I started using EN as my “external brain” in 2010 and would have put myself in his Librarian group but he kept talking. Now I’m not so sure. This looks interesting and I just clicked Subscribe. Thanks for posting.
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Yes, I did too. I also downloaded EN on to my phone and logged in online to manage my day today as I used to years ago. It wasn’t the same experience but I’ll see how I go. It did help me organise myself quite well back then.
Time will tell …
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I’ve left Evernote a few times, always convincing myself that the replacement I’ve selected will stick. It never does.
I realize there are a million workflows and ways of managing information, all of which is extremely personal. For me, Evernote fits the best as my “source of truth”. I may not use it to write a lot of notes or to organize my day, but those little moments throughout the day where you want to save something in a place where you know you’ll remember it later? To me, that’s Evernote.
If I’m planning a family vacation I can quickly clip destination ideas into a Vacation notebook. If my wife just received an important piece of documentation she doesn’t want to lose (e.g. N95 fit test data), she sends me an email saying “please Evernote this”, and I simply forward her email to my Evernote account. If I’m building a project for the house (which I am now), I can quickly and easily store my receipts and ideas for the project in Evernote.
I know there are other web clippers out there for my vacations. I know I could simply archive my wife’s email in Gmail, and I’m fully aware my house project receipts could be scanned and saved in Dropbox, Apple Notes etc. I get all that. But for me – key words – for me, Evernote ingests all the crazy stuff I throw at it with the greatest of ease.
I never have sync issues, the apps work fast for me, I love that I can both tag and use notebooks, and I enjoy having the majority of my “where did I save this” information in one spot.
I tried using Obsidian as my catch-all, Apple Notes – and while they were okay, there was always a hesitation about “how do I save this in there again?” or some friction along the way.
I have been using Obsidian as the realm for my own thoughts and ideas, but Evernote is back to being my reference guide and it can handle anything I throw at it from web clips to audio notes to pdf’s to emails – all with ease.
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I’m a decade+ Evernote user and I just bought DevonThink today.
I have purposes for it other than replacing EN, but if it succeeds at doing that and I don’t have to renew in October it’ll be like getting a $70 off coupon for today’s purchase.
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I’ve seenmany of the same clips in some of his other videos.
I am most definitely in the Librarian and Architech camps which is why I find it surprising that Obsidian is my app of choice. Or rather than he doesn’t consider Obsidian as an app that handles Librarian and Architech mindsets.
To me, the ease with which I can capture stuff into Obsidian even from my handwritten notes in GoodNotes and the linking makes it a simple app for collections. Pure Librarian workflow.
Yet I can implement structure and full systems in Obsidain as well with a combination of judicious use of MOC and TOC type notes, curated tag sets and folders plus the awesome dataview plugin that I am just barely scratching the surface of.
I get that on first glance Obsidian seems only designed for the Gardener types but I would argue that the underlying philosophy allows for implementations that fit any personal preferences for notetaking.
I’ve tried Evenote several times when the notebooks could be totally offline but ran screaming back to DEVONThink at that time. Never even tempted to re-look at it.
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If you are a gmail user check this out. It’s one of the EN features I still miss since closing my account.
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Linking is the killer featuree going forward for me. If an app doesn’t give easy linking, I’m probably not interested.
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Digging up an older thread, I am battling with this a lot at the moment. This thread has helped, thanks!
EN taught me a lot. Like others above, I was one of the first beta users and it’s been on every machine I’ve had since then. I even got an email to say thanks for being one of the first 4000 users (cleverly sent when they removed a load of features and nearly killed us all off). For most of that time I’ve had a paid account and longingly looked at shiny other products.
My main issue is the odd sync mess-up, as I regularly use 4 devices and quick edits on one can cause issues when I pick them up on another. Admittedly, EN has got a lot better at handling this but it still can take manual effort when it goes wrong. And it always goes wrong at bad times, like high pressure meeting notes. Then often taking time I don’t have to manually resolve the issues/make sure I haven’t missed anything. Especially frustrating if I was only reading a note to cross check a recent edit + make a small amendment and then that escalates into a much bigger task I don’t have time for but also can’t risk leaving.
I also like the encryption but hate the feeling of being trapped and not so easily able to export/backup.
My renewal isn’t until May so I’ve got some time to figure this out. I think I’ll investigate Drafts, as I suspect that might be a better way to create and use my hot/frequent notes. Handing them off to Evernote for backing up on all my devices. That could be a good workflow/compromise.
Thanks again for all the inputs, lots of food for thought.
100% agree with the last comment, it has to link! Evernote’s App and Web linking options, encryption, and the Clipper are what’s keeping me. That and a vague Notion of loyalty. If you’ll pardon the Notion pun :D.
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All of my md documents live in a hierarchy of folders stored in Dropbox, where they are accessible by any number of apps, including Obsidian, Devonthink, Notebooks.app, etc. I also store any image files the documents need there as well.
I use Marked 2’s export feature to share markdown documents as pdf, docx, rtf, rtfd, or html files as needed. If I need to make sure that any images are embedded in the exported document, I use either pdf or rtfd. If I want to make sure that one of my md documents absolutely for sure positive never becomes detached from its images, I save it as a pdf in the same directory.
I’m a dedicated “one file, many apps” packrat, though, so your mileage may vary.
This is my biggest issue with Evernote right now. I have pretty much given up on it for now because I will regularly be out and about, and I’ll take a note of something on my phone, only to have the app completely lose half of what I wrote down with no way to recover it. This happens even on my laptop as well, albeit less frequently there.
If they manage to fix that issue I might come back, but as it stands now I just can’t trust it. 
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Eaglefiler works really well in terms of importing EN notebooks. And it’s simple to export from EF.
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Agreed, sync is a major pain point for me as well. I can cope with slow load times, but sync issues just pisses me off. Unfortunately, 9 years worth of history is hard to unwind.
Sticking with EN a little longer. I’ve doubled down on my usage in a bid to leave or stay for the right reasons. Including clearing old notes and reducing its size by removing notes that only included pictures and pdfs. PDFs to iCloud, Books or the bin. Pictures to folders in Photos.
Moving to 2x M1s appears to have helped. As has not using it on the iPad. And, using the iPhone as reader and emergency edit only.
And, lastly, I don’t leave the app open. I quit it if I am not using it.The M1 opening speed means this has no impact on my day-to-day.
0 syncing issues since I’ve done the above. Not a glowing recommendation. Sharing incase others find it interesting/helpful.
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I’ve chronicled some of my back and forth with Evernote on this forum. I’ve “left” for Apple notes about 4 times. It always starts out well, but then I inevitably hit a few hurdles and come rushing back.
- I like clipping things in Evernote. It gives me a copy of the article or web page right in my EN account, and it also provides the URL if I want to visit the site again. Apple Notes just clips the URL with a little thumbnail. Well okay, what if that URL disappears in a year? Unlikely I know, but it does happen. At least with EN I still have a copy of the page I clipped.
- Image/PDF sizes in Apple Notes. Either tiny thumbnail or giant page.
- No email to Apple Notes feature
- Apple Notes lock you in. There are tools out there to export your notes, but when I tried them with my EN account, they were hit and miss. And most export to markdown – maybe I don’t want markdown.
All the other solutions I’ve tried introduce more steps to ingest information. If I use Apple Notes, I need to figure out a way to capture emails and clip pages (the way I want to clip them). If I use Obsidian I find the mobile experience lacks and Obsidian isn’t great for clipping web pages, images, files IMO.
Evernote makes it easy to save EVERYTHING to one place, quickly. For that it’s super useful, though there is also an argument to be made about how it helps you become a digital hoarder. I find incorporating an EN cleanup into my weekly review helps.
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You might take a look at EagleFiler. There’s a free 1 week trial. People generally like it or hate it.
With EagleFiler, it really likes tags, although you can use folders. Also, the metadata internal title of PDF’s and the filename can be different, and it matters in EF.
Renewal time again! Leapt to Obsidian.
The firing of all existing staff = lost my respect.
The T&Cs changes + ability to read notes + AI training = lost my trust.
The App seems to be more stable and I’ve used it for 15 years = why I stayed.
To compound things, I emailed customer services for a discount to help with another year to decide if Evernote was still for me. After nothing for a week, I got an auto-responder asking me to confirm I had read all the T&Cs and summarise my request again. On quitting the final confirmation screen offered me another year at £44.99, I was done by then.
It took me a weekend of early mornings to export and import workbooks while the family slept. I like Obsidian so far. I’ll buy the guide when I have a bit more time. For now, I’ve got a basic system and learning in odd breaks throughout the day. I’m impressed with how fast it is and the multiple vaults. Markdown epic. I wish I had moved sooner!
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I think there needs to be a greater delineation between note taking apps (for thinking) vs note taking apps (for storage and reference). There is definitely some overlap there, but when it comes to replacing Evernote (for how I use it), I don’t see Obsidian as a solution at all – at least for the storage and reference part of the equation. I use Obsidian a lot, just not for what I use Evernote for.
I use Evernote to help me with coaching my son’s hockey team. I clip drills off websites, make lineups for the games, and store league/team documents. I also use Evernote to store receipts, scanned pieces of paper, trip confirmations, household reference notes like how I hooked up my thermostat or set a furnace setting on the circuit board. It’s also great for instruction manuals, for emailing notes directly into the app, and for annotating images.
And the key thing – for all the uses in the previous paragraph, Evernote automatically scans the content of your images, files and makes it searchable (aka OCR). Obsidian doesn’t do this.
I don’t see any of the above use cases viable options for Obsidian. The way it stores attachments is odd, and I don’t think a lot of the use cases I mention above are particularly great with markdown and text only.
Maybe your Evernote notes are more compatible with Obsidian than mine, but whenever I hear someone say they just moved whole hog into Obsidian I get concerned.
I’d prefer to hear - “I moved all my personal, text-based, thinking notes into Obsidian and I’m using Apple Notes for everything else”.
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Good point. For me, when I posted this, I was making the big move of all my stuff and making that move work caused me to pare down what constituted all my stuff.
When EN was awesome, it did so much for me in one place. After my move to Bear, I just didn’t do as much with a single system. I kept EN Legacy for a few things around project management and automation. But in its new role and with my new (bad) feelings toward it, I got more used to not using it and then stopped 100%.
In the end, I don’t do as much with this type of app. I have other solutions, including letting go of the need to have a place and a process for all my stuff.
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I went Evernote → DevonThink → Obsidian. With many side-trips and back-and-forths along the way.
If I were leaving EN today, I’d strongly consider going straight to Apple Notes.
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