta Linux version.


I just use Google Keep.

Tried Evernote back in the day and MS OneNote. Google does cloud sync so much better than anyone else though, even if it has less features.


I was a paid subscriber of Evernote for several years. Then, a couple of years ago, they removed features for paid users in what they called an ‘upgrade’.

I switched to Obsidian and am very happy. Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish are value for money; and Obsidian+Syncthing is a great option for backing up the notes in a local machine.


Don't trust proprietary software. Stuff like this will always be a possibility.

Syncthing + your text editor of choice (vim in termux on android is actually pretty good, imo) is a reliable bet. Emacs with org-mode could be used in a similar way. I'm sure there are other combinations as well.


Stuff like this is always a possibility with free software too. I'm still bitter about KDE4.


GNOME3 for me.


Hmm, that is why i use Github as my note taking tool as I have learned from experience that having a local git and being able to back that up to a cloud git server trumps everything that a normal 3rd party service can claim to provide


I am forever surprised that Evernote is still functioning as a company.

It is just a note taking tool, something that can easily be done with a git repo hosted on github.


Unfortunately, evernote is interesting example of very strange behavior - when they become in troubles with slow backend written on C#, they switched to C++.

To be honest, I cannot say anything about e-note client quality, I have not used it at all (I try to use opensource self-hosting alternatives), but such solutions on backend side, look very odd for me, and not look trustworthy.

Returning to your case, at adequate services, should be possibility to backup your documents yourself, or service should have incremental backups.

So, in such circumstances I will first figure out, if it is possible to make backup myself (and will do backup; and will plan backup frequency based on value of day work for me - for most valued - daily or even few times per day; for less valued - weekly). If self backup impossible, I will ask tech support to return to previous state on server side.

For alternatives, as I know, e-note is best for its cost per client, I think anything else will be more expensive (unfortunately, self hosted FOSS solutions are more expensive, even considering, I trust them much more).


Evernote missed the opportunity to be the first Google docs. It was perfectly lightweight to capture and organize information, often better than its peers on mobile. Didn’t seem to get ahead.

OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support.

Notion is even better with great collaboration but one fatal flaw, no real offline mode.

Evernote was always instant on and with you for the most part, except where it started losing notes on me.


> OneNote is nice except it lacks offline support.

Huh? If you mean purely local, yeah, that's impossible outside the Office app on Windows. But apart from that, OneNote can't even operate without downloading a full local copy of a notebook you open. Any changes you do get applied to the local copy first and then synced to the master copy on OneDrive separately.


Sorry, typo.

OneNote works fine offline but is poor at collaboration and granular sharing and permissions.

Notion is poor at working offline but strong at collaboration and granular sharing/permissions.


Yeah, the notebook as the fundamental sharing unit can be troublesome. OneNote should technically have the ability to make individual sections shareable (a OneNote notebook is stored as a folder containing .one files (sections with their pages) and subfolders (section groups) on disc) since every section is its own file. You could in principle just permission that via OneDrive and I think they had plans to, but I haven't seen anything on that front.


Quite agree, and as a paid user myself I would strongly recommend you don't go paid.

Evernote just keeps getting worse. They add things with negative utility (like the annoying new "home" screen that you have to click past to get to your actual notes while basic features like "search", and the app's speed are significantly worse than they were a few years back.


Another concrete example of this death by product management syndrome just occurred to me so (in the hope that someone from evernote is reading this) here goes.

The "Scannable" app used to be great. Really slick scanning of documents on mobile to evernote. A little while ago they added one of those "new user experience" things you have to click through before you use the app. Fair enough I suppose. Except I have to click through it every single time. This grates given I use the app about twice a week.

Then recently, scannable decided to forget my connection to evernote. Every single time I use it. So every time I use it I have to start by clicking through the new user experience and logging into evernote. It used to be I started scannable and in about 2 clicks a doc was in my evernote. Now there's this BS preamble every time.


Does anyone know of a note-taker or just an Android text editor with good paragraph-by-paragraph RTL support? I really like Obsidian but the RTL support is not there, no luck w a plugin either. It's too bad RTL is so often poorly supported in these electony apps when all it takes is adding dir="auto" to the HTML tags.

Edit: I just found iA Writer. It works great!


I switched to DEVONthink Pro when Evernote switched to Electron and started removing features (e.g. related notes). I capture a lot of images of documents and need the OCR capabilities and search. They also have a fairly extensive AppleScript support so you can automate almost everything. Very happy with the move so far.


I’ve tried to use Evernote a couple times, but within days it always lost data in syncing between devices.

For me Evernote fails the “you had one job!” test.

SimpleNote has been great to me. You can tell they’re not going to mess with the core recipe either.


Another Simplenote user here! Tried many but kept coming back. I wish Simplenote had a feature where I could toggle a flag to make a note “read only” and toggle again to edit if needed. That’d be lovely.


Being able to forward an email to create a new note has always been their killer feature for me. The majority of my tasks begin with an email. Does anybody know if any of the Evernote alternatives support this yet?


I've never used this, but Joplin seems to have a 3rd party solution for that: https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-gateway

Some assembly required of course.


You might write your own Pipeline where you forward a mail, scrape the content and e.g. save it to a Markdown or plain text file to open it with your text editor of choice. I don’t know of any piece of software unfortunately.


Amplenote, OneNote, Mem, GoodNotes, Nimbus Note, Notejoy


I have been using Evernote for 10 years. Initially i was on free plan, but the upload limit made me opt for Evernote premium. With premium i never faced an issue with adding a note, searching a note and adding images. I really like their easy integration with browsers and apps. Saving an article is a breeze. Likewise PDFs. As i could see so many complaints from others, there seems to be buggy areas in Evernote. Wish Evernote takes it as constructive feedback and make its product a reliable one. Because, being reliable for so many years means a lot.


Why don't you try Notion.

Seriously, it feels so much better IMHO, with atomic rollback and you can export your data out in a non-proprietary format (MD, HTML, PDF) if it comes to difficult choices someday.


I tried getting into Notion a while ago (~ 6 months) and ultimately stopped using it, due to general UI responsiveness issues and their lack of a full offline mode.

Really liked the product, though. I think they're working on offline support so i'm planning to check it out again when that is added.

Edit: looked into this a bit more and they promised offline support "soon" as far back as 2018 so maybe it'd be a good idea not to be too enthusiastic about this...


Yeah, I'm using Notion a lot but offline support is really a missing feature. Whenever I'm on a train and want to use it I just can't, it's a real issue, but it's still a good piece of software. Though I'd really like to find a self-hosted alternative that is just as good..


I highly dislike the recent changes in Evernote, so i just tried importing my notebook into Notion, and uh, it's kinda horrendous. The massive amount of margin (going from 850px of usable width to 600px is unconscionable), having to click three times to open a page, having to click another three times to see my list of pages (that used to be 0 clicks), how it handles newlines.


Big red buttons abound: "Try notion for free" that lead to "Sign up with....".

I'm interested (especially as i tried evernote previously and found it to be 'not for me'), but where's the pricing page [supposed to be]?


(I work at Notion)

Pricing is here: https://www.notion.so/pricing

Our business plan is to charge for collaboration, so Notion is free with no writing limits for personal users. You can pay $4/mo for deeper version history, bigger file uploads, more guest editors, etc; and more per month to use Notion with a team.

I'll send a note to the marketing design team with your feedback.


No 2FA.


SimpleNote from Automattic is simple, markdown based, local and cloud synced. It doesn’t get too many updates because it’s pretty feature complete for what it does.


The only answer anyone can give you here is that that sounds like an unfortunate glitch, and perhaps some really poor programming/planning in some area, but no, destroying your notes is not an effort to onboard you to the paid version.

“What happened to them” is covered in other comments (same thing that’s happened to everything that isn’t dominated by a benevolent vision-possessing dictator of sorts to keep things focused and say no a lot).


I've resorted to downloading and using the legacy version of Evernote. I find this version is more stable.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Ins... (Windows/Mac)

I've archived this install package in case the URL dies.

Edit: This is version 7.14.1


I am a paying customer and thats exactly what I have done too.


Evernote started going south for me in 2014. I switched to OneNote and things were great, but it’s far more than I need.

These days I just use Apple Notes and it’s been flawless.

Notion looks neat but I’m wary of startups now. I’d probably use SimpleNote if I switched.

I also have a bunch of scattered markdown notes everywhere, wouldn’t be too hard for me to just sync a folder and use something like Typora to make adding images easier.


I hated Evernote ever since it decided it wanted to be a platform instead of a note taking tool. It was useful in the early days, then it became a gigantic, bloated, ever changing mess that was always trying to get me to use it in ways I didn't need. Wish I had ditched it much earlier to be honest.

These days I use VSCode Notes, a pretty minimal extension that suits the way I work.


What happened? They took VC money which forced them to "grow without bounds". This caused them to lose focus and expand their features in irrelevant ways while stretching their internal teams too much and not listening to their active customer base on features to prioritize (even though they had forums for this very purpose). Over time their tone-deaf stubbornness caused the accumulation of too much technical debt. Instead of doubling down on developing performant features that customers actually needed and wanted to use in their knowledge-bases systems, they dressed as Teletubbies (seriously, it was on their "Careers" page a few years back) and created a disjointed mess of alternate products that they did not integrate properly into their system (i.e. Penultimate does not integrate in any useful way). Then they had a brain drain and executive flight (new CEO etc.). Then they moved to Electron, lying to customers saying it was "Feature-Ready" (from the mouth of the CEO) when it was a dumpster fire of a regression, actually removing features and poorly implementing then existing ones. Now its a nagware-bloatware.

Don't take VC money for knowledge-base companies. You need thoughtful development for these types of applications and a commitment to the very long term, which is incompatible with VC. Obsidian has fallen into this same trap.


Evernote hasn't really advanced for me, especially as my needs have evolved. I ended up switching a while back because of that. I'm currently using Notion because those little built in databases are powerful, but what I really want is a mix of Obsidian and OneNote that can be easily extended and self-hosted.


I switched to Nimbus Note a few years back - no real regrets. Minor issue (vs. Evernote): it's not "smart" like Evernote and doesn't know how to suggest the right tags or categories for a note.

https://nimbusweb.me/note.php


Microsoft has decided to Clone Notion and call it it Microsoft Loop. Apparently its going to be a flexible canvas with widgets. Not sure if its been released though.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop


Where I live I pay almost nothing for evernote (just over 1usd/year) so I don't complain about it much. I do try to keep synced copies of the notes in certain desktop devices just in case the service disappears one day. I also encrypt notes before pasting them in evernote of they are sensitive


https://fsnot.es for macOS/iOS ;-)


I am using Obsidian, synced with SyncThing, after trying all the FOSS alternatives out there.

It's the first time I've actually been happy with a notes app. I wish it were open, and there's a few features I wish it had, but it's the best setup I have ever used.


I periodically return to Evernote:

* Linux support (closed beta)

* tags! omg, I hate and love tags!

If you wish to hop on Microsoft land, Microsoft Todo and Onenote seems an adequate combo.

NOTE: blocking ads somehow blocked Onenote. Not sure which config I used, only that it was DNS, and wasn't able to replicate.


Old wunderlist user, migrated to MS todo which as expected has gotten worse over time, particularly the buggy macOS app but is good enough on the web and iOS.

IIRC the original developer offered to buy it back from Microsoft but Microsoft refused.


To me the core functionality of Evernote has been perfectly replaced by Apple Notes.


https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle This is an excellent evernote to md exporter.


I just tried to login to my 10y+ account to see what I left there. On mobile. It doesn't work and I have to use the app. O my, that's so slooow, it's painful.


https://reflect.app/

Always open on 1/3 of my screen.


It’s definitely not as featureful as Evernote, but Simplenote is working well for me for my day to day note taking.


Same for me. I wanted a simple app like Google notes however a bit more suited for long form texts. Simplenote works brilliantly for me. I gave Evernote a try, however that seems to be more suited towards power users who take a lot of notes and want to capture notes in mixed medium - text, photos etc.

Also, since Simplenote is from Automatic, I am less worried about shown any advertisements or product changing radically.


I switched from Evernote to Joplin


All those product managers gotta Make An Impact

But also, if you want a good product to stay good, pay for it


I'm going to reproduce a comment verbatim that appeared on HackerNews from quite a while ago. I remembered and kept it for reference because Evernote was supposed to be a 100-year company (Phil Libin's words) and the decline of Evernote was that one reason why I decided to own my content even if I have to use various tooling on top of it. I moved to a text-based lifestyle spiced with some formatting with Markdown ever since. Phil Libin, as an entrepreneur, founder is an awesome and kind person.

---

Let’s say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it’s good furniture but even despite huge investments they can’t seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.

You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren’t perfect, but you aren’t going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on.

The furniture hasn’t changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets ‘improved’ from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a web-cam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the web-cam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high.

There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing “ScentedStools”, so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like “Fresh Linen” by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the “Fresh Linen” stools aren’t being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.

You hear it’s someone named Jim’s last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don’t really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his “nontechnical” manager doesn’t know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there’s no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor.

Since it is not a Startup thing to set Jim’s specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren’t done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs “could tell white oak from red oak”. It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he’s expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read that FurnitureNews website. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn’t respect his manager.

Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can’t really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don’t know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don’t know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven’t met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being ‘in furniture’. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn’t be so far behind. You aren’t sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can’t attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.

Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It’s not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.

How do you fix this company?


You're the President of a big and busy company which is prestigious to work for, creates well regarded furniture and gets huge investments. The people who can't tell good furniture from bad furniture are kept away from the factory. What is there to fix, except Jim, who is pait to "tell white oak from red oak" but uses his self-proclaimed skills for sneering and gatekeeping and lowering morale and certainly isn't using them to improve anything. Let him go. If he doesn't want a comfortable position with 5 minutes work per day, there's someone in the factory who does.


This is great


OneNote


Feels like both the comments in here are paid for by Notion somehow.


I am an independent developer based currently in Japan. I work in business intelligence with a gratis role in a national environmental conservation organization. I have no affiliation to Notion. I have used their product for last two years and generally enjoy the productivity boost. I used to be a premium Evernote customer a few years ago.

Hope that clears the matter with you. Please understand that regular HN contributors do not generally engage being paid shill or voting ring members. Some of us happily choose the dignity here over the chaos in paid social media.


From the HN commenting guidelines:

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html*


Yeah, that kind of died the day this was published:

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/corporate-market...

Gitlab said out loud what we were all thinking: companies have automation in place to follow big communities such as HN and notify their developer evangelists and marketing teams and have them reply and create "buzz". Aka, shills :-)


There's a difference between people paid to post positive things about a project whenever it's mentioned and people paid to communicate about a project. One is shilling, the other is... communicating about a project. There's a difference and saying they're the same thing is quite cynic.


They should probably be transparent about it in latter case though (which they aren’t always)


Do you think that people should be banned from commenting on things they work on? Seems counterproductive to me.


No. But they should be transparent about it. Which they have an incentive to not be, since at this point we're talking about real money.


It's weird to suggest something like that when Notion has a rapidly growing user base.

It's a great app and has a lot of things going right for it. They are building a platform for others to also share their customized pages/databases. Tons of templates and resources to learn how to effectively use the tool.

You can try to draw comparisons but I think they and Figma are very innovative products growing in similar ways.


HN is the target of a ton of marketing groups. They have alerts set up for keywords.


Oh yes. And OKRs on engagement.


Notion has a strangely huge and fanatic fan base so it's not surprising

It's like a cult


Eh, it's just a good product. As soon as it becomes shit, expect everyone to jump on the next product.

Just like people who used to like evernote, but not any more.


I never said anything about the product being good or bad. Why do you need to make that comment after all I said was it has a big fan base?


Because the implication is that people as saying it is a good product, not because it’s a good product, but because they are part of a cult


There are a few cults :D

- Notion Nation

- Roam Legion

- Zettelkasten Zealots

- Bear Bros

PS. Add more ;)


Also the:

- Evernote Evangelists

- Orgmode Promotion Society

- Plaintext Patriots

- Joplin Javelins

- Obsidian Organisation

etc etc etc


> Plaintext Promotion Society

I think this was the best of them all :D


> - Orgmode Promotion Society

Special OPS reporting for duty :-)


Orgmod Orthodoxer! :)


Orgmode reveling group, for some recursion...


Tesla Taliban


- Markdown Militants

- OneNote Outlanders

- MSBuild Masochists


It's even worse than I thought


Obsidian Ocelots?


Since Obsidian is a glass stone, it can be something related to mining?


Obsidian Dwarf Gang Member


There are two cults:

* those who appreciate effortless UX that doesn't ask users to dedicate their lives to learning arcane systems i.e. CLI UIs but allow focusing on life outside computers. Notion is indeed a step forward for the industry for them.

* those who appreciate the responsiveness of CLI and don't mind the learning curve since the investment for them is worth the price. For them, Notion probably doesn't give sufficient control over their workflows and data.

These are justifiable value choices. Calling each other cults only erodes the discussion into name calling. So please don't.


You're just rambling... I can't even tell what you are trying to say. Slow down


What gives you that Notion?


I for one use simplenote.com


The future is Notion.so

My entire information management pipeline has been overhauled: I know Notion can be a little culty, but it genuinely has improved my performance so drastically I think it is the best thing to happen to me since the internet itself.


rip, I see how this reads as an ad but it was a genuine declaration. :<




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